Sometimes it pays to go back to an early theory, even one that has been found wanting. Sometimes there’s a gem that has been left behind. I have been considering the thought of J.G. Frazer (1854-1941), an anthropologist at Cambridge and an early secular theorist of religion. Frazer believed he could show why religion was on a natural course for extinction.
When I consider the reasons he thought this was true, however, I find a plausible account of why many people do stop believing in God, but nothing that says they should. In fact, though Frazer’s theory has flaws — which have been amply discussed by religious critics and secular theorists alike — I still find many aspects of it to be fruitful. Instead of agreeing with Frazer’s assumption that a “mature,” and better, society will have abandoned religion, I come away impressed that the world is more fit for humans — more humane — when we believe in a personal God.
Frazer explained religion with the starting assumption that humans are on the hunt for ways to understand and interact with the world, exerting some level of control. With respect to that guiding concern, he thought humanity — different people groups in their own time — progressed through three main stages.
First, there was magic. To control the world around you, you would perceive a “sympathetic” or “contagious” connection between similar things in the world. Acting on one object would have some magical effect on related things. It was an impersonal, transactional system for achieving results.
In a system in which magic is the most trusted source of the results people want, effective magicians inevitably rise to the highest social status, and we see a pattern of early magician-kings.
But because magic isn’t actually effective — to put it in terms of Thomas Kuhns’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) — this paradigm eventually shows cracks. The magical outlook could survive a few ineffective spells, or babies born the unintended sex, but when the system becomes subject to too much doubt, something else is needed.
The “something else” is religion. If the systematic, impersonal rules of magic — supposedly consistent — have failed, people reason, perhaps what we are dealing with instead is personalities. Persons act with purpose … but they can also change their minds or act on whim. So, to account for the unpredictability of our experience, people project consciousness onto inanimate objects in nature.
The result is animism, which Frazer saw as the most basic form of religion. This religious projection of agency eventually matures into polytheism and monotheism, but the basic idea is the same. Achieving desired results in the world now requires engaging in a relationship with a deity, analogous to relationships with other humans. Instead of magicians as our specialists, we now need priests, who are good at cultivating a relationship with the gods.
In the religious stage of development, who holds social power? Where magician-kings once ruled, now priest-kings are supreme.
As with magic, however, Frazer sees that this paradigm begins to weaken. I think of the challenges of theodicy in this context: while an impersonal magical system that fails is surely frustrating, a personal relationship with a deity who fails to be consistent can feel far more painful — more like abandonment, betrayal, or abuse. (Those in Al Anon, for instance, can tell you how devastating it is when a primary attachment figure behaves erratically.) If an individual or community eventually gives up making excuses for a deity who can’t be predicted, it may be a relief to conclude that there was no personality on the other side after all.
And what “paradigm” is there to catch people when the personal paradigm of religion has been given up? Science. For Frazer, science has many of the same elements as the original magic: it is a system of knowledge that is impersonal, systematic, and manipulable for results. But the difference is that, unlike magic, science works.
Thus, in the millennia-long transition from magic to science, religion’s personality-infused cosmos has served as a placeholder, with the projected idea of human personality serving to account for all the things we can’t control. Frazer imagines that, because it mainly serves this purpose of explaining and controlling the world, religion will become increasingly irrelevant as science (and, we can add, technology) expands to explain and control more of the world.
This theory has its weaknesses, to be sure, which are widely recognized by secular scholars of religion. For one thing, Frazer is strangely fixated on religion as an intellectual construct, needed for its explanatory power; he largely ignores its social, psychological, ritual, and other meaning-making aspects. For another, he condescendingly assumes that some existing people groups value magic because they are just immature; they’ll eventually “grow” out of it.
Furthermore, his process of marshaling global evidence into a magnificent theory is — in keeping with Victorian trends — too sweepingly ambitious to be sidetracked by the demands of historical accuracy and cultural specificity. The theory is plausible, yes; but does it bear up with what has happened in history? Does it account for the complex ways magic and religion overlap, the ways belief in a personal God has often supported scientific discovery, or the nuanced ways religion and science coexist?
