In 1949, while an undergraduate at Yale, William F. Buckley Jr. took to the pages of the Yale Daily News to challenge a Sociology 101 professor’s demystifying approach to Christian ritual. As Sam Tanenhaus, whose biography of Buckley appeared earlier this month, explained to our Evan Goldstein in a recent interview, Buckley took particular exception to the professor’s insistence that “if you go to distant countries that seem ‘primitive’ you will find practices that, in the eyes of social scientists, make just as much sense as, say, the Catholic ritual of the Eucharist where people think they’re eating the flesh and drinking the blood of Christ.” Such relativism, Buckley wrote, has caused some “impressionable and malleable students” to “lose faith in God.”
By the time Buckley got to it, the scientific treatment of religious belief was already an old problem in Western scholarship, not just in the anthropological literature of the 19th and 20th centuries but in major texts of the European Enlightenment. In one of the most notorious entries in the 18th-century Encyclopédie, the one on “anthropophages” (man-eaters), a genetic link between primitive cannibalism and Christian ritual is proposed: “One notices, a long time after these centuries, among the most civilized nations, vestiges of this barbarity, to which it is probable that the origin of human sacrifices must be related. See Sacrifice. The pagans accused the first Christians of cannibalism. … See Eucharist, Communion, Altar, etc.”
The contest between science and faith would become a basic theme of 19th-century British anthropology. By 1861 Edward Burnett Tylor, a founding figure in the field, had abandoned religion entirely. As the historian Timothy Larsen puts it in The Slain God: Anthropologists and the Christian Faith (Oxford University Press, 2014), Tylor “could not find a way to think anthropologically and as a Christian at the same time.”
That incompatibility was baked into the discipline by its most influential early figures. For Tylor, modern European culture was pockmarked with primitive “survivals.” A “survival” was a practice or belief that, Tylor wrote, “had lasted on by mere conservatism into a new civilization, to which it is unsuited.” Belief in an immaterial soul was one such survival. By identifying these hangovers from a benighted past, the anthropologist might help to eradicate them. Anthropology was therefore a “reformer’s science,” one that would “expose the remains of crude old culture which has passed into harmful superstition, and to mark these out for destruction.”
Tylor’s great successor, James Frazer, would continue this program of estrangement across his enormous The Golden Bough by implying, without making explicit, “the resemblance of many of the savage customs and ideas to the fundamental doctrines of Christianity,” as he wrote to a publisher. “But I make no reference to this parallelism, leaving it to my readers to draw their own conclusions, one way or the other.” As Larsen observes, readers are much more likely to conclude one way than the other; the whole effect of Frazer’s work is “to make familiar religious practices that his reader had always accepted as understandable come to appear strange and savage.” As Frazer’s contemporary John Morley wrote, although Frazer has “been very careful to keep clear of any direct reference to the Christian mysteries … any reader with his eyes open will be startled — almost painfully startled — by seeing before him the origins of these sacred things laid bare.” (Over the years, Frazer would become more direct about the “parallelism” between primitive religion and Christianity.)
When Buckley’s professor told his Yale undergraduates that “a cleric today is the modern counterpart of the witch doctor,” or that “chaplains accompanying modern armies are comparable to witch doctors accompanying tribes,” he was continuing Tylor and Frazer’s tradition of anthropological skepticism, albeit with none of Frazer’s cautious circumspection. And as Buckley tells it, many students were indeed painfully startled — some into atheism.
In God and Man at Yale, Buckley attacks this kind of debunking on two grounds. First, he is frankly partial to Christianity and thinks that Yale has a duty to strengthen rather than weaken “the average student’s respect for Christianity.” The second ground is more interesting, and has parallels in the discipline of anthropology itself. Buckley suggests that anthropological demystification can obscure more than it reveals about what religion actually is. In support of this attack, he quotes Margaret Mead, who finds that the “anthropological handling of religious behavior” too often fails to show “the slightest feeling for religion.”
Some such critique had long shadowed the rationalist positivism of Tylor and Frazer and their descendants; it came to a head in the pioneering work of E.E. Evans-Pritchard, the preeminent post-war anthropologist of religion. “Almost all the leading anthropologists of my own generation,” Evans-Pritchard wrote, “would, I believe, hold that religious faith is a total illusion, a curious phenomenon soon to become extinct and to be explained in terms such as ‘compensation’ or ‘projection’ or by some sociologistic interpretation on the lines of maintenance of social solidarity.” Himself a Catholic convert, Evans-Pritchard disagreed with that secular consensus; accordingly, he grounded his classic study of Sudanese tribal religion not in the language of economics, psychology, or sociology but of theology.
While anthropologists like Tylor and Frazer tended to believe that similarities between “primitive” religions and Christianity undermined the authority of the latter, that had never been the only possible response. Pre-modern European scholars had quite other ways of dealing with the problem. They might posit that such analogies attest to a prisca sapientia — a hidden ancient wisdom — that could surface in non-Abrahamic religions. Or, in a stigmatizing vein, they might see indigenous religion as a “diabolical parody” of Christianity, or a degraded remnant of an anciently introduced and then corrupted Christianity — which is how some Spanish conquistadors made sense of Aztec religion in the 16th century.
For the hugely influential 20th-century anthropologist Victor Turner, who along with Mary Douglas was Evans-Pritchard’s successor in the anthropology of religion, the study of African tribal religion had the effect not of discrediting Christianity but of re-enchanting it, of making its claims seem serious again. While watching a Catholic Mass, Turner had a revelation: “I felt in the texture of [the priest’s] performance something of the same deep contact with the human condition tinged with transcendence that I had experienced in central Africa when I attended rituals presided over by dedicated ritual specialists.” Later, Turner would explain his conversion to Catholicism as a consequence of his fieldwork among the Ndembu:
I have not been immune to the symbolic powers I have invoked in field investigation. After many years as an agnostic and monistic materialist I learned from the Ndembu that ritual and its symbolism are not merely epiphenomena or disguises of deeper social and psychological processes, but have ontological value ... I became convinced that religion is not merely a toy of the race’s childhood, to be discarded at a nodal point of scientific development, but is really at the heart of the human matter.
“Religion,” Turner insisted, “is not determined by anything other than itself.” Against Freudian and Durkheimian reductions, all rooted in the assumption “that the souls and spirits and gods of religion have no reality,” Evans-Pritchard and his followers would insist that, in Mary Douglas’s paraphrase, “religion was to be given a place in its own right, not to be treated as an emanation of something else.” Religion refers to something meaningful in the world — and spiritual experience picks out something real in the world (just what that is, of course, is a thorny problem). Religion’s meaning cannot be reduced to its social function or to this or that process of sublimation.
The post-war anthropological insistence that religion cannot be explained away by other metadiscourses was influential. Contemporary anthropologists of religion like Talal Asad, himself a student of Evans-Pritchard’s (and, at 93, presumably his last living direct disciple), have taken the call seriously. There are many things about today’s academy that Buckley would presumably dislike, but it’s at least possible he would find its attitude toward religion less objectionable than in his own day.
Check out Timothy Larsen’s The Slain God: Anthropologists and the Christian Faith.
