Does a big society need a Big God?

So big societies first, then Big Gods:

“If Dr Whitehouse and his colleagues are correct, today’s religions did not create modernity but, in the past at least, they held it together.”

Of course, contemporary western scholarship doesn’t really do God as a starting assumption, let alone as the explanation for observable religious phenomena. It is, therefore, predisposed to functional explanations of religion – God made in man’s image, not the other way round.

But leaving that aside, and assuming the historical correctness of the claim that belief in Big Gods usually emerges only after big societies become established, might there be an alternative to the functional explanation? Here’s one hypothesis:

Whether or not one believes in the reality of a ‘Big God’, the idea of a divine being who is beyond our ability to fully comprehend has always been out there. Crucially, the jumping-off point for our conception of what we can’t comprehend (and thus can only have faith in) is what we can comprehend. For instance, one can’t believe in an afterlife without a concept of death; nor can one believe in a creator without a concept of nothingness.

So, if smaller, simpler societies had no concept of a Big God who cares about the justice of complex social relationships, is that mainly because they had no immediate need of such a belief system? Or because they had no concept of complex social relationships (having never experienced them)? Surely, it is not until these structures emerged that human beings could conceive of how God might be greater than – and set the standards for – such a society. People may always have had an inkling of the bigness and beyondness of the ultimate realities, but when it comes to articulating that intuition into a formal system of belief, developments run only just ahead of human experience.

Another complication is that when big societies do arrive at a Big God belief system they don’t always do so in the same way – something that has big consequences for their development.

Over on his blog, Branko Milanovic writes about a very relevant book, The Origins of Political Order by Francis Fukuyama:

“There is one key idea… If you wish to have a functional political order that enables economic growth and gives people freedom from arbitrariness of the sovereign or from oppression by their peers, you need three components: (i) a strong state, (ii) rule of law, and (iii) accountability.”

According to Milanovic, Fukuyama makes the case that religion – of the Big God variety – had a key part to play in achieving the rule of law. While a “strong state is needed to provide public goods” like “defense against external attack”, its power also needs to be placed within limits:

“Religions, according to Fukuyama, were useful in producing the rule of law because they placed the sovereign under one higher law: divine. This was the case in Islam (Umayyads, Abbasids and later Ottomans and Memluks), India thanks to Buddhism, and Europe thanks to Christianity (or rather mostly thanks to Catholicism).”

This kind of religion needs to be more than functional – a mere subroutine of civilisation. Rather, it needs to be seen as beyond and above and greater than even the highest levels of human society.

It is argued that China – an unusually early example of a strong state – is also notable for the “absence of a codified religion with its divinely-ordained rules”. This doesn’t mean that China is a civilisation without religion or sophisticated systems of moral philosophy (think Taoism and Confucianism for a start, or the influence of Buddhism), but that these did not become politically established as a source of authority over the whole of society including the ruling class.

Therefore what perpetuated the Chinese state was “rule by law” not “rule of law” – a distinction that helps explain differences in outlook between the Chinese and Western systems of government to this day. In the West, subjecting the ruling class to a higher law, thus constraining their power from above, cleared the way for constraining state power from below i.e. through democracy.

But with Western civilisation abandoning its collective belief in a higher power and a greater truth, all we now have are the constraints from below. Whether democracy is strong enough to do the job on its own is something we’re about to find out.

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Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.

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