Unfinished Takes: Religion
Throat-clearing philosophical caveat: words have blurry edges to their definitions, there is not objective fact about the meaning of a word but neither is it up for grabs by arbitrary redefinition.
Part I: What Is This Subject?
The word "religious" once meant having taken holy orders, like a monk or one of the Knights Templar. (Who were technically also monks but that's not how that word is commonly used.) Over time it broadened to something like what "devout" now means in English. A preacher was "religious", but regular churchgoers were not "religious". Then the term broadened and was watered down further to include those churchgoers too. They are participating in a "religion". But...
Webster's Dictionary gives definition #1 of "religion" as
a personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices
which is nearly-circular on the adjective form of the same word. Religion is the things that are religious. It's accurate, but not very helpful, and the further definitions are more vague. Maybe a point-at definition is better: Religion is the category of Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Animism, Judaism, Åsatru, Buddhism, Confuci... wait a moment, maybe not that last one?
There's a lot of weird edge cases to consider here, and I'm going to poke a few of them and express a thesis about the Peace of Westphalia, ideological classification, and a jumble of related things that I've been mulling over for a while.
In my experience, one of the most common intuitions for "religion" among English-speakers is that it has to do with one or more gods and the worship thereof, what could more formally be called "theism". A contrary example is Buddhism, generally regarded as a religion, even though it doesn't have gods. This creates weird word overlap, since the negation of religion is commonly called "atheism" not "areligion".
Some people will try to bite the bullet and insist that Buddhism is by definition not a religion, Buddhists are atheists! That leads to the weird implication of atheists who believe in a Hell (called Naraka in Buddhism). This seems wrong to me. Better to split "atheism" from "nontheism" and say that Buddhism is a nontheistic religion.
Judaism is officially a theistic religion, but also an edge case in its own way, with how it blurs into community and ethnicity even for members who are not theistic. I'd argue those are special features of Judaism in itself, not helpful for defining what a religion is.
Trying to give a substantive, non-circular definition of "religion" strikes me as a surprisingly hard problem. There's the edge cases like Buddhism (in, IMO) and Confucianism (out), there's the connotations attached to both the category-as-used and to the definition, and there's atheists who want to slip "false" into the definition to produce something that nobody would use about their own religion, which is very unproductive to communication.
I've seen some attempts at defining "religion" in terms of moral claims, which meets a lot of objection quickly from people who believe they have nonreligious moral claims.
Perhaps one might suggest that "religion" is about the supernatural, but it seems intuitively wrong to call a man "religious" if he thinks Dracula is real, and this suggestion passes the buck to arguing about what is "supernatural" with most of the same problems. A more hostile approach on similar lines is to say that "religion" concerns those things that are unfalsifiable or perhaps non-empirical, which gives egalitarians a bullet to bite, having to choose either: A) Egalitarianism is a religion, or: B) Scientists might prove by experiment that egalitarianism is false.
Looking back at Webster's definition, one can adapt it to be less circular by suggesting "religion" as ritual system, rather than "religious". This seems to handle the edge cases of Buddhism and Judaism reasonably well, and one can reasonably define "ritual" in a non-circular way: a behavior that must be done just so for reasons social not physical. But, this implies that large bureaucracies are religions. Some people might agree for the joke, but I think taking that conclusion seriously is very rare.
I think this exhausts what I can enumerate of plausible definition suggestions for "religion" from intuition and conversational experience. None of them are satisfactory. Yet, the word seems to mean a category that people mostly agree on, despite some fuzzy edges and linguistic drift.
Part II: Christianity and war
Here is a bad and crude definition of "religion": Christianity, and things like Christianity.
It's a very parochial definition. It feels too specific for an abstract global word. It hides a lot of work underneath the word "like". Rivals to Christianity, perhaps, even when they are unlike. One could dress it up by saying that Christianity is the type specimen of religion. There would still be vocal objections from people who do not want their Thingummy defined by whether it's similar enough to Christianity.
But it still captures something of the word's usage. "Religion" is an English word, and the most common religion of the English-speaking world is Christianity, which makes it a natural point of comparison in common use. Christianity is also the largest religion in the world, so it's not purely Anglocentrism.
Here is a tentative refinement of that definition: "Religion" is a category defined by induction.
Base case: Christianity is a religion. Specifically, I'll start from the European Wars of Religion, which were "religious wars" fought mostly between Catholic Christians and Protestant Christians.
Inductive step: Religious wars happen between religions. We start with a religious war between two splits of one* religion. Then the inductive step says that Christians fought religious wars with Muslims so Islam is also a religion, Muslims fought religious wars with Hindus so Hinduism is a religion, Hindus fought religious wars with Buddhists so Buddhism is a religion, and so on.
