I

What makes religion work?

This is a more complex question than it might first appear. A thoughtless answer is likely to give a knee-jerk response that equivocates on important distinctions and differences. Family resemblances, after all, do not make all our relatives the same relation. This will expand neither the questioner’s understanding nor our own. There are a number of assumptions and nuances to consider. Asking what makes religion work may be revelatory, as it may illuminate the ideology motivating the questioner; but just as importantly, it may expose our own faulty presumptions. We ourselves may be captive to an ideology that exploits our religious impulse.

Someone asking this question may do so innocently, out of curiosity. It may also be a maneuver to draw you into a rhetorical pincer movement. Either way, an answer that is neither thoughtful nor critical will confirm the questioner’s suspicions that religion is something easily comprehensible (and comprehensible, moreover, in terms of what makes a desired outcome come about). And so we must ask another question of our own: what is meant by “religion”? 

The word “religion” itself is sourced from the classical Latin religio with its sense of “reverence,” and connotations of obligation and binding. Conceptually this aligns with prohibitions and obligations that cluster around “spiritual” phenomena, as opposed to material or social matters. According to Jason Ānanda Josephson, however, the modern presupposition that religion “represents an independent domain that can be distinguished from other domains, such as politics, science, economics, and philosophy,” confuses things: contemporary understandings of religion “would be unrecognizable even to early-modern Europeans.”¹

Karl Barth, in §17 of his Church Dogmatics, famously described religion as the efforts of human beings to grasp and comprehend God rather than allowing themselves to be so grasped by him.² It is a noble failure born out of fallen self-will, such that even its best attempt to respond to God is a defeat. Barth’s description has much to commend it. He supplies us with an answer that responds from the fullness of the future in Christ and tracks that answer’s course backwards into the present; and yet, this doesn’t sufficiently attend to the day-to-day practices and structures which we would recognize as “religion.”

What if a Christocentric answer to the meaning of religion is supplemented with a more immanent approach that examines what religion looks like in human culture? Wolfhart Pannenberg, in his Systematic Theology, observed that religious studies, rooted as they are in abstract accounts of humanity, unmoored from revelation, described well enough the effects of religions, but do not and cannot arrive at their cause.³ That is, they do not adequately explore the often frightening strangeness of the world that seems to impose itself upon human beings. In disinterestedly describing the effects of rituals and beliefs upon individuals and communities they preclude this traffic between things non-human and human. And though this numinous experience is not necessarily knowledge of God, it is nevertheless a perception that grasps (however murkily) the openness of human beings to something Other. This is another pole to hold opposite to Barth’s, together forming a net with which to critically sift those phenomena we classify as “religious.”

But there is still a danger here of reducing religion to a crude lowest common denominator on the basis of purely formal similarities. Different traditions hold moral prohibitions, for instance, but does that mean that all envision or love the same good? Many have procedures for casting out evil spirits, but what power do they draw upon to do so, and what conferred that power? What is the problem and what is the solution offered for it in any given religion? These particularities must not be flattened while searching out unifying features.

Philosopher of religion Keith Yandell proposes that religion is any “conceptual system that provides an interpretation of the world and the place of human beings in it, bases an account of how life should be lived given that interpretation, and expresses this interpretation and lifestyle in a set of rituals, institutions, and practices.”⁴ This definition preserves the diversity of many religions while demonstrating what they have in common. Moreover, it shows how pervasive religion truly is: many who would self-describe as irreligious still have a “lifestyle”: they interpret the world, and live out that interpretation through habitual practices. 

Having examined the meaning of the word “religion” in the question, “What makes religion work?” it’s now time to ask: What do we mean by “work”? Is what religion accomplishes under examination? Or how religion is practiced? Or how its ends are reached? These questions are all related to one another but are distinct. Providing a straightforward answer to what makes religion work could give the impression that religion in its essence is about obtaining certain results, and that in the absence of those results, religion has not “worked.”

We should acknowledge that many manifestations of religion are indeed centered on proper performance and the achievement of certain outcomes. A fertility ritual or a sacrifice for safe travel over sea, for instance, is premised on such an arrangement of input and output. Moralistic Therapeutic Deism similarly envisions an exchange and a guarantee where “doing good” brings about my happiness and security. A substantially Christian account, however, will rightly demur that the grace made concrete in Jesus Christ annuls such a pathway between performance and outcome; as such, Christianity “works” on the basis of what Jesus Christ has done and is presently doing. 

