In 1896, the great American psychologist and philosopher William James gave a talk to a collection of philosophically-minded Ivy Leaguers, young men from Yale and Brown, entitled “The Will to Believe.” While many of his arguments are fascinating and valuable, I am more interested in what the talk indicates about the cultural mindset and prejudices of the America of his time.
James comments on Pascal's Wager:
It is evident that unless there be some pre-existing tendency to believe in Masses and holy water, the option offered to the will by Pascal is not a living option. Certainly no Turk ever took to Masses and holy water on its account; and even to us Protestants these seem such foregone impossibilities that Pascal's logic, invoked for them specifically, leaves us unmoved.
For anyone who might happen to be bristling a bit at the casual anti-Catholicism here, he follows shortly after with this:
Here in this room, we all of us believe in molecules and the conservation of energy, in democracy and necessary progress, in Protestant Christianity and the duty of fighting for “the doctrine of the immortal Monroe,” all for no reasons worthy of the name.
And lastly:
A living option is one in which both hypotheses are live ones. If I say to you: “Be a theosophist or be a Mohammedan,” it is probably a dead option, because for you neither hypothesis is likely to be alive. But if I say: “Be an agnostic or be Christian,” it is otherwise: trained as you are, each hypothesis makes some appeal, however small, to your belief.
What James was both describing and evidencing was a set of cultural guidelines and boundaries which both direct and delimit what is thinkable. Although it could, as he points out, seamlessly accommodate agnosticism, this particular set he describes could justly be characterized as a form of civic religion.
In the City of God, St. Augustine spent some considerable effort engaging with Marcus Terentius Varro's theory of religion. This has been a point of discussion for us for some time; I have already posted material on this Substack that addresses the issue from a different angle.
Basically, Varro divided religion between mythical religion, natural (philosophical or theological) religion, and civic religion. Here I should explain the identification of Varro's “natural” religion with the philosophical and theological. This may be confusing to believers accustomed to seeing the natural opposed to the supernatural; this, clearly, was not Varro’s aim, as he would have had no idea of what such believers meant by the supernatural. Moreover, in the contemporary world, where the natural sciences and the physical sciences (if not, indeed, science qua science, science in itself) are treated as interchangeable terms, that the “natural” should connote the philosophical, much less the theological, might seem outlandish. Yet consider the alternatives Varro offers: on the one hand, the mythical, the domain of poets and of mystery plays, of the theater – of the human endeavor of marshalling art, language and imagery in pursuit of emotional resonance; on the other, the civic – the fostering of individual docility and social unity through the judicious application of power and pressure. Both of these approaches are concerned with their own action and its effects; neither is preoccupied with what is, with the nature of being. In this sense, natural religion, as Varro himself chose to call it, not intending a compliment thereby, can even be said to parallel natural science. This depends on the word “natural” in “natural science” being taken, not as “about nature,” in the sense in which it is used by, say, the Nature Conservancy, but as “concerned with the nature of” – in their case of the physical universe. If so, “natural religion” can be religion concerned with the nature of God.
Varro, for his part, decidedly favored civic religion over mythical or natural religion. Augustine, in contrast, aligned Christianity firmly with the natural, the philosophical, the theological... in short, religio vera, the religion of truth, concerned with the understanding of God. In his speech entitled “The Truth of Christianity,” Ratzinger, drawing on Augustine to bring his own concerns into sharper focus, takes Christianity not as religion, but as “the victory of intelligence over the world of religions.”
Yet an honest look at history tells that, just as there is mythical religion, natural religion, and civic religion, there is in like manner a mythical Christianity, a natural (philosophical, theological) Christianity, and a civic Christianity. Perhaps a more precise defense of Christianity as religio vera would consist in acknowledging the historical tension within Christianity and identifying the Christian commitment as a clinging for dear life to the natural, the philosophical, the theological, against all the political, cultural, and sociological exigencies that are certain to arise, that have always arisen, that always will arise.
