Religion has been an integral part of human culture for millennia, but only in the last two centuries have some thinkers come to believe it can be explained through critical, scientific analysis. When and how did religion arise? What forces or motives have created it? Is it rational or emotional? Does it fill the needs of individuals or those of society? Why is religion such a universal and powerful presence in human life? These questions have attracted some of the foremost thinkers of the modern era--among them both Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx--and have elicited sharply differing verdicts on religion's place in human affairs.

In Seven Theories of Religion, Daniel L. Pals offers cogent introductions to seven "classic" explanations of religion, taking the reader methodically through the arguments presented by each thinker. After a close look at two pioneering Victorians, E.B. Tylor (the father of animistic theory) and James Frazer (author of The Golden Bough, the monumental study of primitive custom and belief), Pals explores the controversial "reductionist" approaches of Freud, Emile Durkheim, and Marx. Freud, for example, argued that religion is very similar to neurosis: just as neurotic people believe and do irrational things, so religious people also believe and do irrational things. Marx, the guiding spirit of communism, is shown to have presented not so much a theory of religion as a total system of thought that itself resembles a religion. The discussion then turns to the work of Mircea Eliade, the influential Romanian-American scholar who as reductionism's most outspoken opponent insisted that religious behavior and ideas can be rightly understood only when seen from the standpoint of the believer. Moving beyond the debate over reductionism, Pals concludes with two of the twentieth century's most celebrated anthropologists, E.E. Evans-Pritchard and Clifford Geertz, whose extensive fieldwork has led to an appreciation of religion's distinctively human dimension--the ideas, attitudes, and purposes that inspire it. Throughout the discussion, each theory is presented in a common format that offers not only biographical background and exposition of its main ideas, but also comparative analysis and critical assessment.

The thinkers who appear in these pages deserve wide attention, explains Pals, because the influence of their ideas and interpretations has been felt far beyond the sphere of religion, affecting our literature, philosophy, history, politics, art, psychology, and, indeed, almost every realm of modern thought. Easily accessible to students and general readers, Seven Theories of Religion is an enlightening treatment of this much-debated and fascinating subject.

