Religion is poetry

The beauties of religion need to be saved from both the true believers and the trendy atheists, argues compelling religious scholar James Carse.

By Steve Paulson

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July 21, 2008 | Take a snapshot of the conflicts around the world: Sunnis vs. Shiites, Israelis vs. Palestinians, Serbs vs. Kosovars, Indians vs. Pakistanis. They seem to be driven by religious hatred. It's enough to make you wonder if the animosity would melt away if all religions were suddenly, somehow, to vanish into the ether. But James Carse doesn't see them as religious conflicts at all. To him, they are battles over rival belief systems, which may or may not have religious overtones.

Carse, who's retired from New York University (where he directed the Religious Studies Program for 30 years), is out to rescue religion from both religious fundamentalists and atheists. He worries that today's religious zealots have dragged us into a Second Age of Faith, not unlike the medieval Crusaders. But he's also critical of the new crop of atheists. "What these critics are attacking is not religion, but a hasty caricature of it," he writes in his new book, "The Religious Case Against Belief."

To Carse, religion is all about longevity; it's what unites people over the millennia. He cautions his readers against looking for more conventional explanations, like the search for transcendence or belief in an afterlife. He writes that religion's vitality is based on mystery and unknowability: "Religion in its purest form is a vast work of poetry."

Carse dismisses attempts to find some underlying unity to all religions. He says the major religions differ radically from each other. He also shrugs off 2,000 years of Christian debate over who the real Jesus was, claiming "it says nothing." He even speculates that this religious tradition, with its 2 billion followers, may be unraveling. "Christianity is losing its resonance," he writes. "Its history looks to be more a matter of decades than millennia."

Is Carse the man to save religion from its enemies and false prophets? I found him to be charming and good-humored in conversation, even as he lobbed grenades into our conventional ideas about religion.

I think the vast majority of people would say belief is at the very core of religion. How can you say religion does not involve belief?

It's an odd thing. Scholars of religion are perfectly aware that belief and religion don't perfectly overlap. It's not that they're completely indifferent to each other, but you can be religious without being a believer. And you can be a believer who's not religious. Let's say you want to know what it means to be Jewish. So you draw up a list of beliefs that you think Jews hold. You go down that list and say, "I think I believe all of these." But does that make you a Jew? Obviously not. Being Jewish is far more and far richer than agreeing to a certain list of beliefs. Now, it is the case that Christians in particular are interested in proper belief and what they call orthodoxy. However, there's a very uneven track of orthodoxy when you look at the history of Christianity. It's not at all clear what exactly one should believe.

So there's a lot of argument over which are the proper beliefs.

That's right. After the New Testament period, there was a lot of quarreling over exactly how to formulate what Jesus taught, who he was, and how to lead the Christian life. So early Christians began forming creeds. By the year 325 there was so much division among Christians about how to understand Jesus -- his work and his person -- that it was actually breaking up the Roman Empire and forcing the emperor Constantine, who was a very recent Christian convert, to call a conference in the small city of Nicea. In effect, he ordered all the bishops and leaders of the church to settle these issues once and for all. The result, the Nicene Creed, is basically a negative document. Each phrase in the creed is intended to correct or argue against some other belief. So it's a creed and a counter-creed at the same time.

It sounds like you're saying that belief doesn't need to have any religious associations. You could just as well be talking about Nazism or Maoism or Serbian nationalism.

Exactly. In fact, very passionate believers are often not at all religious. However, it does happen to be the case that people who hold on to beliefs with great passion begin to describe themselves as religious. For example, the Nazis had a kind of pseudo-religious understanding of themselves. Hitler talked about a 10,000-year Reich. That's taken right out of Christian mythology -- the kingdom of God going on forever and ever. The swastika is, after all, in the form of the cross. So Hitler was a passionate believer -- not religious but pseudo-religious -- ascribing to himself some sort of religious aura.

So what is it that holds together a belief system?

A belief system is meant to be a comprehensive network of ideas about what one thinks is absolutely real and true. Within that system, everything is adequately explained and perfectly reasonable. You know exactly how far to go with your beliefs and when to stop your thinking. A belief system is defined by an absolute authority. The authority can be a text or an institution or a person. So it's very important to understand a belief system as independent of religion. After all, Marxism and Nazism were two of the most powerful belief systems ever.

What, then, do you mean by religion?

Religion is notoriously difficult to define. Modern scholars have almost unanimously decided that there is no generalization that applies to all the great living religions. Jews don't have a priesthood. Catholics do. The prayer in one tradition is different from another. The literature and the texts are radically different from each other. So it leaves us with the question: Is there any generalization one could make about religion?

But aren't there certain core questions that religion grapples with: God or some kind of transcendent reality? Evil and the afterlife?

Well, let's talk about the five great religions: Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam. Hinduism is 4,000 years old. Judaism is hard to date but about 3,000 years old; Buddhism 2,600; Christianity 2,000. And Islam has been with us for 14 centuries. The striking thing is that each of them has been able, over all these centuries, to maintain their identity against all kinds of challenges. Let's say you're a Muslim and you want to know what Islam is about. So you begin your inquiries and you find that as you get deeper and deeper in your studies, the questions get larger and larger. If people come to religion authentically, they find their questions not answered but expanded.

In your book, you say the only defining characteristic of religion is its longevity. It has to be around for a very long time to qualify as a religion.

Exactly. That's a very interesting contrast with belief systems. Belief systems have virtually no longevity. Think of Marxism. As a serious political policy, it lasted only about 70 or 80 years. Nazism only went 12 years. And they were intense, complete, comprehensive, passionately held beliefs. But they ran out very quickly. The reason the great religions don't run out as quickly is that they're able to maintain within themselves a deeper sense of the mystery, of the unknowable, of the unsayable, that keeps the religion alive and guarantees its vitality.

But you've just used words that people associate with religion, like "mystery" and "the unknowable." I would add "transcendent." Don't you have to talk about these things if you're going to explain religion?

Take the term "transcendent." It's very difficult to find anything in Buddhism that resembles what Christians or Western people think of transcendence. The Buddha was not a divinity. He made it clear that he really died. He wouldn't dwell with his students forever, but turned over to them the discipline that he tried to teach them. So in Buddhism, there's really no sense of the divine or the supernatural. And the notion of transcendence in Judaism is not so large. To be a Jew is really to be an active, practicing Jew. It's a way of living a certain kind of life, not believing something. In my judgment, you can be a very good Jew and have very little sense of transcendence.

Can you be a good Jew and not believe in God?

That's a good question. A lot of my Jewish friends would say yes. Several of my Jewish colleagues at New York University were absolutely obsessed with what makes a Jew. It turns out the question is very complicated. It goes back into the Talmud. Is it ethnic or is it religious? Does it apply to one practice but not another? So it's a very difficult question to answer. As a matter of fact, you could even say that Judaism itself exists as an attempt to find out what it means to be a Jew.

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