Review
Title: Why We Need Religion
Author: Stephen T. Asma
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Genre: Devotional/Religious
Year Published: 2018
Number of Pages: 214
Binding: Paper
ISBN 978-0-19-046967-2
Price: $29.95
Reviewed by Douglas F. Christensen for the Association for Mormon Letters
Stephen T. Asma is not an apologist for a particular religious sect or for transcendent religious faith. He clearly writes from a dispassionate, philosophical, academic perspective. And he begins his book, Why We Need Religion, with sensitivity about widespread damage invoked by religious people, be they murdering zealots or child molesters. At the same time, his book pushes back against a growing tradition of strident atheism to make room for healthy religious practice, and he believes that there is abundant healthy religious practice to observe, arguing that “the positive dimensions outweigh the negative. . . that traditional religion recruit and channels the mammalian emotions of fear and rage adaptively in premodern small group collectives” (4). Asma’s analysis advocates the tradition of William James’ “’middle way’ between the excesses of both secularism and theism” (6). Readers with extreme or literalist views, whether secular or theological, will probably be frustrated with Asma because he says yes and no to religion and secularism in equal measure.
His first chapter highlights a tour through the 30 million dollar Creation Museum in Kentucky, wherein the origin of man gets explained through the prism of Biblical literalism. The museum presents skepticism toward things like carbon dating, but faith in things like an actual ark and worldwide flood. The presentation of facts leans upon “an ‘empiricism’ that gives [participants] just enough skepticism to doubt the secular culture they’re immersed in, but not enough to doubt their own Biblical culture” (17). Asma emphasizes the linguistic trick believers must play on themselves in order to suspend disbelief in the face of intellectual conflicts. He shows how easy it can be for people on any side of the conversation to experience the Creation Museum with confirmation of what they already believe since they “are already bound up in a messy amalgam of mutually reinforcing assumptions, values, articles of faith, emotions and so on” (27). One might see Asma’s book from a similar view. While the skeptical reader will likely see the would-be benefits of faith as ill-gotten gains for people who begin from a false premise, literal believers will find confirmation about their assumed true convictions about the nature of God. Nevertheless, Asma finds lots of benefits for living a religious life.
The remaining chapters outline in detail some of the profound benefits that flow from the religious life: how religion helps people deal with sorrow and death; how to manage emotional experience; how to find forgiveness in a cold, brutish world; how to cultivate mental training that results in peace, resilience, and sacrifice; how to experience lasting ecstasy, joy, and play; and finally Asma examines the value of religion in relation to fear and rage. The combination of the author’s probing questions accumulates toward an admirable thesis that compliments religious believers and invites secular humanists to reconsider their own hasty generalizations, or worse, their caustic renunciations of the life of faith. At the same time, Asma’s biographical transparency about his own ambivalence to faith creates an underlying crisis of credibility. This crisis is not ad hominem, that is, I am not questioning Asma’s scholarship or the viability of his ideas—this is an engaging and accessible book; the crisis of contradiction lies at the door of a premise that says we should take religion seriously, but never literally. Religious believers choose (or stay with) their faith tradition for many complicated reasons, but among them must be some sincere belief that the doctrines they accept are the best ones available. I agree with Asma’s conclusions about the benefits of religious faith and a religious lifestyle, but if his own views, however neutral, get taken to their logical conclusion, how long can a religious ideology last without sincere believers contributing their offerings and filling the pews, populations of conflicted, nuanced believers around the edges of congregations notwithstanding?
Still, there is another kind of credibility at work here, one that acknowledges the persuasive reasons for religious doubt, but defends faith and what Asma consistently calls “magical thinking” anyway. In the case of grief and loss Asma compares religion’s role to that of friendship and love. “No one is condemning friendship because of its pain-killing, pleasure-producing aspects” (42). He seems to be asking why we hold religion up to a zero-sum standard. He claims that if we can stop doing so, we might find a way to leverage the blessings of religion and faith in times of trouble. Asma compares the Judeo-Christian unrequited yearning that one feels in the face of loss to the Buddhist commitment to letting go of attachments in the world. But even in the case of Buddhist believers, people are inclined toward attachment, especially when those ties get severed by death. Accordingly, neither the state, nor a postmodern suspicion will provide adequate resolution or comfort for death, sorrow, and emotional management. So Asma’s belief in the work that religion does in troubled times comes as a profound and welcomed option.