The Future of an Illusion

Totem and Taboo met with approval from Freud's associates in psychoanalysis--and with outrage from just about everyone else. Christian critics found the book particularly insulting. For his part, Freud ignored most of the debate and turned to other interests. Not until fourteen years later did he return to the subject of religion in The Future of an Illusion (1927), a book he chose to describe as a continuation of the earlier study. In it he notes that while Totem and Taboo looks backward into the prehistoric past, The Future of an Illusion considers religion in the present and looks ahead. It centers not on an event hidden in prehistoric times but on the "manifest motives" of religion in all places and times. In addition, the second book puts a focus less on rituals than on ideas and beliefs--particularly belief in God.
���� Freud begins The Future of an Illusion with certain facts recognized by almost everyone. Human life has arisen, or evolved, out of the natural world, an arena that is not necessarily friendly to our enterprises. Though it has produced our species, nature constantly threatens also to destroy us, whether through predators, disasters, disease, or physical decline. For protection, therefore, we have from the first joined into clans and communities, thereby creating what we call civilization. Through it we gain security, but at a price. As the events recounted in Totem and Taboo show us, society can survive only if we bend our personal desires to its rules and restraints. We cannot just kill when anger seizes us, take what we do not own, or satisfy sexual desires as we want. We must restrain our instincts, compensating ourselves (though never enough) with other satisfactions we can hope to find in, say, the joys of art and leisure or the ties of family, community, and nation. Yet even with these sacrifices and comforts, civilization cannot fully protect us. In the face of disease and death, we are all ultimately helpless. In the battle between nature and culture, nature's laws of decay and death will always finally win.
���� Freud next observes that none of us finds this unhappy truth easy to accept; it runs counter to all we treasure most. We would rather face things as we did in the sunnier days of our childhood. Then there was always a father to reassure us against the dangers of the storm and the darkness of the night. Then there was always a voice of strength to say that all would be well in the end. As adults, in fact, we all continue to crave that childhood security, though in reality we can no longer have it. Or can we? The voice of religion, says Freud, makes us think that indeed we can. Following the childhood pattern, religious belief projects onto the external world a God, who through his power dispels the terrors of nature, gives us comfort in the face of death, and rewards us for accepting the moral restrictions imposed by civilization. Religious belief claims that "over each one of us there watches a benevolent providence which . . . will not suffer us to become a plaything of the overmighty and pitiless forces of nature." In the eyes of such faith, even death loses its sting, for we can be certain that our immortal spirits will one day be released from our bodies and live on with God. In denying our desires, therefore, we can be sure we are not just helping society; we are obeying the eternal laws of a just and righteous Lord.
���� The best word we can use to describe such beliefs, Freud contends, is "illusion." By this he means something quite specific. An illusion for him is a belief whose main characteristic is that we very much want it to be true. My belief that I am destined for greatness would be a case in point. It could turn out someday to be true, but that is not why I hold it. I hold it because I strongly wish it to be true. An illusion is not the same as a delusion, which is something I may also want to be true but which everyone else knows is not, and perhaps never could be so. If I were to claim that I will one day be 8 feet tall (which, being now fully grown, I most certainly will not), I� would be holding to a delusion. Rather shrewdly, Freud claims that he is�nowhere calling belief in God as Father a delusion; in fact, he insists otherwise: "To assess the truth-value of religious doctrines does not lie within the� scope of the present enquiry. It is enough for us that we have recognized� them as being, in their psychological nature, illusions."
����� Religious teachings, therefore, are not truths revealed by God, nor are� they logical conclusions based on scientifically confirmed evidence. They� are, on the contrary, ideas whose main feature is that we dearly want them� to be true. They are "fulfillments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent� wishes of mankind. The secret of their strength lies in the strength of those� wishes."
����� We should notice here that, though it may be helpful for some, for Freud� himself this distinction between "illusion" and "delusion" comes to very� little. In his view, it hardly makes a difference which term we use, because� even if they cannot be absolutely proved to be such, religious beliefs are in� the end delusions; they are teachings we have no right to believe because� they cannot pass the test of the scientific method, which is the only way we� have of reliably telling us what is true and what is not. It is the habit of� believers to draw on nothing more than personal feelings and intuitions, and� these are notorious for being often mistaken. Hence, we ought never to put� our trust in religion, even if its teachings can be shown to have provided� certain services for humanity in the past. Freud concedes that, at times,� religious beliefs may have been of some small assistance in the growth of� civilization. Certainly the early totem made a contribution through its role� in the denunciation of murder and incest, and later religion did its part when� these and similar crimes were discouraged by presenting them as offenses� deserving of punishment in Hell. But civilization is now mature and established. We would no more want to build today's society on such superstition� and repression than we would want to force grown men and women to obey� the rules of behavior we lay down for children.
����� Religious teachings should be seen in this same light--as beliefs and rules� suitable to the childhood of the human race. In the earlier history of humanity, "the times of its ignorance and intellectual weakness," religion was� inescapable, like an episode of neurosis that individuals pass through in their� childhood. However, when there is a failure to overcome the traumas and� repressions of earlier life and the neurosis persists into adulthood, then psychoanalysis knows that the personality is in disorder. The same is true for� the growth of civilization. Religion that persists into the present age of human history can only be a sign of illness; to begin to leave it behind is the� first signal of health. In Freud's words:

Religion would thus be the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity; like the obsessional neuroses of children, it arose out of the Oedipus Complex, out��� of the relation to the father. If this view is right, it is to be supposed that a tuming-away from religion is bound to occur with the fatal inevitability of a��� process of growth, and that we find ourselves at this very juncture in the middle of that phase of development.

