3
IN SEPTEMBER 2013 Joel Rosenberg was invited to Kansas to meet with Sam Brownback, the state’s governor. The topic of the meeting was not Kansas politics or economics, but the situation in the Middle East. Earlier in the year Rosenberg had met with Governor Rick Perry and Congressman Louis Gohmert of Texas to discuss a similar subject.1
Rosenberg might seem an unusual person to consult on questions regarding international politics. He is an Evangelical Christian who has described himself as a Jew who believes in Jesus.2 He is also a novelist, whose books, including The Last Jihad, purport to show how present-day events in the Middle East fulfill biblical prophecy.
In his conversations with American politicians, Rosenberg talked about what was going on in Syria. He darkly predicted that the destruction of Damascus would be the forerunner of the end times, and he pointed to a biblical passage in which the prophet Isaiah foresaw the demise of that city as the first step in the process by which God would raise up Israel in the last struggle of earthly times: “Damascus is about to be removed from being a city, and will become a fallen ruin” (Isaiah 17:1).
Rosenberg is not alone in finding present-day political significance in prophetic readings of the bible. End-time prophecies have become big business in the Evangelical subculture and have had a significant influence on the American political right, especially with respect to Israel. Perhaps no presentation of end-time prophecy, however, has had the impact of the Left Behind novels and their spinoff movies and video games. Rosenberg’s ideas are a logical extension of the religious worldview reflected in these wildly successful publications.
With combined sales of over eighty million by 2018, the Left Behind novels have become one of the most widely read and profitable book series of all time. After the first novel, Left Behind, came others with titles such as Tribulation Force, Glorious Appearing, and The Rapture, all of them published by the Christian publishing firm Tyndale House.3 Between 1995 and 2007 Tim LaHaye and his coauthor, Jerry Jenkins, completed sixteen novels, almost all of which topped the New York Times best-seller list as soon as they were published.
The novels offer an account of a group of people who are left behind when a prophecy in the New Testament Book of Revelation comes true and true believers are “raptured” into heaven before the beginning of the apocalypse. Together they repent of their lack of faith, face the rise of the Antichrist, and endure hideous plagues and other acts of judgment from God, most spectacularly the cataclysmic battle of Armageddon and the triumphant second coming of Christ.
Most readers take the books as the fictions they are. But some see parallels with real-world events. Like Rosenberg, they see similarities between the biblical account of Armageddon, which in the novels takes place in the Middle East, and the ongoing conflicts in Syria and Iraq. Writing on the message board of a chat room called “The Prophecy Club” on the Left Behind series’ website, a woman shared her forebodings about the Iraq War and the continuing unrest in Israel/Palestine. “I have never had such a bad feeling about a war ever before,” she wrote. Her “heaviness of heart” stemmed from the portent of worse to come. She was certain that “we are living in the end times and that this war with Iraq is the precursor war to Armageddon.” She concluded with the observation “Never have there been so many signs as now in history.”4
The Left Behind novels are set in a world that most readers will recognize as comfortingly familiar: contemporary suburban America. Yet in the midst of the niceties of ordinary life there are rumblings of something profoundly out of sync. The spiritual sterility of what passes for normal society is increasingly evident. A heartless ideology is gradually imposing itself on the social order. Sensitive people—faithful Christian believers—find themselves marginalized, humiliated, and persecuted in a sea of secularism.
But the Christians have, as it were, the last laugh. An airline pilot who dismisses his wife’s Christian beliefs and has his eyes on a flight attendant’s shapely figure is startled when certain passengers disappear midflight. Believing Christians, including the pilot’s wife, are rescued in the event known as the Rapture. With a whoosh, they are whisked away from worldly reality and transposed into the glorious arena of eternal life. Nothing remains of their earthly existence but piles of clothing dropped in heaps at the moment when their bodies are transported to the higher regions. They would not be naked in heaven, of course; their modesty would be covered by luminous robes provided in the wondrous world of the Lord.