Of course, there is another sense of “work” that Christians must be able to answer. The question, “What makes religion work?” might not be innocently asked: it may be a polemical trap. What we do not ask often enough is, “Who is it that benefits from this?” In a Christian account, the sinner reconciled to God benefits from the religion named by Jesus Christ. But there are other benefits, some of which are materially unrelated in any substantial way to Jesus Christ, that are counter to who he is and what he is for: wealth, prestige, the cult of personality, sexual conquests, and domination over others.

After all, is there really no way in which Christian institutions have served the powered interests of Christians over the course of history? It would be absurd to claim that sinful men and women have never utilized Christianity as a means to an end that had nothing to do with the glory of God and the good of human beings. One need only contemplate the slew of sexual abuse cases in evangelical and Roman Catholic settings in recent years to appreciate how power structures that ostensibly serve Christ can aid and abet the will to power.

The only way out of this trap is to acknowledge the truth: Christians have, unsurprisingly, done exactly as other religious practitioners have, wielding the apparatus of religion to secure power over others. But it is excruciatingly difficult for many Christians to admit this. Such acknowledgment, they fear, would risk calling into question the confession of Jesus Christ as Lord. In truth, we know that these things happen, even if we repress it, but we cannot abide saying the quiet part out loud. Repression of the truth, however, corrupts the practice we would commend to the world.

Acknowledging the way many Christians “use” Christianity does not entail that the faith, at bottom, is nothing more than a machine we operate to tame and exploit transcendent reality. On the contrary, to deny this abuse is to remain trapped in the futile defensive postures that inhibit faithful apostolic presence in the world. Denial of this possibility is, ironically, a function of the self-willing Barth identifies as “religion.”

What makes religion work, then? Ultimately, it depends on which religion is under examination.

II

In the recent film Apostle (2018), the viewer is swept into an adventure of dark intrigue that often carries significant overtones of 1973’s The Wicker Man. Here, as in that classic, a kidnapping compels a man to investigate the inner workings of an island cult. That man, Thomas Richardson (Dan Stevens), is intimated to be a drifter, returning out of self-exile at the behest of his withdrawn and uncommunicative father. An intermediary has summoned Thomas to commission him to rescue his sister Jennifer (Elen Rhys) from the remote Welsh island of Erisden.

Here, Prophet Malcolm (Michael Sheen) leads a utopian community centered on the worship of “Her,” a female entity who seems to encapsulate the life of the island itself. Malcolm washed ashore on Erisden several years prior with two other escaped convicts, Quinn (Mark Lewis Jones) and Frank (Paul Higgins), who the film hints were imprisoned for their anti-crown radicalism, together discovering Her. Her Otherness is communicated through the distance of naming her with a pronoun rather than a personal name. An arrangement was made in which She became the patron of the fledgling community, promising prosperity in return for worship. Malcolm claims to speak Her words but it’s difficult to parse out how much of his anti-imperial rhetoric comes from Her, is his own, or is a conflation of the two.

There is a problem with the romantic alternative Erisden presents to the world, however: the fertility She had once seemed to guarantee has been failing. Bloodletting and animal sacrifice have not been enough to satiate Her and the island does not have resources enough to continue the sacrifice economy. Moreover, something is defiling the island itself: creatures there are dying from terrible birth defects. Jennifer was therefore kidnapped to provide a ransom that will subsidize food for the island’s inhabitants. Besides the failure of the cult’s goddess to reciprocate, this kidnapping scheme speaks to the corruption of the values Malcolm preaches to his followers, values he insists separates Erisden from the decadent liberalism of the British Empire. How could they have sunk so low?

As in so many similar historical instances, the leadership of Erisden are panicking due to the threat the island’s fertility crisis presents to the status quo. They fear the social cohesion their alternative religion had fostered will dissolve when the islanders discover that their observance is not “working.” Malcolm wants to keep the crisis hidden from the community, but another of the leaders feels something more must be done.

