RELIGIONS OF RELEASE

India

hen faced with the realities of a broken

world, human beings can try to fix it.

They can work to return to a place they

remember as a site of peace and harmony. Or they

tree. As the Hindu tradition grew up in

soil of North India's Ganges Plain, it gave risetc

the Buddhist tradition, which originated withthk

fifth-century BCE religious reformer Siddharth

can look for a way to escape. The Indian religions of Gautama. Known after his enlightenment asth

release take the last option. Buddha ("Awakened One"), he renounced

The Indian subcontinent—which comprises India; only worldly pleasures but also Hindu reverent Pakistan; Bangladesh; and smaller countries such ancient rituals and the priestly caste

thatptfor as Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives—is home to approximately 1.8 billion peo-

them. Like the Buddha, theformed

ple, or close to one-quarter of the world's popula-

sixteenth-century Sikh founder Guru Nanak

tion. It is also the birthplace of three religions of

1539) retained many of his Hindu roots and rej

release—Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sikhism—joined others. He also drew on influences from

the

to one another like the branches on a hybrid fruit

tradition, which by his time had brought itsstf

monotheism to the Indian subcontinent

26

Buddhists and Sikhs adopted and adapted key

concepts from Hindu thought, including karma

("action"), samsara ("wandering through"), and mok-

sha ("release"). To be human is to be trapped, all

three of these religious traditions observed, and to

1 be trapped is to yearn to breathe free. But what is it

that ensnares us? According to Hindus, Buddhists,

and Sikhs alike, we all find ourselves in a moral uni-

verse in which our karmic actions in past and present

lives have huge consequences for who we are today.

The most fateful of these consequences is that we

find ourselves caught in a vicious cycle of life, death,

rebirth, and redeath, known as samsara. Participants

in these religions of release seek moksha, or liber-

ation from this cycle. Instead of working to repair

the world or to return to a golden age before it was

broken, Hindus, Buddhists, and Sikhs seek to escape

from the unsatisfactory cycle of samsara.

Each of these Indian religions has its own under-

standing of how life has entrapped us and how we

might be liberated from its fetters. Each offers con-

templative traditions of self-effort in which libera-

tion comes through meditation, chanting, or other

techniques. Each also offers devotional traditions

of other-help in which liberation comes as a gift

from Hindu gods, buddhas and bodhisattvas, or

the singular divinity Sikhs refer to as the Timeless

One and the True Name. Of the eight dimensions of

religion identified by the religious studies scholar

Ninian Smart, Sikhs accent the scriptural dimension,

Buddhists the experiential dimension, and Hindus

the ritual and narrative dimensions. These three

religious traditions also differ on the god question:

Sikhs pursue union with the one divine, Hindus wor-

ship a god of their choosing, and Buddhists cultivate

an intriguing lack of interest in the mathematics of

divinity.

Despite these differences, the stories safeguarded

in the scriptures and rituals of these Indian religions

chart a similar narrative arc from action (karma) to

bondage (samsara) to release (moksha). Some view

this world as an illusion. Others view it as a prison

of sorts whose strict moral law of cause and effect

makes freedom here impossible. But all seek release

from its bonds into another world beyond suffering

and death.

27

Matters

Why Religion

22 CHAPTERI Introduction:

Rites of passage mark life's turning

points. In Judaism, the bar mitzvah (for boys) and the bat

mitzvah (for girls) transform young

people into adult members of the Jewish community.

Hillary Hass kisses her prayer shawl

and touches a Torah scroll during her bat mitzvah in

Beach, Florida.

oral traditions. They are my paraphrased

translations into colloquial English,

ing into a few pages sacred stories that might otherwise

take days or several tho

pages to tell.

After sections that offer basic demographic information about each

many adherents it has and where they live) and briefly explain its key symbols,

and practices, I turn to a third mode of storytelling: history. To do history is

names and dates from memory. Neither is it to offer a "just the facts, ma'am"

of one thing after another. Every history is told from a particular perspective, in thin

from that of a historian of religions on the lookout for how religious narratives interr

with political, economic, and military narratives—how the upstart Christian

got a boost from the conversion of an emperor, how trade routes across the Arab

Peninsula helped spread Islam, how the rise of communism in China first hurt andtle

helped Confucianism. In each case, this historical narrative traces a religious traditc

from before its founding to the present day. Along the way, it underscores the

religions are not unchanging essences that emerged full-born from the heads

founders. They change over time in response to new ecologies, new economies, andrß

enemies. Sometimes they change profoundly, veering in directions quite unintendd:

founders and early followers alike.