Having noted these weaknesses, however, I remain compelled by how this progression does seem to track with many people’s journeys away from religion — especially those moderns who really do come to religion looking for reliable explanations. If the point of the exercise is to find thorough explanations, they are not wrong to look to science “instead” of religion. Some are even concerned for the emotional wellbeing of believers: if life is experienced as a collection of random suffering and prosperity, doesn’t attributing it all to the will of God amount to abuse? Eliminating the personal will behind it all would seem to eliminate the element of injustice.
Frazer also makes the good point that societies tend to give status and authority to those who excel in the leading modes of explaining and controlling things. We may not see “scientific elites” as having quite achieved the level of power of Frazer’s “magician-kings” or “priest-kings,” but we do see individual “tech giants” wielding economic and social power on a level equal to many national governments. Many technologies have proven to be extremely effective ways to control the physical world, and those who manage this power gain a social influence to match it.
The underbelly of this story — what I observe most closely from my vantage point in academia — is what I find most saddening. If science and technology have become the locus of credibility and social power, what has been eclipsed is the personal element. Frazer’s account, while imperfectly accounting for religious impulses and the work of God, presents a heartbreakingly plausible account of why human personhood — along with the humanities — are less interesting as religion wanes in its public explanatory power.
When God — who is person — is thought to be at the heart of the cosmos, it is not only priests who may be respected and seen as socially important; it is also any endeavor to understand, express, and cultivate the personhood of humans. The arts, literature, history, and other endeavors interested in the idiosyncrasies of human nature seem worth the effort, not just for a few individuals at leisure, but as a main concern for thousands.
But the very idea that a Person or persons are in the driver’s seat may become less convincing, in the way we imagine the cosmos or the way we experience daily life. As impersonal systems play increasing roles in information-gathering and decision-making, the personal element can be summed up as “human error.” As that process is underway, then of course the fields concerned with human nature — specifically, all the ways it is not predictable — are unseated, too.
My claim here is modest: because Frazer was right about the felt connection between human personhood and God’s personhood — and he was right that science and technology can sidestep both — it is simply better to be a human when a personal God is at the heart of the universe. Human lives are easier to defend. Human joys have cosmic significance. Human foibles are “a feature, not a bug.” Human creativity is more arresting. Human language can be savored. Human stories must be told.
Frazer is right, too, that we do not control the world by being pious. As Job and Ecclesiastes knew all along, there is no rule of the universe that righteous “input” produces a favorable “output.” In Matthew 5, Jesus similarly points out that God “sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.”
In making this observation, however, Jesus does not need to conclude that the universe is empty of God’s purposes; rather, he uses God’s non-discrimination to the very purpose of elevating persons in relationship. Those who want to be called God’s children — already a deeply intimate relationship — must imitate God. To imitate God’s indiscriminate grace means to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” It means to expand one’s humanity so far beyond ordinary capacity that it even humanizes one’s enemies. It means, even in the face of mistreatment, refusing to be flattened into the merely predictable.
If the point of Christianity is to explain and control things, I am afraid we will have to admit that we have been outdone: science seems to be uncovering the secrets of the universe, and technology is successfully exploiting them for human control. But as we bring more things under our mastery, as Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel once put it, the irony is that we find ourselves mastered by the things we have made. We risk losing touch with what made us human in the first place.
If our faith has more to do with knowing ourselves truly, in our glory and humility — if it is about having our lives woven into a grand story in which God is for us; a matter of coming face to face with the Person at the heart of it all; if it is a matter of seeing and honoring what is irreducible in people — then we can carry on with joy.
Abigail Woolley Cutter, Ph.D., is assistant professor of theology at King University in Bristol, Tennessee. She enjoys the music and many trails of Appalachia with her husband and two young children.
