The Faith Instinct (33 page)

Religion is conducive to survival because ideally its doctrine embodies each society’s collective wisdom and gives leaders authority for certain actions. The system works well in general, but not in every instance. When a single leader or group monopolizes interpretation of the gods’ wishes, and promulgates irrational doctrine, disaster may follow. Though religious behavior has conferred a significant survival advantage in general, it has undoubtedly brought many societies to ruin.

Among the most striking examples of religious pathology is the cattle-killing movement that took place among the Xhosa people in the late 1850s. The Xhosa, who live in southeast Africa, had fought eight losing wars with the British colonial administration and were under the further stress of an epidemic of lung sickness among their cattle. In April 1856 a 16-year-old girl, Nongqawuse (the q represents a click sound), had the first of a striking series of visions.

She said that the Xhosa should cease all witchcraft, kill all their cattle and destroy their corn because new people would arise from the sea and river mouths. The new people would cause fr
esh cattle, free of the devastating lung sickness, to appear from a huge cavern hidden beneath the earth. At the same time the granaries would be miraculously filled with new grain. As for the British, the sea would part and open a road for them to retreat to the place of creation from which they came.

The biblical overtones in Nongqawuse’s prophecy she may have picked up from her uncle Mhlakaza, who had been the first Xhosa baptized into the Anglican church. Other elements were standard parts of Xhosa traditional beliefs, particularly the idea that the sacrifice of cattle was the only effective way of communicating with the spirit world.

Nongqawuse would doubtless have been ignored had not she and her uncle been visited by Sarhili, the Xhosa king. Sarhili somehow became convinced that her visions were real and issued orders that people were to kill their cattle. He began by slaughtering his favorite ox, an animal renowned throughout his kingdom.

Nongqawuse’s message offered hope to people who did not have much. Many had to kill their cattle anyway because of the epidemic. The Xhosa began to sacrifice cattle, destroy the corn in their granaries, and build new cattle pens to hold the fresh herds they anticipated. Hundreds of cattle were killed every day, and those not eaten were left to rot.

The resurrection of the new people was expected to occur on the full moon of June 1856. When nothing happened, Mhlakaza explained that the real date would be the full moon of mid-August. The day after the night of the full moon, he said, there would be a great storm, and the righteous dead and the new cattle would arise out of the earth at the mouths of four local rivers.

“No believer slept that night. The young people danced and reveled, while the older men sat about in silent groups or nervously paced about the huge cattle folds, which had been prepared for the new cattle,” writes the historian J. B. Peires in his account of the cattle killing. “But nothing happened. If anything, the promised day of darkness was particularly bright.”
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Many Xhosa had believed Nongqawuse’s prophecies but many had not. Even among the believers, a common strategy had been to kill a few cattle and hold the rest back while waiting to see what happened. If Nongqawuse’s prophecies had been ignored after the second disappointment in August 1856, no one would have been much worse off.

But the unfolding of the tragedy could not be halted. The reason the new people did not show, Mhlakaza explained, was because many Xhosa had failed to sacrifice all of their cattle, as directed. King Sarhili ordered the killing of cattle to continue. Believers assaulted those who tried to protect their animals. People wandered through their uncultivated fields or sat in the shade of their empty cattle pens, talking of the better world that lay ahead. The Xhosa were told to adorn themselves in celebration of the approaching event. Xhosa working for the British on public works “cheerfully mocked their white overseers and frequently burst in
to song until they abandoned their labor altogether to prepare for the great day,” Peires reports.
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But the cheerfulness was one of desperation. By August people had already started to go hungry. With their grain pits empty, their fields unplanted and their cattle dead, the best way to get food was by visiting those who still had cattle to sacrifice. Others turned to digging up roots and eating the bark of mimosa trees. In late September the first deaths from starvation began. Children and the elderly passed out from lack of food. The dogs were too weak to bark.

Yet the believers even then did not abandon their belief in Nongqawuse’s beguiling prophecies. Before each new moon, orders went out for every last animal to be sacrificed, even goats and chickens. King Sarhili continued to cull his once immense herds. By mid-January 1857 he had none left.

Meeting with his advisers, he decided one final effort should be made to meet the prophetess’s demands. The final cattle were slaughtered. The last stocks of corn were burned. Widows who had remarried returned to their former homes, ready to greet their first husbands reawakening from the dead. Despite their hunger, the Xhosa cheerfully expected the new cattle to burst forth from the ground at any moment. Some stood on their roofs or climbed hills to catch a first glimpse of the resurrected people.

On the appointed day, the 16th—17th of February 1857, the dead once again failed to appear. The new cattle remained beneath the earth in their concealed underground cavern. The emptied granaries were not magically refilled. King Sarhili at last admitted his error. “I have been a great fool in listening to lies,” he said. “I am no longer a chief. I was a great chief, being as I am the son of Hintza, who left me rich in cattle and people, but I have been deluded into the folly of destroying my cattle and ordering my people to do the same; and now I shall be left alone, as my people must scatter in search of food; thus I am no longer a chief. It is all my own fault; I have no one to blame but myself”
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His regrets were too late. With their cattle sacrificed and their fields untilled, his people died by the thousands of starvation. The British colonial administration of South Africa, interested in breaking the power of Xhosa chiefs and inducting their people into the labor force, did almost nothing to help. The Xhosa population of British Kaffraria, as the province was then known, plummeted from 105,000 in January 1857 to 25,916 by the end of 1858. Some of the loss was through emigration, but at least 40,000 people died from hunger. An estimated 400,000 cattle had been sacrificed in vain.