Meantime on sinful and contentious earth are the secularists who are literally left behind at the glorious moment of the Rapture. But also left behind are a band of half-hearted Christians who now realize the foolishness of their ways. They convert to true Christianity, but must await the time for their own moment of Rapture to come. This produces the dramatic tension for the remainder of the series, as the band of newly converted true Christians struggle to keep their faith through waves of plagues and natural disasters and persecutions—the Tribulations—sent by God to punish the sinful. The band of new Christians, who label themselves the Tribulation Force, have to endure the hardships of the reign of the Antichrist, a heartless secularist who just happens to be the secretary general of the United Nations. He uses his position of influence to concentrate all political and economic power under his control in the new world order and renames the United Nations, calling it the Global Community. He even tries to create a new religion in his own name. But eventually Jesus returns, casts the Antichrist and Satan into eternal fire, and the earth is finally redeemed.
The popularity of the Left Behind novels is no mystery. For one thing they are fun to read, full of action and simple in their plot lines, with characters who may be portrayed a bit thinly but are recognizable types. They are a kind of religious science fiction. But there is another reason for their success. They tap into a subculture of Evangelical Protestant Christianity, the only segment of organized religion whose numbers have been growing in the United States. As of 2015 it was the largest single religious bloc in the country, with 25 percent of all Americans describing themselves as Evangelical Protestants, considerably more than Catholics or members of mainstream Protestant denominations, who came in second and third, respectively.5
People who ascribe to Evangelical beliefs may be found in mainstream Protestant churches, but they are the majority in more fundamentalist congregations. Some of these are associated with the Assemblies of God or other denominational structures, but the largest are independent. Typical of these is the Real Life Ministries in Post Falls, Idaho. Founded in 1998, it has grown to a congregation of over eight thousand in twenty years. The pastor, Jim Putnam, preaches an unabashed message of premillennial evangelicalism. In addition to the Sunday congregation, the church reaches out to thousands more around the world through podcasts and internet services that are streamed live.
This premillennial Evangelical Protestant subculture flies under the radar of most Americans. Not until the election of President Donald Trump in 2016 did many Americans realize its political power. Many readers of this book may be startled to learn that the Left Behind novels are among the biggest sellers of fiction in recent years. But most Americans do not live in this premillennial Evangelical Protestant world. Many do not know what it is all about.
The word “evangelical” is derived from a Greek word meaning “bringer of good news,” not unlike the familiar Old English word gospel, which means “good tidings.” Evangelical Protestants embrace a range of beliefs, but common to most of them is the idea that a believer must be “born again” in a conversion experience, accept biblical authority and its inerrancy, and believe in the Atonement, the doctrine that Jesus died for one’s sins and that belief in him brings eternal salvation.
Beyond these are a variety of other beliefs that some, though not all, Evangelicals embrace. Among them are several that lie behind the Left Behind novels—the second coming of Christ, for instance. Taking the last (and most controversial) book in the New Testament, the Book of Revelation, as a guide, it is believed that Christ will return to Earth after a millennium and, after a period of great turmoil, usher in a reign of peace. Though it has already been two millennia since this prophecy was written, Evangelicals who accept it believe that the prophesized millennium is yet to come. There are two different camps, however: postmillennialists think that Christ will come and reign over the Earth for a thousand years before the last judgment; premillennialists believe that momentous events will trigger a thousand years of turmoil that must precede the second coming and last judgment at the end of time.
This tumultuous thousand-year period constitutes the “end times” described in the Left Behind novels. It begins, according to some, with the Rapture, an extraordinary event when people suddenly vanish into heaven, leaving piles of clothing behind. Rapture theology was popular among Puritan preachers in the early years of the American colonies. In the nineteenth century it was enriched by the teachings of John Nelson Darby, a British preacher who renounced his ordination in the Anglican Church and went on to establish a new denomination, the Exclusive Brethren. He also developed the premillennial rapture theology that became widespread in the American Evangelicalism of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its popular revival in recent years is an interesting phenomenon and may be a religious response to the social turmoil occasioned by the increasingly secular, multicultural, and globalized urban society of contemporary America. Extreme times call for extreme religion. The Left Behind novels allow the reader to imagine the implications of this creative theology for everyday experience. They vividly bring the hidden world of religious imagination to life.
Religion’s Alternative Reality
Is the religion embraced by premillennial Evangelical Protestants and portrayed in the Left Behind novels authentic Christianity? Well, that depends on whom you ask. It is certainly on the margins of mainstream Roman Catholic and Protestant theological thinking, but these denominations are declining in membership even as the Evangelicals are on the rise, at least in the United States. In Protestant Christianity there is no pope, no final authority on doctrine or practice, so whether or not something is authentically Christian is a matter of opinion. There is no question, however, that it is a religious point of view, and it tells us much about the religious imagination.