Subsequently, his chapter on forgiveness sees religion bridging the gap between our primal self and the higher emotions that he calls tertiary emotions. He argues that “religion acts as a management system on our emotional lives—it is a far reaching cultural regulation of our native affective instincts” (75). Our emotional sensibility translates the effects of justice and mercy as we move back and forth between our choices and their consequences. Forgiveness seems to be the mechanism that helps us locate mercy in the face of unsympathetic worldly justice. Asma revisits the story of the Prodigal Son from the Gospel of Luke to amplify a message about the difference between good religion and bad. Bad religion always exacts justice and feels sorry for itself, like the older brother, when things do not seem fair. Good religion welcomes the broken, the stranger, the outcast, like the father celebrating the indigent son. As Asma puts it: “Justice means that you get what you deserve and forgiveness grants you more than you deserve. Forgiveness can be a social strategy that folds higher degrees of adaptation into reciprocal altruism. I give so that you will give, and eventually I forgive so that you will forgive” (78). Asma is not arguing that forgiveness is always best, but rather that religion sponsors an inclination toward forgiveness. It places forgiveness on the table, not just as a live option, but as a holy obligation.
Chapter 4 focuses on prayer as a source of quieting the mind and what he calls resilience training. Those using prayer to communicate with the divine also inadvertently participate in the kind of rumination and resilience training that Asma values, while secular people also benefit from a practice of meditation without feeling the need to direct their intention toward deity. As the oldest religious practice, and regardless of how deferential, prayer and meditation bring the self into an awareness of its own smallness relative to the expanse of other selves, and space, and time. Asma reviews the value of prayer practice across a variety of religions to show its impact on a life consumed by noise and distraction. He describes it as emotional management that helps people see the world, and themselves in the world, differently than before, but even more important, he sees how prayer and meditation help people learn to be present and to appreciate the presentness of the present moment.
Asma’s final chapter examines the value of fear and anger. For religion, fear works in negative and positive directions. Religion mitigates fear about the after-life while also increasing fear and anxiety about one’s salvation-status. Asma leans upon Terror management theory to try to understand how religion works as a form of terror management. For example, if terminally ill patients “have a religious orientation that provides order, existential meaning and recognition of one’s self worth, or self-esteem in the broader cosmic context, then those patients attain ‘religious comfort’ amidst physical suffering . . . they are also less likely to succumb to depression at the end of life” (168). Religion also calms anxieties in the face of natural disaster as well as unexpected personal tragedy, though in every case victims of tragedy might arouse further fear for those left behind if their own spiritual status is held in question according to God’s laws.
Asma spends the latter half of this chapter thinking about ways that fear gives way to religious anger and aggression. He reminds us that there is no shortage of examples of religious hostility. When righteous indignation turns to rage however, all objects of that rage are left to fear for their own safety and sanity. “Rage can rescue the depressed, and motivate the righteous to fight for justice, but it can also get tangled up in related antisocial emotions like resentment. Resentment is a hunger for revenge, fed by the feeling of powerlessness” (189). Asma goes on to show the ways that this resentment can find its way into larger stories of cultural or tribal resentment that can metastasize into full blown devastation. He wades through some of the reciprocating challenges between different religious groups, finally trying to understand the importance of Islam and the challenge that its small, but very visible, radicalized population poses to safety, peace, and perhaps most importantly, to the non-radicalized public’s penchant for prejudice and its aspiration toward peace and justice.
In his epilogue, Asma reiterates his argument that religion plays a vital role in helping humanity regulate emotion, but he also knows how much religion needs to change and improve. He makes an appeal for “practical reason” as the best way forward. This means that religious groups need to be self-aware and self-critical. The less reflexive the faith, the more harm will follow. He writes that we “might be inclined to remove the supernatural magic of religion and arrive at an enlightened Deism, on the grounds that it is more reasonable and consistent with science. If you can attain this level of wisdom, then no one will be happier than I, but do not mistake it for religious progress . . . My point in this discussion is to show that even the most supernatural religious beliefs can coexist with and even underscore the goals of tolerant humanism. Principles such as ‘do no harm’ and ‘increase compassion’ . . . form a kind of virtue canopy over all manner of metaphysical and supernatural beliefs” (210-211). Asma’s work on this bridge between humanism’s practical rationality and religion’s transcendencies asks important questions and casts vital light on the conversation of humankind. He invites his readers to participate in the conversation using principles of virtue and compassion as a guide. He believes we can take our cues from secular humanists and religious people and that neither need be wished away in our aspiration toward the common good.