The Xhosa, of course, were neither the first nor the last people to commit themselves to a disastrous course because of their religious beliefs. Some 909 people belonging to the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project, a cult founded by Jim Jones, died in 1978 in Jonestown, Guyana, after drinking cyanide. The cult practiced “apostolic socialism,” a path which eventually led its members from California to a guarded commune in Guyana which no one was allowed to leave. After the murder of a vis
iting congressman, Leo Ryan, Jones ordered his followers to commit suicide by drinking cyanide. Almost the entire membership of the cult perished. It seems some did so voluntarily, but the community operated under severe coercion from its leader.

Stranger still were the mass suicides and murders conducted in 1994 at two villages in Switzerland, and in Morin Heights, Quebec, by members of the Order of the Solar Temple. The cult believed it was a descendant of the Knights Templar, a crusading order. About 50 people died in each country.

Members of another strange sect, the Heaven’s Gate cult,
believed the earth was about to be wiped clean of life and rejuvenated. In preparati
on for this event, they lived such an ascetic life that six of
their male devotees underwent castration. Their leader, Marshall Applewhite, believe
d that he and the woman who nursed him after a near-fatal heart
attack were the two witnesses mentioned in the New Testament’s book of Revelation.
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He persuaded 38 of the cult’s members to escape the impending purification of the earth by committing suicide, which they did on March 26, 1997, in a rented villa in Santa Fe, an upscale community of San Diego, California.

The cult members took their own lives in shifts, with surviving members cleaning up after each group’s death. They were found dressed in identical black shirts and sweatpants, new Nike athletic shoes and armband patches reading “Heaven’s Gate Away Team.” All carried in their pockets a $5 bill and three quarters. Their bodies were each covered with a square, purple cloth. Their deaths coincided with the reappearance of the comet Hale-Bopp.
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At first glance, the Xhosas’ disastrous religious beliefs and the suicide pacts of modern cults pose something of a challenge to the view that religious behavior evolved because it promoted survival. But what these episodes more directly demonstrate is the extraordinary hold that religion can exert on people’s minds, compelling them to override the strongest human emotions, including those of self-preservation and the protection of family.

Such committed group behavior is clearly invaluable when harnessed to rational goals, as it is for the most part. Most leaders are keenly interested in their own and their society’s well-being, and the will of the gods is usually interpreted by a consensus of some kind, whether of priests or rulers. But evolved behaviors are often vulnerable to malfunctions, which are tolerated if they do not make too much of a difference overall. The subversion of religious belief systems by irrational leaders shows only how potent a force they can be in the hands of those interested in their societies’ survival.

Just as religion provides an agreed set of rules for managing fertility, it can also be pressed into use in other forms of management, such as coordinating a group of people in the control and distribution of natural resources. Resource management often requires agreement among affected parties to subordinate their particular interests to the common good, and religion was the means used by early societies to accomplish this goal.

Hunters and gatherers may live off nature’s bounty but when people first settled down and started to practice agriculture, they discovered that farming requires hard, cooperative labor of a kind quite novel in human experience. The Natufians of the Near East devised a religious solution for the problem of getting people to work for others: as mentioned earlier, they acquired supernatural supervisors of the community’s behavior. The supervisors were people’s own ancestors. To make sure everyone knew the ancestors were watching, the skulls of the dead were decorated and set in commanding positions in the walls of the Natufians’ houses.

In early societies ancestor worship seems to have been a househ
old affair, with the people under each roof acknowledging throu
gh appropriate rituals their relationship to the dead ancestor and to one another. S
ome archaic states, such as those of the ancient Maya and the T
’ang dynasty in China, conceived the idea of replicating ancestor worship outs
ide the household. The rulers claimed especially close ties to
the supernatural world through their descent from the founding ancestors. They requi
red that offerings previously made to the household ancestors b
e diverted to, or at least shared with, themselves. They thus gained access to much
of the society’s surplus production which they could use
for managing natural resources, as well as for their own purposes. Mayan rulers, for
example, built reservoirs to collect water and distribute it in the dry season. A s
ymbol of royalty throughout the Mayan lowlands was the water li
ly, a plant that grows only in clean, still water and affirmed by its presence that
the rulers were keeping the stored water drinkable.
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Early agricultural societies used religion not just to make people work but also to coordinate their activities quite precisely with the rhythm of the seasons. Failure to do so led to crops being planted or harvested at the wrong time, with possibly serious consequences for the community. Religious festivals held at appropriate times proved to be an effective means of organizing early farming societies. These agricultural festivals, as noted earlier, were later adopted by organized religions and reassigned to commemorate critical events in the sacred text; Easter, Passover and Rosh Ha-Shanah are all co-opted from the farmers’ calendar.

Modern states have many ways of coordinating people’s activities, and the role of religion, probably once pervasive, is no longer so prominent. The organizing powers of religion are more visible in societies like that of Bali
in Indonesia. A system of temple management there, led by a high priest, allocates water supplies throughout the island and sets farmers’ planting schedules so as to minimize infestations of pests.

This remarkable system, long ignored by the Dutch, Bali’s colonial rulers, came to Western knowledge through the eyes of Stephen Lansing, an anthropologist who was studying Balinese religion in the early 1980s. At the time, high-yielding strains of rice, part of the Green Revolution, were being introduced by agricultural officials unaware of the temples’ role. The officials found yields were better at first, then rapidly diminished as pests overwhelmed the crops.

Delving into the matter, Lansing learned that Balinese farmers had for centuries controlled pests through an elaborate, religiously based system centered on the goddess Dewi Danu and her high priest.

The island of Bali is a long extinct volcano with a vast, deep lake occupying its central crater. The rivers that rush down the mountain gulleys would be useless for irrigation but for numerous weirs that divert water into tunnels and canals. Each canal is used by from 60 to 120 farmers to irrigate terraced fields built up around the mountain.