The saga portrayed in the Left Behind novels presents in an interesting way the worldview of religion in general. It pictures a world of normal reality that is somehow insufficient. Those who are sensitive to deeper aspects of reality perceive this insufficiency and are attracted to a different way of thinking, a hidden truth. This truth informs them that the material world of ordinary reality is in fundamental conflict with a truer, transcendent order provided by religion. In the Left Behind novels, this deeper reality is not just hinted at in scriptural texts and Sunday sermons. It crashes into the mundane world with a vengeance, in the dramatic moment of the Rapture.
The tension between the two realities—the mundane world and the religious world—is what most of the Left Behind novels are about. They show that the religious reality is more enduring and reliable than secularism, a superficial lifestyle that is mired in the quest to satisfy crass urges for power, money, and physical pleasure. The mundane reality is not just insufficient to provide meaning and comfort; it is downright evil. The battle between good and evil is presented as a challenge to us, the onlookers, who are forced to make a choice, to join one side or the other. Like Prince Arjuna hesitating at the fringes of the battle in the Hindu epic the Mahabharata, the newly converted Christians in the Left Behind novels realize that it is not an option to avoid taking part in the battle. The only questions for them are which side they will be on and how they will wage the fight.
It is an imaginary view of the world, to be sure. In saying that, I do not mean to disparage the beliefs of millions but simply to point out the obvious. The language of religion—any religion, be it Evangelical Protestantism or esoteric Buddhism—is imaginary language. This is a point that some theologians have also made. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a Protestant theologian who left a position at Union Theological Seminary in New York and returned to his native Germany, where he joined a conspiracy to take down Hitler. He was imprisoned and ultimately executed for his role in that plot. Bonhoeffer saw religious activity as a human invention. In one of his letters from prison, he advocated a “religionless Christianity” free from the theological and structural limitations of the church and open to the idea of the indwelling of the spirit, wherever it might be found.6 The point is that the ideas, practices, customs—everything we think of as being part of religious belief and activity—are products of the human imagination. Believers may affirm that these imaginary ideas and actions are authentic responses to an experience of transcendence, and this may be so. But religion is imagined, all the same.
For this reason many scholars have questioned whether it is even appropriate to talk about religion as if it were a thing, some essentialized entity that can actually do things on its own. In 1963 Wilfred Cantwell Smith, a Canadian scholar of religious studies who for years was director of Harvard’s Center for the Study of World Religions, published an arresting book, The Meaning and End of Religion.7 In it he argued that the term “religion” had no analytic value and he advocated discontinuing its use. For one thing, Smith wrote, similar terms scarcely exist in traditions outside of Christianity. Moreover “religion” is a relatively new term even in English. Smith scoured old manuscripts and could find little use of the term before the seventeenth century.
Smith objected to the notion that religion could do anything apart from human agency. He allowed for the continued use of the term in adjectival form—religious roles, religious organizations, religious beliefs, and the like—but not as a noun, because that indicated that it had some sort of independent existence. He preferred instead the terms “cumulative tradition” to describe the cultural heritage associated with the great religious communities around the world, and “faith” in relationship to individual acts of religious belief and practice. Years later another scholar, Talal Asad, refined and expanded on Smith’s way of thinking.8 Asad argued that the term and the idea of religion was a European construct invented in part as a contrast to the idea of the secular.9 The history of the interaction between secularism and religion in the West has been traced in a magisterial opus by the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor.10
In part because of this scholarly interrogation of the term “religion,” scholars of religious studies are somewhat hesitant to employ it, although Smith himself sometimes used the word despite what he had written. He argued that the label “religious studies” implied that the studies themselves were religious. For the department at Harvard, Smith favored “the Program in the Study of Religion,” a phrase that Harvard College has used for its undergraduate program ever since. His point about reifying religion by the use of the term has caught on. “Religious studies” is generally the phrase used to describe the study of religious things without implying that religion is in itself a thing that can be studied.
One scholar who departed from this trend was Robert Bellah, perhaps his generation’s leading sociologist of religion. Though once a colleague and admirer of Smith and someone who respected both Taylor and Asad, Bellah asserted that it was possible to talk about religion as something in and of itself. He agreed that religion was a product of the human imagination, and that was precisely what interested him. It was not just a matter of religious this or that, for Bellah. The term signified a different way of looking at the world. Where and how did this perspective arise, and what role has it played in human life?
