Metabiblical

I am currently working my way through Neil Van Leeuwen’s Religion as Make-Believe. I worry that the title will drive away people who could benefit quite a bit from it.

So let me state at the outset — although Van Leeuwen himself is not religious, and occasionally takes shots at religious belief in general, his basic thesis has a lot going for it whether or not any one particular religion is true.

I won’t rehash the whole book, but the argument is that, for at least many religious believers, religious belief has certain features in common with childlike make-believe play. That is, (many) people treat religious claims in a way very different from the way they treat regular factual claims. This is true even if some religion is actually, factually, true in its basic claims. It is simply a fact that many religious believers do not live as though the claims they make in a religious context are bare facts about the universe, and I think this book goes a long way toward explaining how this works at a cognitive level.

And so I would recommend this book especially to religious people, including to religious people who are quite convinced that their beliefs are factually true. At the very least, it will help a person, religious or not, get a better understanding of the religious world around them.

Van Leeuwen, in my opinion, has gotten further than most non-religious people in understanding the general psychology of many religious people. Nevertheless, consider what he has to say about Jonah. The comments about Jonah come as Van Leeuwen is commenting on Durkheim’s views on the contents of religious beliefs.

If I am understanding rightly, Durkheim claims that religious beliefs are a sort of symbolic representation of social realities. Van Leeuwen counters that while religious beliefs may function to keep social groups together, the contents of the beliefs themselves are not about society. Now Van Leeuwen (p. 212):

Since he infers social content (accuracy conditions) from social function, Durkheim, I think, is guilty of a gross non sequitur.

His mistake becomes obvious when we consider religious narratives that are more elaborate than the representation of simple totem animals. Consider the Jonah story. That story has detailed contents, which we would be hard-pressed to interpret as being about a given society and the relations between people that exist in it. What social relations are represented by sentences that appear to claim that a man lived in the belly of a whale for three days, which then belched him up? Perhaps there is some moral lesson of social import, but this social import is murky at beast, while the actual story contents are clear as day.

The prospects for displacing all the apparent contents of religious beliefs with clannish contents are thus dim.

I would beg to differ from Van Leeuwen here. The Jonah story is, as Durkheim might celebrate, about society. And in particular, the Jonah story is an anti-clannish tale about how Israel’s god values the lives of people outside the boundaries of the Israelite people, including even their political enemies.

The story of Nineveh inverts the typical genre of prophecy in several ways, including by being transparently fictional, by portraying the Ninevites as repentant, and by making the prophet a ridiculous figure who misses the point of the story throughout. It’s ingenious satire that challenges the religious boundaries of the Israelite people in the name of their own deity. It’s serious literature.

There are a lot of biblical passages that aren’t transparently about society, like Jonah is. It would be very difficult, though perhaps entertaining, to try to read the erotic literature of the Song of Songs as being about society.

It is strange that the Jonah story, of all things, would be the example that comes to mind when Van Leeuwen needs a good example of a not-about-society sort of religous beliefs.