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  • Safe and Responsible God-Talk:Beyond F. LeRon Shults's "Abstinence-Only" Version of "The Talk"
  • Jeffrey B. Speaks (bio)

I. Introduction

Rather than proclaiming the "death of God," in the fashion of Nietzsche's madman, F. LeRon Shults proudly proclaims the "birth of God" in his incendiary, radically iconoclastic book Theology after the Birth of God. Shults argues, drawing on the multidisciplinary findings of the biocultural study of religion, that the commonplace belief in supernatural agents is the result of a variety of evolved cognitive and coalitional mechanisms that cause human beings to overdetect agency and that contribute to in-group cohesion—traits that would have been selected because they aided the survival of early hominids living in hunter-gatherer societies, but that are maladaptive in our contemporary context. In his most recent book, Practicing Safe Sects: Religious Reproduction in Scientific and Philosophical Perspective, Shults expands on his arguments for "theogonic reproduction theory," supporting them with hundreds of empirical studies.1 For Shults, these findings have potentially devastating consequences for traditional beliefs about God, liberating human beings "so that we can learn to live together—on our own," and respond to the unique political, economic, and environmental challenges of the twenty-first century.2

Just as theologians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries attempted to wrestle with the cultural death of God, so too theologians in the twenty-first century must ponder the implications of the birth of God. This paper is part of my own humble attempt to do so as a liberal theologian. I am a religious person—a Unitarian Universalist by ecclesial home, a Unitarian Christian by confession, and a religious naturalist by philosophical orientation—and Shults's arguments have profound implications for how I approach my vocation as a religious educator and theologian. [End Page 65]

II. On the Birth and Bearing of Gods: F. LeRon Shults and "The Talk"

Shults sees the God-bearing (or theogonic, in Shults's terminology) mechanism as being a result of human-evolved tendencies toward anthropomorphic promiscuity and sociographic prudery. An anthropomorphically promiscuous person tends to assign agency in their interpretations of ambiguous phenomena, while an anthropomorphic prude is suspicious and "[prefers] to reflect more carefully before giving into their intuitive desire to grab at agential interpretations."3 A variety of cognitive mechanisms, including the Hypersensitive Agency Detection Device and the Theory of Mind Mechanism, lead human beings to overdetect "agency" in the face of ambiguous phenomena and then to assume that "agent" has "mental and emotional states somewhat like our own."4 These detected agents helped to bind together social groups through ritual engagement and reinforce social norms through punishing "potential freeloaders, cheaters, and defectors,"5 playing off our evolved sociographically prudish tendencies—we are "strongly committed to the authorized social norms of [our] in-group, following and protecting them even at great cost to [ourselves]."6 These theogonic mechanisms were selected because they proved advantageous to early humans living in the Upper Paleolithic, helping them to "[outcompete] other groups when resources were low."7 These mechanisms work together in ways that are "reciprocally reinforcing … the superstitious interpretations of the world and the segregative inscriptions of society born(e) within religious social assemblages can become entwined in a spiral of mutual amplification."8 As societies grew increasingly complex in the Axial Age, religious reflection in West, East, and South Asia began to develop the idea of an "ultimate disembodied Force that was axiologically relevant for everyone," one version of which is the God of the west-Asian monotheisms.9 Although theologians stress the inability of the human mind to comprehend God, an [End Page 66] iconoclastic resistance toward anthropomorphism, the tendency of religious practitioners is to fall back on the "theologically incorrect" position of conceiving of God as a supernatural agent when "dealing with the possibility and passions of everyday life."10

While the belief in gods was beneficial at one point in human history, Shults claims that "we can no longer afford to romanticize the human search for gods to protect and partner with us … today it is distracting us from the task of developing new strategies for living together in our rapidly changing environment."11 We...

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