Quinn, after seizing power late in the film, reveals the depth of his brute pragmatism to Jennifer and Andrea, Malcolm’s daughter. He was the one who captured Her and put her to proper use as the fuel for the island’s productivity. “She’s no god,” he barks. “She’s just a machine. You feed her, and she delivers.” Malcolm, he contends, “fell victim to faith,” and introduced stopgap measures, such as collecting blood from every cultist, instead of doing “what needed to be done”: feeding Her with human flesh. For Quinn, the outcome is what truly matters, and the community’s leadership should fall to whoever has the will to guarantee that outcome. This is the same civic religion Malcolm had repudiated in the past but under a different guise. Quinn is aware of it and embraces it, but Malcolm is in denial. The will to power is Quinn’s religious orientation.

This emerges after the revelation of Thomas’s past, a past which could not contrast more starkly with the Erisden regime. In a moment after he has come face to face with Her, Thomas informs Andrea that her father and the island’s leaders have kidnapped Jennifer and want Thomas dead. Andrea resists this, and Thomas cautions her that “the promise of the divine is but an illusion.” Andrea sees the scars on Thomas’s back and asks how he received them. She is stunned to learn that Thomas had served as a missionary in China during the Boxer Rebellion and the film’s patient guarding of its secrets renders her surprise as our own.

Prior to this, the viewer is left to assume Thomas has been a prodigal son squandering his life on trivialities. This of course means that Thomas’s father never disapproved of his profligate living as he never indulged in any such thing: religion drove a wedge between Thomas and his father. Thomas’s father recognizes no advantage coming from Thomas’s religion, but cost-benefit analysis compels him to call on Thomas’s help when religion threatens his daughter. To him, Thomas’s Christian faith and the pagan practices of Erisden alike disrupt the civil religion that has provided him with position and privilege.

The distance between father and son began before Thomas ever sought his self-effacement following the eradication of his mission church and his branding by Boxer insurgents. And the distance obviously never narrowed when Thomas most needed the love of his family to help him in his psychological and spiritual collapse. Thomas’s sense of having been abandoned is all but complete: his screaming out for God to arrive on the scene and save his parishioners is met with silence; no communication comes from his father whatsoever until his father’s necessity demands it. Is there no one who is for Thomas?

Thomas seems to have harbored the belief that religion guaranteed deliverance out of the predicaments of being alive. It seems as though Thomas’s zeal was never examined by his mentors: was he ever reminded that martyrdom is a real possibility in the course of serving God? He appears to expect God to vengefully arrive on the scene as his parishioners are being executed en masse and then he abandons his faith when God fails to arrive. Had no one imparted to Thomas that suffering after the pattern of Jesus Christ is the part and parcel of true religion? But if this indicates a certain naiveté to Thomas’s prior faith, it certainly pronounces as vain the buoyant idealism of Erisden’s cult. Here, they claim, all is well; all defilement can be left behind. The human can be abstracted from the sin and entropy of the world and Paradise regained.

But Thomas knows these are empty promises. Undoubtedly his sense of abandonment intensifies his drive to rescue his beloved sister—he will not have her undergo what he has already endured. “This world has taken so much from me,” he tells her, “but in all my pain, even in my darkest days, I swore it would never take you.” In her letter to their father Jennifer had written that she feared “our Lord no longer hears my prayer. Yet still I pray for your presence; for my savior.” The one who has been broken is the one who brings the presence of the Lord, who brings salvation to Erisden.

Thomas ultimately lives up to his apostolic namesake, as it requires nothing less than witnessing the reality of the island’s goddess and the evil perpetrated by those who exploit her powers to be awakened to the reality of the faith he had formerly professed. Seeing, he believes. As one villager is fleeing the chaos of the cult’s unraveling, she tells Thomas, “God be with you.” In full earnestness, Thomas responds, “And also with you.” In the inversion of that liturgical form—a layperson declaring, “God be with you” to the failed priest—an invitation is extended to Thomas: materially, he is already on the trajectory of reconciliation with his past and with his faith, but now he is formally reincorporated into the apostolic faith. In the same way that Jesus’s question to Peter, “Do you love me?” negates Peter’s denials and restores him to his calling (“Feed my sheep”), this woman’s extension of the eucharistic preface to the one who should preside at the liturgy of the table restores him as a servant of the Lord.