In search of answers to these questions Bellah embarked on a lengthy scholarly journey. He had retired from teaching at this point, so he had the luxury of taking the whole sweep of history into consideration. I knew Bellah during the years he was working on the resulting book; we had been colleagues at Berkeley when I was the coordinator of the religious studies program there and Bellah was the chair of its advisory committee. Now whenever we met, he could not wait to talk about the new nugget of knowledge he had acquired about ancient India or China or about astrophysical theories regarding early forms of life.
Bellah’s project was published as Religion in Human Evolution in 2011.11 It is a huge book, as impressive in its scope as it is rich in detail and insight. He takes the long view, beginning 13.8 billion years ago with the Big Bang and the creation of stars and planets, including our own, and then the emergence of living cells in the primal ooze, and the beginning of animate life forms. He ends the book at the Axial Age, the rise of new modes of conceptual activity in the sixth century BCE, a period of intellectual efflorescence around the world, from the emergence of Greek thought to philosophical developments at the end of the Vedic period in India.
It is in this grand historical narrative that he addresses the question of what religion is and relates it to the development of living species. Early life forms, Bellah suggests, are focused on basic material needs, survival and procreation. But later in the evolutionary process more evolved life forms have the leisure of spare time and can do whatever they want. And what they often do is unstructured or arbitrarily structured activity, doing things for no apparent purpose. They are like schoolchildren finally released from their boring classrooms for a few precious moments of recess. What they do during recess is run around and have fun and explore the world. It is what we call “play.”
Following the lead of the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, Bellah argues that play is the beginning of all forms of culture, including religion.12 It is the human ability to be creative, to roam and discover. Initially it is primarily an activity. The early forms of religiosity—such as the rituals described in Leviticus and in the Vedas of ancient India—are focused on activity, on what priests do to interact with God or the gods.13 It is only later, in the Axial Age, that religion becomes more introspective and cerebral; this is when we can describe religion as a product not just of creative activity but of creative thought: the religious imagination.
As an illustration of the process by which activity related to religion becomes conceptualized, Bellah describes the development of the Greek idea of theoria. Before Plato, this term referred to a practice in which an emissary of one Greek state would go to another state to observe their religious festivals and come back and report on what they saw. Theoria was an account of a different kind of religion. Plato took this concept and applied it to the intellectual adventure of going out to search, not for religious festivals but for truth. The classic example is the analogy of the cave. Plato says that most of us venturing into the cave see shadows cast on the wall and think they are what is truly real. If we turn around, the bright light behind the objects whose shadows we saw would be so intense that most of us would flinch and turn back to the shadows. Only the bold would go in search of the real objects, the truth. These are the theoria that Plato admires, the searches for truth. Later Aristotle would refine this further in a way that we all know, in which the idea of theory is related to identification of truthful concepts.14
Religion in Bellah’s understanding is some thing, or rather some perception. It is an imagined world of being, “a general order of existence,” as the anthropologist Clifford Geertz describes it. Bellah goes further, labeling it “religious reality,” one of multiple realities that “calls the world of daily life into question.”15 Here Bellah allies himself with a school of sociology associated with the Austrian philosopher Alfred Schütz, who held that reality is socially constructed. The American philosopher William James, who saw cultural forms as constructions of the social imagination, is also an influence.16 This idea, made popular by the book The Social Construction of Reality by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, is that what we perceive as everyday reality is a social construction of what things are and what they mean.17 A wooden table, to most humans, is a place to put books and plates of food, but to a termite it is a feast. It all depends on your point of view. What Bellah adds to this conversation—aided by the thought of the pioneering French sociologist Émile Durkheim—is the insistence that religious perceptions are also constructions of reality.18 The table might, for instance, be an altar in a religious reality. These religious realities are among the varied multiple realities that most people navigate every day. These multiple realities can present meanings that are quite different from one another even though they relate to the same thing, just as we and termites see tables differently though the table remains the same.
