Practicing Safe Sects: Religious Reproduction in Scientific and Philosophical Perspective by F. LeRon Shults (review)

Behind the playful title of this book there is a serious theory about the origin of religions, as well as an argument concerning their usefulness and the truth claims they make. Anyone familiar with Shults's work will recognize this book as a companion to his Theology after the Birth of God—and, to a lesser extent, Iconoclastic Theology: Gilles Deleuze and the Secretion of Atheism—repeating the basic argument but adding an avalanche of more recent research, engaging some different interlocutors (e.g., Celia Dean-Drummond and Robert Neville), and outlining the virtues of computer modeling as an avenue of inquiry.¹ The first and last chapters detail the core of Shults's theory and the evidence for it; the inner ten chapters are "contraceptive essays [against religious sects]" (65), revised from previously published articles, which makes for some repetition.

What Shults calls "theogonic reproduction theory" (TRT) addresses the questions of how ideas about gods are born in human society and how those ideas are transmitted from one generation to the next. In Shults's terminology, a "god" is a "supernatural agent; that is, a disembodied (dis-embodi-able, or at least ontologically confused) intentional force that is imagined to have some interest in and causal power over the members of a religious in-group" (88). Thus, ancestor ghosts, nature spirits, members of polytheistic pantheons, jinn, demons, angels, and the monotheistic being(s) of the regnant Western religions are counted as gods. Ideas about gods are borne in society through religion, which Shults consistently operationalizes as "shared imaginative engagement with axiologically relevant supernatural agents" (4). The "shared imaginative engagement" is realized in rituals, and gods are "axiologically relevant" when their "existence or intentions" bear on "value judgments and ritual behaviors of a particular coalition" (4); this is in contrast to gods that do not have such bearing or who have become otiose. For example, jinn are axiologically relevant to Muslims but not to Jews or Christians. Evidence for TRT is drawn from what Shults calls "the biocultural study of religion," including cultural anthropology, archaeology, evolutionary biology, cognitive science, economics, history, moral psychology, neurobiology, and political science. Philosophy and theology come into play primarily where the questions of the utility and truth of religion are concerned.

With many others, Shults argues that human survival during the Upper Paleolithic was crucially aided by the emergence of two mutually reinforcing mechanisms. One adaptation, a hypersensitive agency-detection device (HADD), led our ancestors to detect agency or intentional purpose even where none existed, especially in situations where the evidence was unclear. A rustling on the savanna could be a predator, an unusual sound in the forest might be a voice, the unexpected recovery from an illness might be the work of an unseen spirit. The HADD was fallible, but it allowed rapid responses to ambiguous situations and was useful for survival (34–35). Evidence from ethnographic studies and archaeological investigation of the burial practices in preliterate societies (see chapter 3) indicate that our ancestors posited the existence of gods both benign and malevolent. Altered states of awareness due to dreams, hallucinations, and psychoactive substances also contributed to the idea of transmundane realms of spirits. For these reasons, Shults maintains that there is an evolved tendency toward "anthropomorphic promiscuity," which he contrasts with the "anthropomorphic prudery" of science, which resists ascriptions of agency (22ff.).

Going hand in hand with the overdetection of agency was a second adaptation: that of privileging members of one's own tribe. This too was advantageous, as the survival of the group depended upon cooperation and trust among its members. At a basic level, human newborns and the young are completely dependent upon their caretakers, but the continued existence of the group completely depends upon babies growing to maturity. Interactions with the gods through religious rituals ensured divine favor and kept hostile forces at bay. Tribal gods were fundamentally tutelary: they endorsed in-group...