An interesting interview in the latest issue of the Immanent Frame, a blog that everyone interested in the science of religion ought to read: Robert Bellah, a distinguished sociologist, is talking about religion before theology emerged. (there is also a full transcript here)What he said about body language and ritual made me think again of Tony Blair, and the extraordinary sense I had of watching two or three people sharing his body:

Today many people, including the harshest critics of religion, like Dawkins, Hitchens, et cetera, think religion is a theory or a set of theories that are simply wrong: science has disproved those theories; therefore, we don't need them. [But] theory [itself] emerged at a certain moment in human history, and before that, it didn't exist. We can say it emerged a long time ago, in the middle of the first millennium B.C., about 2,500 years ago. But looking at human evolution, it's extremely recent; it's the flick of an eye.



Before then, he distinguishes two main forms of communication. The first was pre-linguistic, what he calls "mimetic culture"; it's probably worth avoiding the term "body language" here, because there is so much more that spoken language can convey (which tells you more about character in a modern film, the dialogue or the obligatory sex scene?).



The key to understanding mimetic culture is ritual. I think ritual is the phenomenological basis of all religion. Ritual, of course, is part of our lives. If you live in the university, you are hemmed in by an extremely elaborate set of rituals. We don't call it that, we don't remember that, but that's what it is. Then, when language emerged around the period–we don't know for sure–between 50,000 and 120,000 years ago, we get narratives. Narratives add an enormous amount of information to what was communicated through bodily, or mimetic, exchange. Again, we're still there. Most of our lives are controlled by narratives, not by logical reasoning, not by science. But rational, logical thought emerges at a certain moment, and that is the so-called Axial Age, more or less around 2,500 years ago. There, too, it comes out of religious experience. The two examples I gave in that little paper are Plato and the Buddha, two of the great rationalists.

So part of the unease I felt in front of Tony Blair arose because he was communicating simultaneously in three registers: there was the body language, the narrative drive, and finally the analytical picture of the world; and they were all telling different stories. But what does this have to do with religion?

Bellah's answer, which some people here are not going to like at all, is that this almost everything has to do with religion why it gets deep enough: "at this point, both the word"religion" and the word"secularism" are used in such chaotically diverse ways that they are almost useless."

Bellah talks a lot about Charles Taylor's monumental and magisterial history of secularism, which traces the appearance of several senses of the word from the histories of Christian Europe and America. In the end, he points out, the ideology, or philosophy of secularism takes on many of the functions and inherits many of the cognitive mechanisms, that Christianity once had.

"Ritual culture" he says, is a way for a group to express important things together – again, this idea that the function of religion is essentially groupish at least as much as it is about individual meaning seems to me terribly important. "But there is a sense in which every form of ritual is quasi-religious." Bellah continues:

The university is an institution that we believe in. Some of us are ready to lay down our lives for it when it's under attack. Family ritual is critical–and in danger. The family meal is a central expression of the common life of the family, and it has a religious dimension. The family is an instantiation of a kind of group that, through its deep ties, is tied into and related to some pretty deep meanings. So you are sliding in and out of what is religious and whatever this word"secular" means.

And it is precisely this sliding in and out of what's "religious" which seems to me the interesting area to write about.

There is a great deal more in the interview, to which I may return, about the nature and origins of fundamentalism. But what he has to say about secularism as itself a mythical structure is tremendously important. All of us who criticise the new atheists for getting religion wrong by understanding it as a set of theoretical propositions should watch ourselves lest we make the same mistake about atheism.