Now Christianity isn't involved in the later steps.
This definition is bizarre, and I don't think people consciously construct the category that way, but I do think it tracks usage fairly well. Examples for core elements are above; for some edge cases:
People mostly call Buddhism a religion, and it was involved in religious wars. People mostly call Confucianism a philosophy or ethical tradition or something else that isn't a religion, and it was not involved in religious wars with any (other) religion to my knowledge. But Confucianism is an edge case that's intuitively 'close', and there was sub-war conflict, and things like when Jesuits first showed up to China they focused on arguing intensely with the Confucians.
And so, as religious war has mostly ceased in the modern day, the category of "religion" has mostly ceased accepting new members by this tentative definition. Today we instead get "cults" or "new religious movements" or things that claim to be revivals of older religions. The main sites of religious war in the 21st century are a couple of Islamic jihadi holdouts like ISIS/Daesh, but we already knew Islam was a religion and ISIS isn't fighting e.g. Scientology, so Scientology remains not a religion. The last non-Islamic religious war was maybe the Sri Lankan Civil War (ended 2009) where religious and ethnic groupings overlapped: Sinhalese Buddhists vs Tamil Hindus.
But, why did religious war mostly cease? People haven't stopped being religious, and people haven't stopped fighting wars.
Part III: Westphalia and the First Amendment
The European Wars of Religion ended (mostly) with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, also known for establishing the state system of international actors. I'm going to gloss over years of extended negotiation and nuance in the details here, don't @ me.
A key point of the Westphalian settlement was the principle cuius regio, eius religio ("whose the region, his the religion") which said that the ruler of the state had the sole right to choose the state religion, though not to compel the conversion of subjects.
To understand why this constitutes a peace settlement, we can look at who it excludes from making that choice: Foreign states and non-state organizations such as the Knights Templar. Analogously to how 21st century states assert a Responsibility to protect that may swell into a right to invade failing states and "fix" them, medieval states might assert a similar principle to invade and "fix" states of the wrong religion. In practice, the former often means America gets to bomb the third world and the latter meant the Catholic Church got to bomb cathars. Non-state actors with private armies were also more commonly powerful and used to topple states. Westphalia declares the sovereignty of states on religious matters, an agreement to refrain from invasions even when you're convinced the other state is evil. Originally this principle held for Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists, but it caught on and spread.
The Founding Fathers of the USA adapted a lot of ideas from the Holy Roman Empire, like electors, and the Westphalian peace rule. It became the First Amendment of 1791 which said that Congress shall not establish a religion. This is sometimes glossed as "separation of state and church" which is a later invention. Individual states were still free to have state churches under the 1A, and did! New Hampshire, for instance, was a Congregationalist state until 1819, mandating that every town have a Congregationalist priest, paid for by taxes. If the Catholics didn't like paying for it, they could move to a different state, that's how taxes are sometimes.
These are two famous examples of a kind of religious peace where the religious parties settle for "half a loaf": having one state of your religion is better than going to war and gambling on 0 or 2 states of your religion, especially after the Thirty Years' War proved that the conflict could make both sides worse off. These look like a big reason why religious war mostly ceased: the Catholic states and the Protestant states agreed to be hands-off with each other, and gradually more states and religions signed onto a similar principle after the examples were shown to work.
Fun fact: My own country of Norway had Lutheranism as its state religion until 2012. There was a state church, spelled out in the Constitution, and priests of the state church were government employees. I say this to underline that a state can have an established state religion and still be very much in a condition of religious peace. Even if we posit a generation from acceptance to formality - Catholics and atheists in 1982 Norway were not oppressed.
There's a bundle of atheist/secularist/disestablishment ideology which argues for a second kind of religious peace, call it "crumbs for everyone" to contrast with "half a loaf", where nobody gets a state church in any state at all, allowing strictly-private religion but preventing religious warfare by crippling religions and restricting their access to state power. One of the problems with this is in the passive voice of that word "restricting" - someone is doing the restricting, by construction it can't be a religion, so someone is pulling a fast one in this conception of the separation of state and church where the church is being held down by someone.
In America this second system grew from the Fourteenth Amendment of 1868 and later judicial incorporation in the 1940s to make "Congress" mean every government sub-org down to schools not holding school prayer any more. This is a recent and gradual development over time through court interpretation, which creates a mess and a weird incentive structure.
Part IV: Gluten-Free Religion Substitute
Part I observed some weirdness in the definition of "religion", Part II argued that usage seems to track religious conflict which declines, Part III discussed religious peace from established to disestablished religion. Here's the big take tying them together: disestablishment (separation of church and state, etc.) is a cause of the weirdness by incentivizing belief systems (and their conflicts) to identify as "nonreligious". This has subtly but deeply fucked up our classification.
