Religion is poetry

I'm absolutely saying that. There have been a lot of fantasies about putting all the religions together. Mahatma Gandhi was famous for saying that all religions are, at their core, the same. But I have spent my life studying these traditions. I am a historian of religion. And the more I studied them, the more I saw that they were absolutely different.

Those are large questions. Will Mormonism hold out over the centuries? It's a difficult judgment. I don't have an answer for that. What I'd really like to focus on is how extremely long the great traditions are. There are other traditions that aren't that long: Sikhism, various kinds of Middle Eastern religions, mystical movements. Mormonism is an open question. You could even talk about Scientology. Does it really have staying power over the centuries? I would doubt it, but we don't know yet.

I would say yes, but in the sense that I am endlessly fascinated with the unknowability of what it means to be human, to exist at all. Or as Martin Heidegger asked, why is there something rather than nothing? There's no answer to that. And yet it hovers behind all of our other answers as an enduring question. For me, it puts a kind of miraculous glow on the world and my experience of the world. So in that sense, I am religious.

[Laughs] Frankly, no. But there are so many different conceptions of God. Take, for example, the medieval Christian, Jewish and Islamic mystics. It's a very rich period from the 12th to the 15th centuries. They began to realize that in each of their traditions, it was impossible to say exactly who God was and what he wants and what he's doing. In fact, human intelligence has a certain limitation that keeps it from being able to embrace the infinite or the whole. Therefore, every one of our statements about God and the universe is tinged with a degree of ignorance. I would say that I am deeply moved by the thought of an unnameable mystery. If you then ask me, exactly which mystery are you then referring to? I can't answer. That's as far as I can go. But it's got its grip on me, for sure.

I have, off and on, over the years. I find certain religious liturgies very compelling, especially the Christian Eucharist, which is the celebration of Jesus' last supper with his disciples. When you begin to look into the aspects of that liturgy, there are some very strange things. For example, breaking and eating the body of God and drinking the blood of Jesus. What in heaven's name is that about? Once you begin to inquire into it, what you find are very deep echoes with ancient religious traditions. Primitive people sacrificed their gods and literally drank their blood. They would elect someone to be a god for a year or a season and would then sacrifice that person. You also have to understand the art, the music and the rich culture that surrounds these traditions. Think of Chartres, the Vatican, the Dome of the Rock, the great temple in Jerusalem, which in its day was the largest building in the world. And the music, the poetry, the great scriptural texts; it's a very rich fabric. I find myself deeply moved and endlessly reflective about it.

Absolutely. In the current, very popular attack on religion, the one thing that's left out is the sense of religion that I've been talking about. Instead, it's an attack on what's essentially a belief system.

Yes. There are several problems with their approach. It has an inadequate understanding of the nature of religion. These chaps are very distinguished thinkers and scientists, very smart people, but they are not historians or scholars of religion. Therefore, it's too easy for them to pass off a quick notion of what religion is. That kind of critique also tends to set up a counter-belief system of its own. Daniel Dennett proposes his own, fairly comprehensive belief system based on evolution and psychology. From his point of view, it seems that everything can be explained. Harris and Dawkins are not quite that extreme. But that's a danger with all of them. To be an atheist, you have to be very clear about what god you're not believing in. Therefore, if you don't have a deep and well-developed understanding of God and divine reality, you can misfire on atheism very easily.

The difference, though, is that I wouldn't call myself an atheist. To be an atheist is not to be stunned by the mystery of things or to walk around in wonder about the universe. That's a mode of being that has nothing to do with belief. So I have very little in common with them. As a matter of fact, one reason I wrote the book is that a much more compelling critique of belief systems comes not from the scientific side but from the religious side. When you look at belief systems from a religious perspective, what's exposed is how limited they are, how deeply authoritarian they are, how rationalistic and comprehensive they claim to be, but at the same time how little staying power they have with the human imagination. It's a deeper and much more incisive critique.

Oh yes, I'm very concerned with belief systems. Today, the world is really being ravaged by conflicts between believers. Go to Bosnia, anywhere in the Middle East, to China, Sri Lanka, the Sudan, Kosovo, Chechnya, even in Europe. There are great crises in France and Britain, even Holland and Denmark. So it's very important to understand how different belief systems work and what's inherently wrong with them.

Well, you could see it that way. But my deeper point is that religion doesn't need to be defended. I'm not going to make a whit of difference to a tradition that's 2,000 years old and has 2 billion people talking about it. That's a remarkable phenomenon. I don't have a case to make for religion. In fact, as a historian of religion, I'm very aware of the fact that religions die. They disappear. Hundreds of them have over the centuries. I even believe that Christianity and Islam and the other great traditions will themselves dissipate in one way or another.

I think there's a fragmentation going on that's quite significant, a tendency to identify with something outside their religious tradition. Once they've married their Christian faith to a national or ethnic identity, then it loses its deep historical Christian character. To look at these huge mega-churches, for example, the startling thing to me is when you go to their services, you don't have any sense of the enormous complexity of the history. You have the feeling that Jesus walked in here yesterday, and the minister will pick up a few contemporary cultural phenomena, like popular music. You're seated in something like an auditorium. There's no cathedral atmosphere. There's no great chanting choir. I think it's lost that indefinability.

The so-called Age of Faith runs from the end of the 11th century to the beginning of the 13th. It's a period in Europe in which all the religions grew very rapidly. It was also a period of terrible conflict. At the end of the 11th century, Pope Urban II gave one of the most consequential speeches in Christian history. He called on Christians to rise up and take Jerusalem back from the Saracens. And it was with that speech that the Crusades began. The Crusades were an ugly period. It was bloody and cruel. It exhausted people on both sides. No one won or lost. And it went on for centuries.

I would say we are back in that crusading spirit. In the modern era, the great belief systems begin to think of themselves in more militaristic ways. And they conceive of themselves more and more in oppositional terms. Look, nothing equals the 20th century for its bloodiness. Who knows how many people were killed? Two hundred million? And the 21st century is not getting that great a start. At the same time, there's a very rapid growth of belief. Islam is growing faster than ever. Christian evangelicalism is probably one of the most rapidly growing phenomena in religious history. Mormonism is just racing along. The earth as a whole is getting more and more religious. But it has nonetheless become more and more preoccupied with conflict.

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