Why Do We Need Religion? 

Contributed by Stephen Wickman, St. Thomas Episcopal, McLean

Spurred by a comment to my blog post on “comfort,” led me to take a  historical and philosophical dive. In 2014 Philip Jenkins wrote a deliberately provocative article to argue there was “a genuine and epochal decline in the number and scale” of religious movements like the Church of Scientology and the Unification Church, both of which date from the 1950s and early 1960s. 

But others have mushroomed in Asia, where I lived and worked for years. Daesoon Jinrihoe, founded in 1969, is the largest “new religion” in Korea, while the Church of Almighty God – you can’t make these names up — was established in 1981 in China and claims millions of followers at home, and because of persecution and emigration in some 20 other countries. Indonesia, Vietnam, Africa, Puerto Rico, and Columbia have spawned “new” religions or neo-Pentecostal groups.  Mexico’s La Luz del Mundo has spread despite COVID-19 and the arrest of its leader for a sexual crime. 

The new Korean religions usually cite Christianity as a source and are often more successful abroad than at home. Just so, the World Mission Society Church of God claims two million members in Nepal, Latin America, and even in the United States, where the Unification Movement has dwindled to 65,000 members but controls the wholesale sushi supply industry and a newspaper. Won Buddhists and Jeungsanists have recently translated their texts and begun missionizing abroad, which some see as unprecedented in religious history. 

Why do we need religion, new or old?   

In 1949, Karl Jaspers posited the idea that there was an “Axial Age” from roughly BCE 800-200 when humans, across vastly different regions and without direct contact, simultaneously came up with new ways of thinking that lay the foundations for the world’s enduring philosophical, moral, and religious traditions. These included China, where Confucius and Laozi (Taoism) reshaped ideas on ethics and governance; India, where the Buddha, the Upanishadic philosophers, and the Jain tradition emphasized liberation, compassion, and self-realization; Persia, where Zoroaster, introduced dualistic cosmology and moral responsibility; Greece, where Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle explored reason, ethics, and metaphysics; and Palestine/Israel, where figures like Isaiah and Jeremiah deepened the moral and spiritual vision of Judaism. 

Jaspers has been criticized for simplifying things, but many agree there was a process if not an “Age” where a new layer of morality emerged that featured the following principles: 

1.  Moralistic punishment: violations of “natural” morality will be punished by higher authorities, in this life or the next. 

2.  Moralizing norms: peers and other members of a relational network are obliged to monitor and deter deviance.

3.  Pro sociality: cooperative behavior should be actively encouraged and rewarded. 

4.   Moralizing supernatural beings: an “eye in the sky” watches over everyone, punishing sins and rewarding virtuous behavior. 

5.   Rulers are not gods: worldly leaders are merely human, just like everyone else. 

6.   Equality: moral rules apply to both elites and commoners, regardless of birth and social status. 

7.   Ruling morality: The rules apply to the rulers as well. 

8.   Formal legal code: the rule of law is explicitly formulated. 

9.   General applicability: the law applies to all citizens equally. 

10. Constraints on the executive: decisions are constrained by formal rules—such as a veto—or informal (but powerful) ideological constraints, e.g. requiring the tacit approval of a priesthood. 

11. Bureaucratization: administration of a system of governance requiring specialist skills, training, and salary.

12. Impeachment: excessive and arbitrary exercise of power by rulers can lead to their removal. 

This new morality replaced “archaic” systems where rulers could act with impunity. Again, however, there were exceptions. In the Italian Peninsula, Christianity created a pronounced moralizing dimension, but it was accompanied by an increase in social inequality – still not as bad as in the old Roman Empire — and the emergence of a religious autocracy. Moreover, the greatest concentration of axial principles was not in the first millennium BCE, but in the 2,000 years that followed. Because of the emperors’ strong association with the divine and a lack of tension between secular and sacred order, Japan remained pre-axial until the modern era despite early introduction and adoption of Buddhist and Confucian ideas. And in what is now Cambodia, Buddhism and the Hinduism that preceded it did not exercise a moralizing effect until much later. 

Archaeological and historical research in the decades since Jaspers, moreover, has unearthed evidence for “sustained, impactful connections between all of these regions.”  Zoroastrianism, Rabbinic Judaism, and Greek philosophy not only developed through the exchange of ideas, but also owed much to earlier Hittite, Mesopotamian, and Egyptian ideals and practices. 

But what about the newest religions? Several theories share the idea that after the French and Industrial Revolutions, rapid change and the feeling of an “accelerated history” provided fertile ground for such movements. They argue that it is not a coincidence that Spiritualism and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints appeared first in 19^th century New York and that some Asian countries, faced with imperialism, colonization-decolonization, war, and sudden economic development have similar experiences.  

Fast forward to Korea, where the social unrest caused by Japanese, Chinese, Russian, and Western imperialism helped spread the idea that Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism were outmoded.  Christianity and Ch’ŏndogyo, Daejongism, and the branch of Jeungsanism known as Bocheonism gained followers because they opposed Japanese occupation. After the devastation of the Korean War, new groups proliferated and became even larger. And they continue to this day. 

This blog post is the expressed opinion of its writer and does not necessarily reflect the views of Tysons Interfaith or its members.