Furthermore, at some level every religion presents itself in mythical, natural and civic forms. Yet individual religions weight these aspects differently. I cannot pretend to an expert's knowledge of all human religious traditions, or ever of the most numerous and influential among them. Yet some things can and should be said. For instance, the strong nominalist influence of al-Ghazali, the extinction of the rationalist Mu'tazili tradition and the discouraging of widespread study of Kalam (philosophical theology) combine with the reality of a geographic Dar al-Islam and the ideal of a universal Caliphate to tilt Islam away from natural and toward civic religion. Judaism, with its strong emphasis on the people and the law, has over the centuries steered natural religion away from the question of religious truth (long taking a position on the afterlife uniquely ambiguous among world religions, and at least in our time treating atheism as not per se a disqualifying belief) toward ethics and culture; the last seventy-five years have reset the question of Jewish civic religion in a way that is currently hotly disputed among Jews in Israel and throughout the Jewish diaspora. Hinduism has long embodied a dizzying variety of mythical and natural religious approaches integrated in a structure more traditional and cultural than civic; the 20th and 21st Centuries are witnessing the development of a civic Hindutva which draws inspiration from the Islamic model of the caliphate and from European nationalism. There is doubtless finer detail here in abundance; my personal knowledge, while adequate to teach college classes in world religions, limits both the scope and the precision of what I can say here.
What of Christianity? Now I have the opposite problem; I will do my best to simplify, but will still surely fall into the trap of too much detail. The non-Chalcedonian churches existed as a minority under civic Islam for almost their whole history (which has virtually come to an end in the past century or so); the Byzantine Orthodox churches are bonded to national identities, thus intrinsically entailing a civic aspect; the Catholic Church has certainly had extensive political commitments over time including, though not confined to, the Pope's retaining temporal rule over the Papal States for over a thousand years; the Protestant Reformation was accompanied (and in some cases driven) by secular political forces. Yet with fairly rare exceptions* (the Peace of Augsburg, in which peasantries were forced to follow the religion of their local lords; the fraudulent “Donation of Constantine,” which alleged that the Pope was the legitimate heir of the Roman Emperors), Christianity largely followed – at least in principle – the paradigm of religio vera... so well, in fact, as to fall on the one hand under accusations of atheism on the part of Classical-culture pagans who understood religion as fundamentally civic, and to face claims of obsolescence and refutation posited by contemporary Global North atheists (whose minds were largely formed by Christian assumptions) on the basis of its being by their lights untrue – an objection that would have held no weight for the aforementioned pagans.
To be sure, individual national cultures can and do import their own peculiarities into any religious system – consider the impulse to syncretism in China or, more relevantly for the current question, doctrinal latitudinarianism in the Anglosphere - and here we do well to recall William James and the world-view of his time, with awareness of what it means for our time and place, where everything is a live issue. Nonetheless, up to relatively recently, Christianity has as a whole tended to center on natural religion, with mythical and civic elements extending outward therefrom. This is the justice in the Augustinian and Ratzingerian take on Christianity as religio vera.
Yet there has been throughout a civic Christianity, as well. Indeed, there are regions of the world where civic Christianity persists, where people live (with cultural adjustments, however extensive) in a kind of atmosphere of cultural guidelines and boundaries not wholly unlike what William James was both describing and demonstrating above. There is also, however, the secular, technocratic Global North that Ratzinger describes in Truth and Tolerance as he writes: “[O]nly in modern Europe has a concept of culture been developed that portrays it as a sphere separate from religion, or even in opposition to it.” It is this culture which has essentially eradicated civic Christianity. Whether this is for better or for worse, remains to be seen.
All of this is but to frame the considerations of my next post: Christian nationalism. In raising this issue, I am not concerned with theocracy per se, nor with integralist theories of government, nor with the relative merits of any public policies whatsoever. None of this is really my point, here. I am concerned – indeed, I might even say distressed – at the consequences for the faith of a project to revive the civic Christianity of Christendom artificially, or rather to engineer a Frankenstein monster of Christendom-era civic Christianity in contemporary conditions. For all the legitimate critiques of civic Christianity one can evince (and I have many in mind), I dread this development in a different way. For absent knowledge of theological doctrine, and absent the guidelines and constraints cited by James – which are neither theological doctrine nor positive law, but instinctive – we can expect, not a return to civic Christianity, but a mutation unlike anything seen heretofore. This mutation may be more destructive to true Christianity, to religio vera, than any other system to date, religious or atheistic.
I had been hoping to address all of this and the deeper questions that it implies in a single post; I had to relinquish this hope, in the interests of coherence. Once I have completed this with a second post on Christian nationalism, Val will be following with the last two installments on True Belief, False Mysticism and Reading the Cosmos – drawing on ideas that she has had in mind from the very beginning of the series… ideas which, as you will see, bear many connections to this material.
* The legacy of colonialism is another, much thornier issue; where the missionary impulse was significantly – indeed, to some contemporary sensibilities, offensively – natural in its truth claims, it was accompanied by notions of “civilization” and cultural superiority that were quite distinctly civic. Nonetheless, I would question whether colonialism could justly be called a form of civic Christianity en bloc.