Tribal Faith Breeds Religious Dogma

     In his fascinating Sept. 19 New York Magazine article, Andrew Sullivan argues that aggressively rigid American religiosity is an artifact of humanity’s ancient tribal roots.

     In other words, according to Sullivan, we communally believe in invisible beings because such shared assumptions were essential to survival during Homo sapiens early evolution in small, nomadic tribal groups. Sullivan wrote:

     “Tribal cohesion was essential to survival, and our first religions emerged for precisely this purpose. As Dominic Johnson argues in his recent book God Is Watching You, almost all indigenous societies had a common concept of the supernatural, and almost all of them saw their worst threats — hunger, disease, natural disasters, a loss in battle — as a consequence of disobeying a god. Religion therefore fused with communal identity and purpose, it was integral to keeping the enterprise afloat, and the idea of people within a tribe believing in different gods was incomprehensible. Such heretics would be killed.”

     Is it any wonder, therefore, after millennia of enforced religious dogma among virtually every human group, that we continue to vigorously—often violently—defend the shared phantasmic dogmas of our communities? In the case of America, the “community” is largely the nation as a whole.

     This is a reflection of emotion trumping reason, because, as always, compelling material evidence of the divine is absent, and blind faith thus necessary.

     Sullivan’s article is worth reading because it spotlights the reality that human behavior today reflects human behavior in our primordial past—and that it generally has only a glancing relationship with reason or reality.