Ofcourse, religions cannot be reduced to their histories any more than individuabt

Each chapter also includes a section on "lived religion" that details how today's

0

practitioners live their religious lives. This section includes a "Birth and

outlines how adherents of each religion memorialize these key life passages•

Becaug

dif the influence in the modern West of Bible-driven Protestantism and

the reason

Enlightenment, there has been a strong tendency among scholars to denigrate

Format of This Book 23

material dimension—to see "true religion" in scriptures and ideas and to view images,

idols, and objects as inconsequential. Scholars in recent years have worked to counteract

that tendency by focusing on the ordinary stuff of "lived religion." With their efforts in

mind, each chapter in this book also includes a "Material Religion" box that examines

some particular item of clothing or devotional object or architectural feature—material

objects that carry meanings for adherents. Each chapter ends by attending to a contempo-

rary controversy in which we can see history unfolding today, setting the stage for where

the religion might be heading in the future.

The book is divided into three parts, each of which tracks different types of religion in

different parts of the globe. Once you have determined that the world has gone awry and

the human condition is fundamentally flawed, there are only so many ways to proceed.

You can try to get out. You can stay and try to fix what is broken. Or you can stay and try

to restore the world to its original condition before things went so terribly wrong. In other

words, you can seek release from the problems of this world. You can try to repair what is

broken. Or you can try to go back to a time and place before it was broken in the first place.

In keeping with these three options, this book is divided into Religions of Release,

Religions of Repair, and Religions of Reversion, with an additional section on atheism.

Religions of Release (India)

Hinduism: The Way of Devotion

Buddhism: The Way of Awakening

Sikhism: The Way of the Guru

Religions of Repair (Middle East)

Judaism: The Way of Exile and Return

Christianity: The Way of Salvation

Islam: The Way of Submission

Religions of Reversion (China and North America)

Confucianism: The Way of Ritual Propriety

Daoism: The Way of Flourishing

Navajo Religion: The Way of Beauty

Rejecting Religion

Atheism: The Way of No Way

India's religions of release seek to escape from a world in which we are trapped in an

endless and unsatisfactory cycle of life, death, and rebirth. The religions of repair of the

Middle East seek to fix what is broken through the intervention of God—through the

revelation of the Torah or the Quran or through the revelation of Jesus Christ, whom

Christians call the "Word of God." The religions of reversion of China seek to return to

nature in the case of Daoism or to the glory days of the ancient sage-kings in the case of

Confucianism. As a Native American tradition, Navajo religion is, of course, very differ-

ent from these Chinese religions, but it, too, focuses on the work of reversion—in this

case returning to the original beauty and balance its practitioners refer to as hozho. The

book's final chapter is devoted to people who, in the name of reason, have rejected all

of the above and either don't believe that the world has gone awry or are convinced that

what ails us is religion itself,

Matters

Why Religion

24 CHAPTER 1 Introduction:

Naturalism is a key Daoist

value. Here, a Daoist monk

walks a relatively easy

portion of one of the world's

most difficult hikes—to the

mountaintop Cui Yun Gong

monastery on Hua Shan

("Flowery Mountain") in

China's Shaanxi province.

4

THE POWER OF

QUESTIONS

The conviction underlying

the narrative

approach of this book is that religions h

ceded or failed, spread

or stalled, based on the

power of the stories their

have told. Every religion

that appears in this book

has been a tremendous

has survived for centuries

or, in many cases,

millennia through a long series of

adaptations. It has gathered

millions, in cases billions, of followers. Along th

it has shaped the

we tell ourselves about

who we are, why we are here, and

we are going after we die.

To engage these stories is

to learn something important

the world we inhabit.

It is also to engage

with some of the most profound questions

human beings have asked.

Religions are widely understood

to be answer banks—ATMs of a sort where

walk up, punch a few buttons,

and get the answers to life's questions. Perhaps

is

the Answer," as billboards

across

than

America's

three hundred

Bible Belt

questions

proclaim.

in

But

the

Jesus,

New

who

Testamentb

asks

also an enigma. So are the Buddha and Laozi and

other

founding figures.

Each year, I tell students in my introductory

that there are at least three good reasons to go to coll

One is to get a credential that will get you a job so youcan

support yourself and your family financially. A second'b

to answer questions you wondered about as a teenager-

questions about the size of our solar system, the engineer.

ing of a bridge, or the soliloquies of Shakespeare's Hamlet.

The third is to wrestle with questions that can take alife

time (or more) to untangle. The study of religion offers students and professors alike the opportunity to take up that third task by entering into the imaginative worldsof

some of the greatest stories ever told. Tucked inside these

stories are some of the greatest questions ever asked:

Is there a self?

