Religion As We Know it: An Origin Story by Jack Miles (review)

If anyone can define religion, surely distinguished Biblicist (pardon the outdated, but sensible term) Jack Miles can—along with his many readers, especially the smaller heroic corps who have trekked through sizable stretches of his gigantic 4,448-page Norton Anthology of World Religions (2014). But wait, the Norton covers only Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, inevitably consigning thousands of lesser known "faiths," alive or extinct, to oblivion. And Miles, who cites some twenty-three different scholarly notions of religion, instantly makes clear that religion can't be univocally defined because it's not one distinct thing, as we see in the endless permutations of folk practices, languages, cultural traditions and histories that it has fused with.

Many religions don't even have a word for "religion" or their own variety of it (as the British baptized the Hindus with the umbrella-concept Hinduism). Plenty of religions have no personal God (Buddhism); and practically all religions evolve and change in major directions (e.g., the late, tiny traces of belief in the afterlife found in the Hebrew Bible, not to mention today's liberal Christian views of homosexuality). Too bad we can't just stick with the handy old triad of creed, code, and cult, as found, for instance, in the classic work Miles never mentions, Huston Smith's The World's Religions (originally The Religions of Man, 1958). Smith's first title, by the way, exposes a problem that the Norton, with its stunning array of theologies, cosmologies, and philosophies surveyed and explicated, hardly has the time to address: the overwhelming predominance of males as founders and licensed promulgators of religion. Nowadays Religious Studies may be, or may soon become, a majorityfemale discipline, like Comparative Literature; and that development has already revolutionized the field. But for the most part the men got there first—with more than a few deleterious results.

Miles's book is simply an expanded and more personal version of the "Concluding Unscholarly Postscript" (alluding to Kierkegaard, of course) that he ended the Norton Anthology with. His point there was that Christian Europe invented comparative religion, and thus provided the conceptual framework we westerners use to describe and discuss religions of any sort. The early Christian Fathers did something exceptional: they separated the three hitherto inextricable elements of religion, ethnicity, and culture: They took Yahweh, the Jewish Lord of history, radically refashioned his interaction with his people and the world, drastically transformed the Torah, and abandoned key notions like a sacred language, homeland, and specific Holy City—even while clinging to essential Jewish religious ideas, "including monotheism, revelation, covenant, scripture, sin, repentance forgiveness, salvation, prophecy, messianism, and apocalypticism." One is tempted to irreverently call this the boldest hijacking in religious history (akin, in a minor way, to what Virgil did to Homer). In any case, with the coming of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, Christian academics started to apply the tools of secular analysis to biblical texts and doctrines, drawing upon burgeoning advances in the Wissenschaft of ancient languages, history, archeology, etc.; and so religion became the "subject" we are likely to think of today, repeatedly coming to conclusions that alter or flatly contradict familiar ways of thinking about the Abrahamic religions. All the unspeakably vivid literal images and teachings of Scripture have been demythologized, but not necessarily disenchanted, into "religion as we know it." Sentimental regrets and Fundamentalist hankerings aside, there's no way back.

All this is interesting and convincing; but the best part of Miles's presentation is the account of his own brand of belief. He was a Jesuit seminarian for a decade (1960-1970), and is now an Episcopalian (and choir member). He's long since left the Thirty-Nine Articles behind (and had the audacity to compose a lengthy biography of God); so whence does he approach institutional Christianity now (and with such enthusiasm)? Perhaps surprisingly, he cites Robert N. Bellah's Religion in Human Evolution...