Thinking about religion as alternative reality gives us a whole new perspective on the Left Behind novels and the religious worldview behind them. Like the characters in the novels, the true believers in premillennialist Evangelical Protestantism think there are deeper realities beneath the superficial appearances of everyday life. They might not have seen the Rapture, but they certainly think it’s possible that one day they will be flying in an airplane or walking down the street and, whoosh, people will start disappearing, leaving little piles of clothing behind. They are likely to be suspicious of political leadership and efforts to forge a new world order, knowing––as they believe they do—that the Antichrist can adopt just such a posture. They are convinced that eventually there will be a last judgment and the faithful will be redeemed, while unbelievers and sinners will pay for their transgressions and burn in eternal flames.
It is a remarkable view of the world, but not that dissimilar to many other, less extreme religious realities. They may not contain an antichrist or a rapture or a last judgment, but the fundamental dichotomy between the ordinary world and the alternative reality of religion is there, even if the religious reality in question is simply a subtle awareness of a deeper stratum of meaning in the world. It may just be the certainty that there is an ultimate reality, as the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich described it. For many, however, and an increasingly large number of Evangelical Protestants, it is a vibrant and startling reality that could break into the normal world at any moment. Behold, the rapture may be at hand.
To accept the alternative reality of religion is to peer through the looking glass and see that there is a Wonderland behind the ordinary world, only a few steps away. Like Wonderland it both mirrors ordinary reality and alters it. It provides an alternative source of authority—clergy and scripture, in the case of Evangelical Protestantism—that can challenge or supplant the laws and authority of the state. It can give a sense of identity that is more sure than the national identity associated with being a citizen of a given country. The religious identity is often transnational, and loyalties to it can challenge state loyalties. The alternative reality of religion can also provide community, a kinship with fellow faithful that can be more binding than any allegiance to a political party or national society. The alternative reality of religion is not a passive gift; one must do something to find it. One must believe and follow its commandments.
Responding to Life’s Disorder
For those who accept it, the Wonderland of religion is comforting simply because it exists. It provides a way of thinking about the world—an alternative vision of reality—that takes the disturbing uncertainties of life, the anomalies, the dangers, and the nagging sense of chaos, and gives them meaning. It locates disorder within a triumphant pattern of order. It does this especially effectively in thinking about the most difficult moment of chaos in one’s personal life: one’s death.
In Japan, where the religious traditions of Shinto and Buddhism are intertwined, it is the Buddhist strand that is prominent at the time of a person’s death. The funeral is held several days after death and involves a wake, then the funeral proper with a Buddhist priest reading from the sutras, cremation, and burial. At the time of the funeral the Buddhist priest assigns a new name to the deceased, the Buddha name that will prevent the soul from returning and help to speed the departed into eternity. The elaborateness of the name will depend in part on the fee the family is willing to pay. Often they will come up with a sizable sum because the purpose of the name, the prayers and sutras, and all of the ritual is to help maneuver the dead person’s soul through the tortuous journey of the afterlife and elevate it in the heavenly abode.
Hindu death rituals have the same purpose, though in Hinduism the idea is not to help a soul achieve a higher status in heaven but to help it be born into a more auspicious body in the karmic cycle of life and rebirth. As in Japanese Buddhism, the priestly rituals at a Hindu funeral pyre are for the benefit of the dead, intended in a way to cheat death of its victim by providing a religious conduit to a life in the hereafter.
In Christianity the religious encounter with death occurs at the very heart of Christian worship. The central moment is the Eucharist, also called Holy Communion or the Lord’s Supper. Protestants may celebrate it only on special occasions, such as Easter. In the Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican tradition the Eucharist is enacted in most services of worship. In Roman Catholic churches the Eucharist must be present for a service to be considered Holy Mass; otherwise the service is called “Lessons and Prayers,” or “Morning Prayers,” or some other term according to the type of ritual and time of day in which it occurs. What makes the Eucharist special is that it is a sacrament, thought to be an occasion for an act of God.
This divine action comes in the blessing, or consecration, of the “elements”—wine and bread. Each worshipper eats a tiny portion of blessed bread and sips a few drops of consecrated wine (or grape juice in many Protestant denominations, water in Mormon services).
“Take, eat; this is the body of Christ, broken for you,” the celebrant usually says during the distribution of the bread. “Take, drink; this is the blood of Christ, shed for you, drink this in remembrance of Him,” the celebrant repeats in offering the wine. Later, as the worshippers prepare to leave, the celebrant will often say these closing words of blessing: “Go in peace, and the peace of the Lord be with you.”