What must I do to be saved?

How can I become immortal?

What does it mean to be truly human?

What can I do to escape the cycle of life, death, and

rebirth?

How can I eliminate my own suffering and the suffering

of others?

Like every great figure in every religion, we all inhabit

our own stories, which tell us who we are, what tovalue,

and what to do. But the questions we carry around with

us have the power to change those stories and to Chang

us as well. As much as our beliefs and our values shape

it's the questions we ask—of ourselves, our cornrnuD1t)é'

and the world—that make us who we are.

Further Reading 25

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

I. In what ways is storytelling an effective approach to understanding the world's reli-

gions? How do stories affect beliefs and practices? And how do beliefs and practices

affect stories?

2. How does "bracketing" help students and scholars in the academic study of religion?

What might be the downsides to this approach?

3. What are the benefits and pitfalls of comparing religious traditions? What can com-

parison help us see? What might it obscure?

4. Which definition of religion makes the most sense to you, and why? What does your

favorite definition reveal about the world's religions? What does it miss?

5. What are the components of the four-part approach to studying religion outlined

here? How does this approach work to undercut perennialism? In your view, does it

fall prey to essentialism?

KEY TERMS

essentialism, p. 9 perennialism, p. 17

FURTHER READING

Albanese, Catherine L. America: Religions and Religion. 5th ed. Belmont, CA: Wads-

worth Publishing, 1981.

Herling, Bradley L. A Beginner's Guide to the Study of Religion. New York: Continuum,

2012.

Orsi, Robert A. History and Presence. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2016.

Pals, Daniel. Nine Theories of Religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Smith, Jonathan Z. "Map Is Not Territory." In Map Is Not Territory: Studies in the History

of Religions, 289—310. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Five-wicked oil lamps used during worship illuminate the interior of a small temple to the popular Hindu god Shiva in Varanasi, India.

1

Introduction WHY RELIGION MATTERS

I will tell you something about stories…

They aren't just entertainment.

Don't be fooled.

They are all we have, you see,

all we have to fight off

illness and death.

—Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony

In the beginning was the story. Before Star Wars and

Pride and Prejudice, before Moses and the Buddha,

before the first mastodon hunt and the first crop of

wheat, human beings told and listened to stories. Some

of these stories concerned the size of the fish they

caught. Others told of grander adventures with gods

and monsters. But for nearly as long as we human

beings have walked the earth, we have been telling

and retelling stories.

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live," writes

author Joan Didion, but we also live to tell stories.l We

tell ourselves stories about loves lost and found, and

about who we are, who we have been, and who we

might become. Parents tell children folk tales about

how the zebra got his stripes. Historians spin narra-

tives that transform soldiers into presidents. Preachers

tell stories about how love and justice triumph in the

end. Some of these stories are true. Some are packs

of lies. Most are a combination. Nonetheless, stories

circulate among us as surely as the air we breathe.

These stories may entertain, but they are serious stuff.

They orient us in time and space, telling us where we

have been and where we are going.

3

4 CHAPTE R 1 Introduction: Why Religion

Matters

Fortunes rise and fall on

the stories we tell. Stories

determine the successes

failures of our towns and

cities, political parties, and countries. Individual lives

sacrificed on the altar of

a story, or snatched from

certain death at the last minute

a better one. Megabrands from

Alphabet to Zillow are worth billions because Of

stories their founders,

advertisers, and users have spun

over the years. The reason

can walk into a store, pull out

a dollar bill, and buy a candy

bar is because you

with the person behind the

counter stories about that piece of paper being a

and the dollar being a storehouse

of value.

When we are born our parents

and grandparents tell stories about us. And

we die those who remain tell

stories, too—about how we will be reborn someday in

another body, or how one day all the

bodies buried underground will rise up and be

spirited off to their afterlife appointments.

Religions are often called "belief

systems." But the Christian tradition is the only

major religion that puts a strong

emphasis on beliefs. "We believe in one Lord, Jesus

Christ, the only Son of God," Christians

affirm, every Sunday in many churches, in the

words of the Nicene Creed. Beliefs matter

less in other religious traditions, where they

are rarely pressed and processed into formal

statements of belief.

So religions are not "belief systems." Are

they ritual systems? ethical systems?

