The Faith Instinct (36 page)

Religious behavior is shaped in part by genetics and in part by culture. Both components may vary over time but the cultural component of religion can be changed more quickly. Through cultural shifts in the interpretation of a religion’s requirements, a society can tailor its behavior, or a country its foreign policy, to whatever strategy fits the circumstances. Religions thus possess a considerable degree of flexibility, more than might be expected from their claims to reflect the unchanging commands of divine revelation. The malleability of religious doctrine is not so surprising, given that inflexible religions would soon have led their societies to destruction.

Still, religions have a certain inertia that may persist for generations. Doctrine derived from a divine founder cannot be changed too obviously or too fast. And in some societies leaders may not see the need for change or may fear to implement it. Reasons of this kind could explain the comparative stability of Islam over the centuries, in contrast to the continual turnover of Christian sects.

When states go to war, it is usually for a variety of generally secular causes. Religion may be quickly invoked, but only because it is such a potent instrument for energizing a society and motivating troops. It is usually no more a cause of war than are weapons; both are
primarily means of war. Even when the formal cause of war is expressed in terms of religion, the underlying motives are usually secular.

The Bishops’ Wars between England and Scotland, for instance, began when Charles I decided in 1637 to impose a version of the Anglican prayer book on the Scottish church. The Scottish nobles and Presbyterians found common cause in rejecting the bishops appointed by the king. In the course of these events Scotland declared itself a Presbyterian nation, sealing its difference with Anglican England, and declared that the appointment of bishops by the king was contrary to divine law. This blunt challenge to royal prerogatives and the divine right of kings to rule as absolute monarchs led to the second Bishops’ War, to the English parliament’s Grand Remonstrance against royal abuses of power, to the outbreak of civil war in England between the king and parliament and, in 1649, to the momentous event of the king’s execution.

But these events can also be considered as a struggle between England and Scotland, followed by a civil war in England, in both of which the combatants used religion to energize their followers. The driving force of both Bishops’ Wars was the desire, first of Scotland and then of the English Parliament, to reduce the power of the king; both found it useful to invoke religion against him.

A case in which religion seems much closer to being a prime cause of war is that of the sanguinary campaigns fought by the Aztec empire against its neighbors. The Aztec empire rose to power in the fourteenth century A.D. by shaping a horrific new religion for itself. Building on an ancient Mesoamerican tradition of human sacrifice, the Mexica, the principal members of the Aztec alliance, asserted the belief that their patron deity, the sun god Huitzilopochtli, required spilled human blood to replenish his life force.

“The imperial cosmology held that the Mexica must relentlessly take captives in warfare and sacrifice them,” write the anthropologists Geoffrey Conrad and Arthur Demarest. “The spiritual strength of the sacrificed enemy warriors would strengthen the sun and stave off its inevitable destruction by the forces of darkness. Thus, it was specifically the Mexicas’ sacred duty to preserve the universe from the daily threat of annihilation.”
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Instead of the occasional human sacrifice at major festivals, the Aztecs now required routine slaughter of massive numbers of people. The whole society was given over to the mad objective of capturing as many victims as possible from neighboring states, while imposing demands for tribute.

With extraordinary cruelty, the Aztec priests would cut the heart out of living people, whose remains would then be eaten in a cannibal feast. According to a Spanish monk who accompanied Hernan Cortes’s invading force in 1519, “The natives of this land had very large temples ... with a house of worship at the top, and close to the entrance a low stone, about knee-high, where the men or women who were to be sacrificed to their gods were thrown on their backs and of their own accord remained perfectly still. A priest then came out with a stone knife like a lance-head but which barely cut anything, and with this knife he opened the part where the heart is and took out the heart, without the person who was being sacrificed uttering a word.

“Then the man or woman, having been killed in this fashio
n, was thrown down the steps, where the body was taken and most cruelly torn to piec
es, then roasted in clay ovens and eaten as a very tender delic
acy; and this is the way they made sacrifices to their gods.”
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Aztec practice was for the warrior who had taken the captive to
sponsor a feast at which a carefully prepared human stew was served.
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The scale of this macabre operation was enormous, given the resources of an archaic state. The Aztecs themselves claim to have sacrificed 80,400 prisoners during a 4-day festival in 1487, during the reign of the emperor Ahuitzotl. Historians consider the number exaggerated because the Aztecs could not have managed the logistics. Still, estimates are that at least 15,000 people a year were sacrificed in Central America, with hundreds or thousands of people being massacred in a single ceremony.

The new religion gave the Aztecs a pretext for continual campaigns against their neighbors for the purpose of taking captives and levying tribute. Both nobles and civilians were indoctrinated in the imperial cult and the gods’ ceaseless thirst for blood. Their empire expanded rapidly. In the course of a century the Mexica and their allies came to dominate almost all of Central America.

Aztec soldiers fought fanatically because they gained wealth and prestige if they brought captives home, and were promised immortality if they died in battle. Priests accompanied the soldiers to the battlefield, bearing statues of the gods and murdering the first captive in a ritual sacrifice.

The speedy rise of the Aztec empire demonstrated the frightening power of a religious ideology to organize a society around a single goal, however irrational, and drive it to excel in warfare. The religion operated at every level of society, from guiding the state’s military campaigns to motivating individual warriors. But the religious ideology the Aztecs created had a fatal flaw, which its designers and their successors failed to fix.

The empire’s two goals were sacrificial blood for the gods and tribute for the state. But so much of the workforce of vassal states became depleted by the Aztecs’ voracious demands for human blood that there were soon too few people to work the fields. Tribute revenues dropped, a
serious threat for the Aztec polity where the noble and warrior classes had expanded in relation to the productive labor force.

