This is episode 4, Toward a Functionalist Understanding of Religion. This is part one of a three-part series.

(You can find my other podcasts here)

In the first episode I will explain my functionalist theory of religion. Though I have many influences, this framework is original to me. 

In the second episode we will discuss the American Civic Religion through the lens of my functionalist theory.

In the third episode, we will talk about religions as organisms, the online right, and the possibility of Christo-Nietzschean synthesis.

But First, a Disclaimer

Today I am going to speak about the nature of religious sentiments.

This is an easy topic to understand if you can maintain an impartial disposition, but it is a nearly impossible topic to talk about, because it occupies a mental territory which is perpetually inflamed

In order to understand the nature of religious sentiments, one must view them “from the outside” — that is we must be able to look at them from the perspective of one who is not possessed by them

I am not suggesting you should abandon religion, in fact I think that is impossible, rather I am telling you that if you can emulate the intuitions of an unreligious person sincerely, with neither condemnation nor acceptance, then you can also broaden and deepen your perspectives as a man of faith.

This is much harder than it sounds, because most anyone who is sentient — and I must point out here that I believe a great many people, maybe even a majority, are not sentient. They have phenomenology and base desire but they lack a certain ineffable quality, an inner spark —

Most anyone who is sentient is governed by something quite like a religious sentiment, though often, and in our modern age in particular, he denies it

to the modern man, an important article of faith is that his religion is not a religion; it is the pure and self-evident truth about the world, informed by rationality and dispassionate observation

And a huge part of my message to you, to every single one of you, is that no matter what you believe, it’s retarded to think that your worldview is the pure and self-evident truth about the world

This is one of the many ways that revealed religion is better than deduced religion, because the former is self-aware, open and honest about the necessity of faith. 

For Christians, this is hardly a novel observation, I know. But here we have a sort of tension in this talk I am about to give, because there are two very different sorts of people who I think are probably listening to it, and so I have to couch every statement about religion in a kind of double disclaimer, one for the Christian, and one for the modern

And I contend that if you are a Christian, and you primarily try to justify your beliefs on the basis of evidence or rational argument, you are actually doing your faith a disservice.

He who lives by the sword dies by the sword, and he who pins his faith to empiricism and logic will see his faith broken on those very same instruments 

Now the atheist on the other hand scoffs at faith, usually, but he’s the bigger fool, as every Christian knows, because he has faith, but he lacks the honesty to admit those things he believes on the basis of faith.

Christians tend to suspect that when you talk about religion from the outside, it is your goal to undermine it. 

They are suspicious and understandably so because of the way their teachings have been abused in secular discourse especially in the last half century, let’s say

But I promise that’s not my intention here

I have no interest in dissuading anyone from holding religious views or from participating in religious life. Again, I do not believe such a thing is possible, because nature abhors a vacuum, and you can’t believe nothing

That’s right, there is not even one nihilist in the whole world. There’s no such thing as nihilism, it’s not possible. The man who proudly declares that he believes in nothing still esteems himself highly as a man who believes. He thinks his declaration is worth something, in other words. He believes in himself

When one religious sentiment disintegrates in the mind of a believer, a new sentiment always replaces it, usually a more primitive one

Although I am not a Christian myself, I was raised as a devout protestant, and in my youth my family changed to a new denomination, and we moved about as far from our previous beliefs as it was possible to move while staying within the Protestant tradition

As a result, I observed quite intimately that there is an essential fungibility between religious or ideological convictions of different flavors

(I know many of you will bristle at this claim, but I’m asking you to accept that it’s true psychologically, even if it’s not true theologically. This is a critical distinction, and making it is the key to understanding what I am here to talk about today)

What do we mean when we talk about religion

So I want to begin by defining religion, and explaining what I mean when I say that this talk is towards a functionalist definition of religion. 

Functionalism is the idea that we should try to define objects in terms of the functions they perform rather than in terms of any particular constitution

Often people have positive or negative associations to words which have nothing to do with the meaning of the word itself, which can make it impossible to think clearly about those words.

We’ve all observed this on twitter, I think, when someone you don’t know sees a tweet you’ve made and they really latch on to your usage of a particular word

It’s as if they’ve built up a kind of allergy to a triggering word, and they can’t hear it without calling up some long dead, far-away argument that possibly hinged on it

A functionalist approach tries to evade this problem by first acknowledging that the same word has different meanings to different people

And second, by trying to look beyond the word in order to understand what it signifies in terms of behaviors or functions.

In the case of the word religion, I see both positive and negative associations with this word from both christians and atheists.

Some Christians see Christianity as a religion, caveat it’s the only true religion, but they recognize it as part of a class of entities which also includes Judaism, Buddhism, and so on. 

For these Christians, they can recognize the shape of a religion in something like communism, wokism, and similar. In fact, it’s a common Christian refrain that, from their perspective it takes “just as much faith” to be an atheist.

We’ll come back to that.

I’ve also met Christians who see Christianity as something greater than a religion, who relegate all mere “religions” to the realm of falsehood. You can see, I think, the instrumental value in this type of self-understanding

For many atheists, they see religion as fundamentally a negative thing, as a “mind virus,” as something parasitical, or as a hoax or a con, something which exploits or controls its victims. This is an incredibly stupid position to hold, but it is common

I’ve also met atheists, and I am among them, who think that religion can be a noble thing, something that orders the passions and facilitates game-theoretic cooperation

And sometimes you will hear people say that a worldview, in order to be a “real” religion, must be ennobling or capture some particular value, maybe it has to be non-zero-sum for its practitioners, something like this

But we are interested in taking an outside view on religion today, which means that we want to reason about moral valuations without judging them, at least not too much

In general I claim that you should not strive to eliminate bias, that this corporate mantra against civil rights litigation is an attempt to do something impossible in the service of a goal that’s undesirable

To live and to be alive is to continually judge the world, to render YOUR judgment upon it, and the four letter word bias is an attempt to rob you of this power.

Regardless, this is a discursive arena that we should enter with impartiality, before we pass our judgment according to our good taste.

Varieties of religious experience

Taking a functionalist approach to religion means that we try to decompose religious belief into the various functions that it serves. 

The following taxonomy is based only on my personal observations and contemplations. I first proposed this taxonomy on twitter, five years ago, and for that reason I expect it will be unfamiliar to most of you.

In the interim I have made some small adjustments. I believe that each of these components of religious belief that I am about to enumerate fulfill an imminent psychological need that each person feels.

A man may not think of himself as religious; nevertheless he will—perhaps unwittingly—cobble together a worldview, usually in his youth, when these demands feel most pressing, in order to satisfy the following imperatives.

Gnosis

The first is what I call gnosis, which just means knowledge. I don’t want to confuse people and make them think of Gnosticism, which is something specific. 

But within Gnosticism, they believe that the world is an illusion, and when you see behind the curtain, when you acquire real knowledge of the world, that’s called gnosis. 

So all religious beliefs, every single one, begins with a concept which is structurally identical to this idea of gnosis.

in Marxism, they call it class consciousness, and they say everyone who doesn’t have it has something called false consciousness

Which is when people of the working class, in particular,