What has happened in this ritual moment? On one level it is simply a sacred snack. On another level it is divine cannibalism. It is a reenactment of a hideous event, the torture and death of Jesus, after which, it may appear, the faithful pounce on the body and consume it. The Eucharistic table is the church’s altar. It is a table, an apt symbol of the meal that the congregants consume together. But it is also the vestige of a much older religious artifact: the chopping block on which blood sacrifices were offered, after which the dead animals were consumed.
The Eucharist reenacts what in Christian memory is a sacrificial death. It recalls the Jewish seder meal, which was the last meal of Jesus Christ, who as a good Jew was celebrating the Jewish season of Passover shortly before his death. But the “body” and “blood” that the bread and wine represent point to the sacrifice of Jesus himself. According to most theological interpretations, Christ offered himself as a sacrifice on behalf of all of us, sinners who deserve punishment and eternal death. By offering himself as a sacrifice he atones for our shortcomings and enables us to secure eternal life. Hence, as Saint Paul famously wrote, “Christ died for our sins” (1 Cor. 15:3). It thus makes sense that the crucifixion is the central Christian moment and its primary symbol. It recalls what was fundamentally a sacrificial act.
This central idea of sacrifice unites Christianity with virtually every other religious tradition on the planet. All have images of sacrifice. In one case the same sacrificial story is shared by three different religious traditions, a story involving the biblical patriarch Abraham. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all venerate the occasion described in Genesis 22:1–19 when God tests Abraham by calling him up the mountain and commanding him to sacrifice his own son (Isaac in the Christian and Jewish versions, and Ishmael in the Muslim version). But at the last minute, before the knife is applied to the boy’s neck, a ram (a goat in the Muslim version) appears in a thicket to be sacrificed instead. This story is behind one of the most sacred days in the Muslim calendar, Eid al Adha, “Festival of Sacrifice.” On that day throughout the Muslim world, goats are brought to mosques to be slaughtered and to commemorate the miracle in which a similar animal was offered up as a substitute when the patriarch Abraham was commanded by God to sacrifice his son.
Martyrdom is also a kind of self-sacrifice. Calendars in Sikh homes are adorned with pictures of warfare and the sacrifices that Sikh leaders have made in fighting for the faith, including vivid images of the beheading of one of the founding ten gurus, Guru Tegh Bahadur. In Shi’a Islam, the martyrdom of the founder, Hussain, is seen by the faithful as a sacrifice as well.
Sacrifice—particularly blood sacrifice, the offering of an animal or even a human—is one of the earliest forms of religious activity and is found in every ancient religious tradition. The Vedic Agnicayana, some three thousand years old, is probably the most ancient such ritual, and is still performed today in southern India. It involves the construction of an elaborate altar for what some claim was originally a human sacrifice.19 Human sacrifice was said to be at the center of elaborate rituals in the ancient Aztec Empire in South America, in which conquered soldiers became the sacrificial victims. They were treated royally in preparation for the sacrifice, then set upon with knives, their still-beating hearts ripped from their chests and offered to Huitzilopochtli and other gods, eventually to be eaten by the faithful. Their faces were skinned to make ritual masks.
In contemporary forms of religious expression, no humans are harmed in sacrificial events, and few animals for that matter. Rather, sacrifice is usually presented in a symbolic or metaphorical way. But the historical texts of the traditions portray a bloodier past. One cannot read the Hebrew Bible, sacred to Jews and the first books of the Old Testament in the Christian Bible, without being overwhelmed with the precision of the instructions for how sacrificial rites were to be carried out.
There is a good deal of specificity about the sort of animal required for the sacrifice. In the Book of Numbers, for example, it has to be a “red heifer without defect,” on which “there is no blemish, and upon which a yoke has never come” (Numbers 19:2). The priest is required to take the heifer outside the camp and slaughter it, and then with his finger take some of the blood and sprinkle it at the front of the main tent of the camp seven times. Then the priest presides over the burning of the heifer, along with perfumes and sweet-smelling wood. Afterward the priest has to wash his clothes and bathe since he is ritually unclean. The ashes of the burned heifer will be retained for special occasions, when some will be mixed with water and sprinkled on the faithful for the removal of sin (Numbers 19:10).