That depends on where you are looking, since

the world's religions vary widely when

it comes to their relative emphases on ritual and

ethics. But all religions are "story

systems." To explore the world's religions is to wander up

and down the aisles ofa

vast library housing the greatest stories ever told—stories so powerful they have

lasted, in many cases, for millennia. Though adherents of the world's religions are often

called believers, "storytellers" is more apt. The stories they tell inform their beliefs,

practices, and ethical codes, which then double back on those stories in an infinite

loop of invention. The Vedas, Hinduism's most ancient scriptures, are ritual hymnals,

but they also contain stories, including one about how the world was created from

the dismembered body of a primeval man. A competing creation story, about the

emergence of the universe out of an egg, appears in a Hindu ethical manual called

the Laws of Manu. The Upanishads, Hindu scriptures that double as philosophical

dialogues, are also repositories of stories. The most translated book in the world,

the Christian Bible, begins with a story of creation and ends with a story about the

destruction of the world. In between, all sorts of intriguing characters engage in all

sorts of messy conflicts—about fathers and mothers and brothers and daughters and

murder and betrayal and famine and war. The Daodejing of the Daoists comes with

its own origin story—a tantalizing tale about a sage named Laozi who quits his

Of and wanders off toward the mountains. As he approaches the far western reaches

Chinese civilization, a border guard familiar with his reputation for wisdom asks him

for a CliffsNotes version of all that he knows. What Laozi leaves behind becomes the

second most translated book in the world. When families gather for a meal over the holidays, they tell stories, which

link

ents to children to sisters to brothers to cousins to aunts. Religious stories do similar

work. Whether told around a kitchen table or in a car or by a Hindu kirtan singer

Navajo sand painter, they serve as links in the chains of memory that bind members

CHAPTER 1 Introduction: Why Religion Matters 5

Religious people are storytellers. Here, a monk preaches to pilgrims and tourists alike beneath the shade of the ancient Bodhi Tree in Bodh Gaya, India, where the Buddha is said to have attained enlightenment.

of religious communities to one another. To be a Jew is not to believe Jewish things. It is to tell Jewish stories. And so it goes for storytellers in each of the world's religions.

This book explores nine of the world's most influential religious traditions, plus one antireligious tradition that may or may not qualify as a tenth religion. Along the way, I attend to beliefs and practices and symbols, but I focus on stories for two reasons. The first reason is that stories animate beliefs and practices alike. The Nicene Creed doesn't just affirm core Christian doctrines and practices. It tells the story of Jesus, who

took on a human body, suffered, rose from the dead, and "ascended into heaven." The

Passover Seder of the Jews tells the story of a people delivered from slavery to freedom

by their God's hand. In the Hindu tradition, stories serve as vehicles for philosophical

and theological conversations, as in the Bhagavad Gita where, on the eve of a great battle, a soldier and a god (who just so happens to be moonlighting as a charioteer) debate the merits of doing one's duty.

The second reason I emphasize narrative is that stories are universal and easy to

understand. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to understand the Buddhist story

of a prince who left his palace or the Navajo story of the emergence of the first people

out of the underworld. In fact, you don't even need to be literate, since stories like these

originally circulated orally. Even after they were written down in books, they continued

to be told in sermons, on pilgrimages, and during family reunions.

All humans—male and female, young and old, Asian and American, straight and

queer, black and white and brown—tell and retell stories. Stories are what we do with

our voices, and with our hopes and fears. They are the vessels in which we carry around

our assumptions and sensibilities we use to filter new ideas and experi-

ences. They are the nets we use to fish the world.

6 CHAPTER 1 Introduction: Why Religion Matters

RELIGION MATTERS

One obvious reason to explore these stories is to cultivate religious literacy. The

States is one of the most religious countries on the planet. Politicians appeal r nited

to Christianity and the Bible to justify their policies—on homosexuality

and

immigration and economic inequality. Yet Americans know very little about the

0 others. In thU.S. Religious Knowledge Survey (2010), the first nationwide

study of the religious litera of American adults, the Pew Forum found that just about half of Americans c

the Quran as the holy book of Islam and less than half knew that the Dalai ould

Lama identify

Buddhist. Results were no better in a follow-up survey in 2019, when the ave

surveyed correctly answered just 14.2 out of 32 questions. 2 rage person

So what? Why does this matter?

Religious ignorance matters because religion matters. Religion obviously matters pek_sonally to Christians who love Jesus, to Muslims who submit to Allah, and to Hindus

who sing devotional songs to the goddess Durga. But religion also matters politically and economically. It moves elections in India, where the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)functions as a sort of "Religious Right" in defense of a "Hindu India," and in the Unitedstates, where white Christian support carried Donald Trump to the White House in2016. Religion shapes economies in the Muslim world, where earning interest on loansis forbidden, and in America's Mountain West, where Mormons are required to tithe 10percent of their income to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Religion alsomoves troops around the globe and spurs humanitarian efforts.