But even here, restoration does not guarantee a straightforward, happy resolution. In what should be Thomas’s final moments, he sees Andrea’s and Jennifer’s boat escaping the island and slumps over, dying, yet satisfied he has rescued his sister. But something strange happens: he notices that the blood flowing from his wounds is being soaked up in the soil beneath him and that vegetation is blooming around him. The land is healing itself and absorbing Thomas in the process, cocooning him in tendrils and leaves and flowers. Thomas unmistakably resembles Her, the island’s goddess who had also been so cocooned.

The machinery of the island’s religion is inscribed within the soil and flora of the island, and claims his body for itself. The viewer is left wondering if She ever was, in fact, a goddess, and not simply some unwitting human vessel who had been claimed by the island in a similar manner. Perhaps religion is first and foremost how we name those schemes that envelop us and drive our desires towards outcomes we could not otherwise have foreseen. Perhaps this is why the island is named Erisden, which is so nearly an anagram of “desire,” which is fitting as it so nearly approximates what its residents think they want.

In that case, there is nothing all that remarkable about the fact that the island came in time to replicate the politics of the mainland Malcolm so vociferously denounced in his preaching. This simply is the course things follow when the non-human gives itself as a manipulable means to assert oneself over others. This is the bait the powers and elemental forces of the world offer to lure us into entrapment. In a way, it does not matter whether the non-human is an entity like Baal or Artemis or YHWH or an abstract notion such as capital or Romanitas: the course that exploitation of these things takes follows a consistent downward slope in terms of human dignity and moral rectitude.

Given this, perhaps religion names the parasitic relationship with wild, inhuman forces which humans are drawn into as a consequence of simply sharing a world with them. In the final scene of Apostle, Thomas does not seek to be subsumed within the island: his body is simply hijacked by the powers that indwell Erisden. Similarly, it is unlikely that our remote ancestors sought out entities to whom they could offer worship; rather, they found themselves visited by, and brought into numinous contact with, powers which before that moment they had never named nor scarcely imagined as possible. Contact and overtures were made with our ancestors and expectations were placed upon them in return. Some, of course, recognized in these patterns of exchange and allocations of power the means to consolidate positions of privilege over their peers.

These instantiations of religion are simple enough for Christians to denounce. But even the sincerest among us can inadvertently fuel the machinery of religion when we lose sight of the centrality of suffering, of dispossession, of weakness, and of mercy, to the Kingdom vision of Jesus Christ. Person and mission are one in the living Word, who is not only Creator, not only Redeemer, but also archetypal embodiment of the being and end of creaturely existence. The devotion to the Father Jesus exemplified is the pattern of authentic religion. Life is in him, and that life is light (John 1:4); not the cold, sterile light or the humming, alternating current of a machine, but the activity and thought and feeling of a living thing. This life does not coerce: it divests itself of the need to control.

The will to power can find itself reacting to or funded by the frightening things with which we share the world, the things from which the machine of religion draws its impetus. It is a fact of human nature that much of the time, in response to provocation and threat, we can do little but react. We all have contributed, inadvertently or not, by what we have done and by what we have left undone, to the destructive power of machine-religion.

But these deformations will never be undone by simply resisting with greater force, as this simply responds on their own terms. The violence and coercion that characterize so much of our world’s history stem from these continual, predictable seizures after exploitative power and from their being fought against, displaced, and ultimately reinscribed much of the time by the victor. The Reich is defeated but subjected to such humiliating, dehumanizing terms of surrender that the Third Reich becomes all but inevitable. There may be a time where the sword is the only way to deliver a people out of slavery, but the sword will never be sufficient to effect a new thing. The most new thing, that which is truly apostolic, is the Word making all things new.

III

What, then, makes religion “work”? In many instances the causes are fear and force; much of the time, strong men play the part of racketeer and promise protection either from hostile powers within the world or guarantee protection due to their alliances with such powers. The humility that acknowledging such forces ought to evoke is routinely perverted into a demand for dehumanizing obedience to unscrupulous men who shore up their own power. Sadly, even decadent forms of Christianity can participate in this same type of thuggery while never acknowledging that the regimes they construct have nothing to do with the lordship of Jesus Christ. They know not what they do as the machinery of religion maintains incentives while repressing from consciousness their shift in allegiance.