Clearly something is going on here that is more significant than simply burning a cow. This highly specific ritual process is a way of integrating death and life, impurity and purity, sin and redemption. It is a curious procedure and it raises the basic question of why such gory acts of sacrifice are so central to religion. That question has preoccupied scholars for over a century, from Émile Durkheim and Sigmund Freud to contemporary theorists such as Maurice Bloch, René Girard, Walter Burkert, and Eli Sagan.20 The theories are diverse and sometimes contradictory, but there are some common themes. These theories focus on sacrifice because it is ubiquitous to religion and can be traced in most cases to antiquity, but for two other reasons as well. One is that the scholars sense that something about this rite is fundamental to the religious imagination. If one can make sense of it, one can understand religion itself. Another common observation is the obvious one: that sacrifice is an attempt to understand and overcome life’s most disturbing anomaly, death.
Almost every religious tradition deals in some way with death, and most have some promise of existence beyond it. The Mahayana Buddhist idea of the Pure Land, the Christian idea of heaven, and Hindu cycles of reincarnation all offer ways of overcoming the fear of what humans know to be fact, that eventually they will die. Ernest Becker has called this religion’s “denial of death.”21 I agree with Becker, but what strikes me as particularly interesting is the way religion incorporates death into life by domesticating symbols of violence—the sword and the cross, for examples. These remind the faithful not only of death but of religion’s ability to tame and overcome the violence associated with it.
Images of violence, rituals of death, and rites of sacrifice are all a part of the armament of religion for dealing with life’s deepest anomaly: human mortality. They permeate all aspects of religiosity and are at the heart of the large structures of religious activity and meaning that make each religious tradition distinctive. For example, the distribution of the sacrificial elements of the Eucharist takes place within a ritual designed to magnify the differences between the sacred and mundane levels of existence and to highlight the tension between them. The dramatic moment of ritualized sacrifice in Christianity occurs in the context of struggle and despair. The inadequacies of the human condition—its weakness and confusion—are overcome in the recognition of a divine intervention that tips the balance in favor of humanity and rescues the fallen. Thus the sacrifice becomes a metaphor for salvation, and salvation the resolution of an eternal conflict—the apotheosis of a grand and timeless war.
Religion and War: Competing Realities
As we saw in chapter 2, war provides an attractive alternative view of reality in a time of social discord. The war worldview begins with a nagging sense of discomfort, the feeling that somehow the social order is gravely out of place. Phenomena like political oppression or events like the attack on the World Trade Center can trigger this experience of disquiet. War becomes a way of explaining things, of making sense out of the senselessness of reality. It is a way of dealing with disturbing aspects of life and offers a way out of them.
The alternative reality of religion is strikingly similar to the alternative reality of war. The worldview of war provides a way of making sense of social chaos, explaining a world gone awry. In a curious way, the religious worldview does much the same thing. In the case of religion, however, it is not just a social anomaly that is experienced but an intensely personal one: confrontation with the reality of mortality and one’s own impending death. Religion, like war, can take the fear of discord and not only mask it but provide a template for action by which one can overcome the forces that lead to the discord, and thus banish the fear.
The religious worldview is like the war worldview in other ways as well. The promotional video for Fortnite highlighted the elements of the appeal of its imagined war; these are precisely some of the same things that are attractive about the imagined world of religion. Both offer alternative forms of authority that parallel the established leadership of a political regime, an identity that gives a unique sense of being and purpose, and membership in a community––an army or religious fellowship––that binds its members together more closely than any civil society can do. Both war and religion are calls for action, commitment, and participation. One can surely exist in both the world of the alternative reality—war or religion—and in everyday life. As Bellah has said, we have the ability to live with multiple realities that overlap in our daily lives. But for many true believers in either war or religion, the alternative reality will ultimately challenge and supplant the ordinary order.
Religion and war seem to operate in the human imagination in similar ways. The French scholar Roger Caillois observed that war “possesses to a significant degree the character of the sacred.”22 Religion—by which I mean the religious imagination of an alternative reality—does in a symbolic way what war does. It begins with a state of discord and incompleteness. For most worshippers, the recitation of prayers is an invocation of their own limitations, their sinfulness, and most of all their mortality. To be reminded of the human condition is, after all, to be apprised of its inevitable end. Religious images of sacrifice revel in this reality and expose it in what might appear to be a brutal way. In the cathedrals of Central American cities, one frequently finds a life-size figure of Jesus in what appears to be a glass coffin, as if he had been brought straight from the cross. The bloody wounds from his crucifixion are still glowing in vivid red. Yet to the faithful these are positive images, since the end of the sacrificial ritual—and the end of the Passion narrative of the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ—is like the end of war. It is the transformation of death into life.