In other societies religion has operated to manage natural resources or maintain an ecological balance. But religions are only as good as the thought put into their design and operation. The Aztec state was ultimately unsustainable because the two goals of its religious ideology—victims and tribute—were in effect contradictory.

Aztec armies had to campaign farther afield in search of victim
s, straining their logistics and leading to many defeats. The A
ztec emperors seem to have believed in their sanguinary cult and feared the gods’
wrath when the supply of captives started to dry up. Without a
ssurance of the gods’ support “the zeal and confidence of the imperial armies
was greatly diminished,” Conrad and Demarest observe.
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Cortes and his conquistadors arrived on the scene in 1519, at a time when the empire’s war machine was failing and the Aztecs were hated by all the surrounding states on which they had preyed for so long. Under the assault of a few hundred Spanish troops, and tens of thousands of eager Indian allies, the Aztec empire disintegrated into Cortes’s hands.

Though the Aztec wars were formally driven by their sun god’s inordinate thirst for sacrificial blood, the question is why the Aztec society and its leaders embraced such a cruel and wasteful creed. Presumably Aztec rulers believed their religion’s requirements to be in the state’s interests, and indeed without the constant requirement for new victims it’s possible that the Aztecs themselves could have ended up on a rival’s altars.

“The Mexicas’ sacrificial cosmology gave them the competitive edge needed for such victories: fanaticism,” write Conrad and Demarest. “The unending hunger of the gods for mass sacrifices also generated the tireless dynamism of the Mexica armies, a persistence which allowed them to wear down some of the most obstinate of their opponents.”

The Aztecs’ error, from the perspective of their state’s long-term survival, was less in adopting such a bloodthirsty creed as in failing to moderate it when circumstances required. Religion is a potent instrument for survival but it embodies only the collective wisdom of a society, and when that is insufficient religion is no salvation.

If religion plays a somewhat less prominent role in wars between modern states, the reason is in part the separation of church and state. The power to declare war rests with secular leaders, not a priest-king. But there is another reason for the detachment of religion from warfare: modern states are no longer dependent on religion for military training, because they have learned how to borrow and secularize religious techniques.

One of the most surprising achievements of the secular state, though it is generally taken for granted, is the ability to induce men to sacrifice their lives in battle without any explicit religious incentive.

In primitive societies and archaic states, religious indoctrination was a principal way of getting soldiers to fight. Boys were expected to endure painful initiation rites without showing pain, so as to toughen them as warriors. Their emotional endurance too was tested through long and frightening ordeals. They would often be trained with others of their age group to encourage solidarity. Among the Nilotic peoples of East Africa like the Nuer, the age-sets of initiated young men served as military companies who were always ready to go to war, and this organization enabled the Nuer to prevail over neighbors who were less well prepared.

In a cross-cultural survey of male initiation, the sociologist Richard Sosis and colleagues tallied the presence or absence of 19 ritual practices such as genital mutilation, teeth pulling, tattooing, scarification and piercing. They found that societies that went to war most often had the most painful initiation rites. Presumably the more militaristic the society, the more searing it made the initiation of its future warriors.

The pain and fear associated with these rituals stands in interesting contrast to the positive effects of religious rites involving dance and music, which leave participants emotionally uplifted. Sosis and colleagues suggest that “through frightening and painful rites, religious symbols can acquire deep emotional significance that subsequently unites individuals who share the experience.” Even though boys may not go to war until many years after their initiation, the emotional effect of initiation is enduring. Painful rituals “generate solidarity between men and serve as reliable indicators of group commitment, thus reducing the likelihood that men will defect when there is war,” the researchers conclude.
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Besides the bonding of initiation rites, early societies seem t
o have depended heavily on ritual dancing before battle to spre
ad a feeling of cohesion. Religious war dances were used by the Zulus, Swazis and ma
ny other peoples. The Aztecs required boys to live apart from t
heir families and train with nightly dances to firelight. On the night before the ba
ttle at the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, the Spanish were ala
rmed by the sound of martial music. According to a Spanish survivor, “That nig
ht more than a thousand knights got together in the temple, the great loud sounds of
drums, shrill trumpets, cornet and notched bones ... They danced nude ... in a circ
le, holding their hands, in rows and keeping time to the tune o
f the musicians and singers.”
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Yielding one’s life in war is, from the point of view of individual survival, an irrational act. Yet untold millions of men have done so, proving that to risk one’s life in combat is a part of human nature. But this beh
avior cannot prevail unless the powerful biological instinct for self-preservation is overridden.

For men to become warriors, they must be imbued with several important attitudes. They must be trained to develop strong group cohesion, to lose their fear of the enemy, to believe victory is possible, to believe their valor will be rewarded, to believe right is on their side, and to sacrifice their lives if necessary.

Religion, notes the evolutionary biologist Dominic Johnson, provides an answer for all of these problems. Initiation rites inculcate group cohesion, belief in the god of one’s tribe promotes confidence in victory, religion-based morality defines the warrior’s side as good and the enemy’s as evil, and religions may promise luxuriant rewards to those who fall in battle, or punishment for those who desert the cause.

“Religion turns out to have many properties that make it an excellent adaptation for war,” Johnson remarks. “Perhaps this is an accident. Alternatively, perhaps it is so effective because it was designed for exactly this purpose.”
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How then do modern armies induce men to fight without the emotional goads of initiation rites, consulting oracles, war dances or the promise of paradise?

First, modern armies are imbued with military rituals. As Johns
on observes, “Rituals dominate not only war itself but mi
litary organizations in their entirety: initiations, oaths of allegiance, ranks, dut
y training, drill, parades, indoctrination, standard operating procedures, combat ta
ctics, memorials to the dead, and offerings to the gods prior t
o battle or after victory.”
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Religion no longer has a central role in
warfare but it has not been banished very far from the scene of action. Modern armies have military chaplains in attendance.