I wrote in part I:
...say that "religion" concerns those things that are unfalsifiable or perhaps non-empirical, which gives egalitarians a bullet to bite, having to choose either: A) Egalitarianism is a religion, or: B) Scientists might prove by experiment that egalitarianism is false.
Why is this a bullet to bite at all? What's wrong with picking option "A"? Morality isn't in labels, there's nothing wrong with being a religion, why does calling egalitarianism a religion feel so different (at least to me) from the trivia argument about whether tomato is a fruit or a vegetable? Yet the option seems wrong, and my contention is that a lot of the arguments and rationalizations against accepting "A" are downstream of the following: Calling egalitarianism a religion would mean it violates the separation of church and state to teach egalitarianism in (state) schools.
Egalitarians very much want their beliefs (still) taught in schools, which means they have a strong incentive to insist that egalitarianism is not a religion, regardless of whether this is true or false - and there is no objective fact about whether a label in a language is true.
This is not specific to egalitarianism, it applies to all sorts of ideologies, memeplexes, and belief systems trying to land on the right side of the "religion" distinction. Let's call this Gluten-Free Religion Substitute, all the sweet taste of using state power to push one's beliefs on dissenters and children, but none of the gods or gluten that would trigger an allergic response from the judicial immune system. Beliefs that fill a religion niche, without having the obvious religion marker.
Part of the reason there's so little new "religion" these days is that being a "religion" would hobble a new memeplex by forfeiting access to the State and its propagation power. The disestablishment principle in various forms exerts selective pressure for new ideologies to avoid classification as "religious", so that they can spread with the state. Disestablishment turned a colloquially-defined word into a legal filter, the filter drove evolution by ideological mutation and natural selection for evading the filter, and now we've got "is X a religion?" arguments all over the place, where something like "is the state wrong to teach X?" is the underlying implicit question. What a mess.
To put that another way, and tie back to the opening question: Disestablishment in law bled back into usage and categorization, and now part of the definition of "religion" is "belief the state isn't allowed to teach". That's absurd! But functionally accurate.
Bans on state religion are interpreted according to the traditional markers of religion (particularly gods); borderline-religious ideologies market themselves as Gluten-Free Religion Substitute to do the same job, loudly insisting that they're not religious, they just happen to have religious traits like moral claims and meaning-giving narratives and eschatology about The Day Of The Apocalypse Revolution, whose righteous arrival is inevitable and foretold, and so on. I don't see what benefit this replacement has.
The original Peace of Westphalia was signed among Catholics, Lutherans and Calvinists. It's easy to generalize this to Christians of all denominations. Going further, one can generalize to "religion", which has definition boundary problems, so let's go one step further. Next, one might generalize to "ideology". The implication is that full disestablishment ought to be a separation of ideology and state - how bizarre. This would be impractical, and the attempt would have more definition problems. Something is wrong here.
Part V: Nature Abhors A Vacuum
The attempt at disestablishment of state religions creates a power vacuum. States would very much like to have something they can teach people about why the state is good and legitimate; ideologies would very much like to have state support in propagation; the symbiosis is obvious. Drive one species out, and another will migrate or evolve or be invented to fill the same ecological niche. This produces Gluten-Free Religion Substitute, or maybe God-Free Religion Substitute is a better name. GFRS.
"King by the Grace of God", "President by the Will of the People", same sort of slogan. The latter is currently more popular, but does not look more real to me. Consider e.g. the Norwegian election of 2001, where the Prime Ministership went to the fourth largest party (KrF, 12%) for complicated coalition reasons. I am assured it was the Will of the People that the largest party (AP, 24%) should not govern this term.
The disestablishment of religion has turned out to be a failure. State GFRS still has the problems of state religion, plus dishonesty and confusion of language. Disestablishment did not bring peace: instead of warring to spread Catholicism, states warred to spread Communism or Democracy or other ideology. States will have a state ideology; Norway pre-2012 and America pre-1940 show that state religion can work fine as a state ideology.
Bring back state religion, it never really went away, disestablishment was an excuse to disenfranchise traditional religion in favor of GFRS believers. I will make an exception for a few very principled libertarians (maybe there's enough of them that they can have a Free City of their own); I think everyone else's objections to state religion are special pleading that would undermine their preferred state ideology if applied honestly. Like "I should not be taxed to teach things I don't believe in", which effectively forbids the state to operate schools because the entire school curriculum would get vetoed by some dissenter.
[to be revised]