These aspects of religion support the idea of an unseen source of power and meaning in the world, a source that is usually imagined to be on a transcendent plane of reality. This is where God comes in, a term that combines the ideas of ultimate power and certitude in a way that is vivid and sometimes portrayed anthropomorphically. The idea of warfare need not contain the notion of God enabling it, but there is likewise a sense of the inevitability of ultimate victory for those who adopt its perspective, the sense that their own sacrifices on the battlefield will not be in vain.
Both war and religion present an alternate order of existential tension and moral contest that encompass any apparent anomalies in life, such as bombing attacks or the persistence of sinful mortality. The main difference is that war offers a mundane form of alternative reality, a different way of understanding the configuration of social order, whereas religion provides a vision of a transcendent order of reality. God rules.
For those who have adopted a perspective of the world at war, war wins. What is comforting about both of these ways of thinking is that those who accept them are convinced of ultimate victory. Those who adopt a religious perspective imagine God to be ruling on their side; those who believe in war are assured that they will conquer. Both religion and war provide alternative visions of power and meaning in the world that ennoble humans both as individuals and as communities and exalt them beyond their messy, confused, and mundane worlds and, by allowing them to stare into the face of death, ultimately to conquer it as well.
Notes
1.Tim Murphy, “Oh Magog! Why End-Time Buffs Are Freaking Out about Syria,” Mother Jones, September 4, 2013.
2.Joel Rosenberg, “My Spiritual Journey,” Joel Rosenberg Website, accessed July 22, 2018, http://www.joelrosenberg.com/my-spiritual-journey/.
3.Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House, 1995).
4.Quoted in Melani McAlister, “An Empire of Their Own,” The Nation, September 22, 2003.
5.Pew Research Center, “America’s Changing Religious Landscape,” May 12, 2015, http://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/chapter-1-the-changing-religious-composition-of-the-u-s/#the-shifting-composition-of-american-protestantism, chapter 1, “The Changing Religious Composition of the U.S.”
6.Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. Eberhard Bethge (New York: Simon and Schuster Touchstone Books, 1997), originally published as Widerstand und Ergebung: Briefe und Aufzeichnungen aus der Haft (Munich: Christian Kaiser Verlag, 1970).
7.Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion: A New Approach (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1962).
8.Talal Asad, “Reading a Modern Classic: Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s The Meaning and End of Religion,” History of Religions 40 (2001): 205–222.
9.Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).
10.Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
11.Robert Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
12.Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (1944; London: Routledge, 1949).
13.The philosopher and Indologist Frits Staal has analyzed ritual in ancient India and emerged with a theoretical conclusion that ritual in general is simply patterned random activity and has no inherent meaning at all. J. Frits Staal, “The Meaninglessness of Ritual,” Numen 26.1 (June 1979): 2–22.
14.Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, 577.
15.Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, 5.
16.Alfred Schütz, Phenomenology of the Social World, trans. George Walsh (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967); William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902; New York: Penguin Classics, 1985).
17.Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Penguin Random House, 1966).
18.Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Karen Fields (1912; New York: Free Press, 1995).
19.J. Frits Staal, Agni: The Vedic Ritual of the Fire Altar (Berkeley, CA: Asian Humanities Press, 1983).
20.Maurice Bloch, Prey into Hunter (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992); René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977); René Girard, The Scapegoat, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); Walter Burkert, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, trans. Peter Bing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972); Walter Burkhert, René Girard, and Jonathan Z. Smith, Violent Origins: Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation, ed. Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987); Eli Sagan, The Lust to Annihilate: A Psychoanalytic Study of Violence in Ancient Greek Culture (New York: Psychohistory Press, 1972); Eli Sagan, Cannibalism: Human Aggression and Cultural Form (New York: Psychohistory Press, 1974).
21.Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973).
22.Roger Caillois, Bellone ou la Pente de la Guerre (Paris: Flammarion, 2012), 151. This English translation of the quote from the book is in Arnaud Blin, War and Religion: Europe and the Mediterranean from the First through the Twenty-First Century (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019).