$.2

-4

Religion is now associated in the United states with political conservatism, but at the 1017 women's

March religious people expressed their liberal values. Here, Begler, American

fashion designer, wears a hijab she designed while marching in Washington, DC.

Tivo Ways to Talk about Religion 7

Critics who claim that religious people have perpetrated many of the world's greatest

horrors are, in my view, correct, Also correct are defenders of religion who claim that

religtous people have been sotne of the world's greatest peacemakers. Put these two facts

together and what do you get? A world in which religion matters. Anyone who wants to

understand that world—as a politician, an entrepreneur, a psychologist, or a citizen—

needs to take account of religion's powers.

Years ago, many scholars promoted a concept called "secularization theory," which

predicted that, as societies modernized, they would become less religious. So far, these

sxholars have been proved wrong. Today, the world remains furiously religious. You can-

not understand what is going on in the Middle East without some knowledge of Judaism,

Christianity, and Islam, You cannot understand what is happening in Myanmar with-

out some knowledge of the Buddhism of the majority and the Islam of the minority. In

her book The Mighty and the Almighty (2006), former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine

Albright wrote that, during her time in the Clinton administration, she had hundreds

of economic and political advisers she could call if she had questions about the gross

domestic product in Saudi Arabia or political parties in Brazil. But how many religion

advisers did she have? Zero. This might make sense if human beings are motivated solely

by greed and power, but we are not. The overwhelming majority of the human beings

who have walked the earth have engaged intimately not only with one another but also

with unseen gods and demons and ancestors and immortals. These presences have bent

our human drives toward different visions of a "just society" and a "fair economy." They

have shaped how we have adopted technologies from the book to the organ to the cell

phone, and they have shaped those technologies in turn.

You may be an atheist, a Sikh, or an evangelical Protestant. You may be "spiritual but

not religious." In any case, the world's religions—their leaders, institutions, practices, and

stories—matter nonetheless. Religion may or may not make sense to you, but you cannot

make sense of the world without making sense of the world 's rel igions. But how to begin?

What exactly is religious literacy and how can we cultivate it?

TWO WAYS TO TALK ABOUT RELIGION There are two ways to talk about religion. The most common is the way of faith and

devotion. This is how people talk about Judaism or Christianity in Sabbath School

or Sunday School—how Buddhist teachers speak of the Buddha in dharma talks and

how Hindus sing of their love of Krishna. But there is another way to talk about

religion—a nondevotional and nontheological way. This is the way of the academic

study of religion, also known as religious studies. Here the aim is not to do religion

but to study it. Here, learning takes precedence over preaching. If the devotional way

to talk about religion is like making art, this academic way of talking about religion

is like doing art history.

After you have distinguished between the religious study of religion and the nonreligious

study of religion, it is important to start with basic facts about the world's religions. But

memorizing Buddhism's Four Noble Truths or the Five Pillars of Islam is not enough.

Religious literacy, like other forms of literacy, is a skill. More specifically, it is the ability

to engage in public conversations about religion. This ability requires a combination of

knowledge and sensibilities:

Matters

Why Religion

8 CHAPTERI Introduction:

• knowledge about the

world's religions

• empathetic

understanding

• critical engagement

• a comparative

approach

Religious studies

scholars often

employ a method they call "bracketing" (or

This method challenges us

to momentarily

set aside our own attitudes and beliefs in

to examine whatever we

are examining

in as unbiased a manner as possible.

bracketing is nonjudgmental

knowledge, or what Ninian

Smart and other religious

scholars have described as

"empathetic understanding." The

idea is that if you are

suspend your own judgments

you may be able to glimpse

how a religion's symbols, beliefs

and practices 100k to insiders.

what does it feel like to

walk in their shoes? to

world through their eyes? of

course, this is an impossible

task. But to ask these questions

is to call attention to your own

biases and prejudices. It is

to attempt to short-circuit the

power of your own religious (or

nonreligious) presuppositions.

This empathetic approach has led

some scholars to 100k only at the sunny side

religions they study. In his bestseller

The Religions of Man (later retitled The world,s

gions), Huston smith makes this approach

explicit. His goal is to write about

their best," he says, showcasing their

"cleaner side" rather than airing their dirty laundry11

This approach obviously carries biases of its

own. It shields us from the evil acts that

religious people do, and from the ways they

draw on the resources of their religions to

justify their actions. Therefore, it is important to combine

empathetic understandingwith

critical engagement&#x201