The fear of chaos also fuels the machinery of religion. In the ancient world, a community living in fear of a monstrous force might offer sacrifices to appease it and ensure the community’s survival. Though this tribute seems to keep the monster at bay, the truth of the matter is that the external enemy has replicated itself within the community which has itself become monstrous. Whether in the form of Athenians offering up their virgins and young men to be devoured by the Minotaur, or of the Aztecs fueling Huitzilopochtli’s war against the darkness with blood and hearts, those who secure the détente become participants in the evil they aim to keep at bay. The “peace” that is secured through the sacrificial arrangement becomes synonymous with the transformation of that community from victims into villains. The fear that surrenders its moral commitments to create a state of exception—permitting any means necessary to exorcize an external evil—internalizes that evil and becomes the very thing of which it is afraid. 

Dmitri Karamazov famously voiced the fear that without God anything and everything would be permissible.⁵ Horrifyingly, when the object of faith is not the self-emptying God of the Gospel, the reverse is also true: whatever you need is permitted. This logic applies to the atrocities of the modern era, as each program of ethnic and political cleansing appealed to “their own Absolute (and to their privileged relationship to it) which permits them to do whatever they want (or consider necessary),” Slavoj Zizek has observed. An atheistic crusade to liquidate religious belief is a religious enterprise by virtue of its object of justification. Consider the consequences of Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 speech denouncing Stalin’s crimes when “many cadres committed suicide: they had not learned anything new during that speech, all the facts were more or less known to them, they had just been deprived of the historical legitimization of their crimes by the Communist historical Absolute.”⁶ Religion works by justifying the political expedient: apart from it we cannot live with ourselves.

In other instances, what makes religion work is the reinforcement provided by favorable outcomes: serenity, detachment from degrading pursuits, growth in virtue, and the promotion of love for others over love of self. There are, however, other types of reinforcement that persuade religious adherents that their belief system is good and properly functioning. In Apostle, Thomas undertakes his ministry in China confident the mission cannot fail, that the British Empire and even God will not allow any force to hinder it. As is so often the case, civil religion and revealed religion knotted together to sanction a form of life that served the interests of the civil religion more than the tenets of the revealed religion.

It is his suffering in Peking which enables him to lose everything to rescue his sister and dismantle the domination system ruling over Erisden. It is both the devastation of his congregation and his experience of apparent abandonment by God that unravels the triumphalistic version of faith he had formerly embraced, without which he could not confront the cult of Her. Liberating action and suffering do not inherently coincide, but they do unite in Christian witness when believing subjects participate in the redeeming suffering of Jesus Christ. Genuine witness is participation. George Hunsinger writes, “The special vocation of the Christian is to share in the living self-witness of the Crucified. This sharing results in a fellowship of action and a fellowship of suffering.”⁷

This, and only this, is what sets Christian faith potentially apart from religion as a purely immanent human phenomenon. Other systems of behavior will at times sound out consonant notes, and for this we can and should be grateful. And yet the drama of the Son’s mission into the far country to rescue and restore the ungrateful and undeserving is sui generis. There is something on offer here the singularity of which cannot be apprehended apart from its own particular form. Christians confess that this is how the world will be saved, but we must be vigilant to never allow this confession to become a weapon with which to crush anyone. Christians are not to attempt to save the world with it. For if we are not attentive to our propensity to undermine our best intentions and betray our God, we will slink back into patterns of the will to power and subvert what we profess to be true.

1.  Jason Ānanda Josephson, The Invention of Religion in Japan, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 17. ↩︎
2.  Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, Volume One, Part Two, trans. G.T. Thompson and Harold Knight (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956), 297-325. ↩︎
3.  Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, Volume One, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), 141-151. ↩︎
4.  Keith Yandell, Philosophy of Religion: A Contemporary Introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 16. ↩︎
5.  Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (San Francisco, CA: North Point Press, 1990), 589. ↩︎
6.  Slavoj Zizek and Boris Gunjevic, God in Pain: Inversions of Apocalypse (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2012), 44, 46. ↩︎
7.  George Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 183. ↩︎