Moses and Monotheism

Freud's interest in religion did not end with The Future of an Illusion, even though it is perhaps the most important statement of his views. At the very end of his career, while struggling with the cancer that eventually took his life and finding himself driven from Vienna by the Nazi takeover of Austria, he returned to the subject for one final effort--writing this time on Judaism, his own religious tradition. In a series of essays undertaken between 1934 and 1938, he focused his attention on the figure of Moses, examining his foundational role in Jewish life and thought. These essays were then brought together in a single volume and published in the year of his death under the title Moses and Monotheism.
����� As in Totem and Taboo, so in this quite unusual book, Freud puts forward a set of startling new claims about certain events in religious history--in particular Jewish history--and tries to show how the concepts and comparisons drawn from psychoanalysis can help to explain them. In the Bible, he observes, we learn that Moses is the great Hebrew prophet who inspired the people of Israel by his leadership and shaped their lives by giving them the law of God. True enough perhaps, but how do we know, Freud asks, that Moses was really a Hebrew? A close look at the texts gives reason to believe that he was actually an Egyptian prince, a ruler and follower of the radical Pharaoh Akhenaton, who tried to replace the many gods of ancient Egypt with a strict devotion to one and only one deity--the sun god Aten." Unlike the other cults, the worship of Aten employed neither images nor superstitious rituals; it stressed a purely spiritual god of love and goodness, who was also revered as the strong guardian of an eternal moral law. When Akhenaton died, his new religion failed in Egypt, but not entirely. One of those who kept it alive was this same man Moses, who adopted the Hebrew slaves as his people, united them behind the new faith, and with great courage led them out of their captivity. Initially those who followed Moses prospered under his leadership. Later on, however, buffeted by their misfortunes in the desert, Moses' chosen people rebelled against his leadership, renounced his god, and put him to death. His monotheistic religion was then overlaid by a new cult dedicated to a violent, volcano-deity named Yahweh, the god whom Israelites worshipped as they fought their bloody battles to win the Land of Promise. Later, in writing their scriptures, Jewish scribes attached the name of Moses also to the founder of this second faith, but this sleight of hand could not disguise the differences between the new religion and the earlier monotheism of the original Moses, their first and true spiritual leader. The new faith replaced the pure spirituality and morals of the old with the rituals, superstitions, and bloody animal sacrifices we find in Israel during the age of the great Hebrew kings. Degraded as it appears to us, says Freud, the new religion managed almost completely to push out the old, leaving behind little more than a faint memory of the original Moses and his faith.
��� Yet that is not where the story ends. Centuries later in the life of the community, and against all probability, the people of Israel found themselves face to face with the great monotheistic prophets, men seized with the mission to recover and revive the old faith of the tribe. These prophets--Amos, Isaiah, and others--denounced the religion of sacrifices; they demanded worship of the one universal God announced by the first Moses, and they called again for obedience to his stem moral law. Their words thus marked a decisive turn that affected not just Jewish history but the entire world. For it was out of the soil of this revived Jewish monotheism that Christianity would one day rise to become a great world religion. From the time of the Hebrew prophets forward, faith in the awesome, righteous God of Moses took its place as the immovable center of both Jewish and Christian belief.
���� There is, of course, no question that this quite extraordinary retelling of Hebrew history as Freud sees it rests on a number of adventurous connections and eye-opening historical conjectures that would trouble both the historian and the biblical scholar. It is not easy to find in the Bible any clear proof that Moses was an Egyptian, that he was murdered, that two persons were given his name, or that the early Hebrews ever had two different religions. To Freud, however, all these problems are hardly a concern. Much more interesting to him is the mystery of how, over many centuries, a true monotheism was somehow born, apparently died, and then came back to life. How can it be, he asks, that the faith of the original Moses virtually disappeared from the life of his people, only to revive centuries later in dramatic fashion and win back the hearts and minds of the entire Jewish community? Theologians may be at a loss to answer such a question, but psychoanalysis certainly is not. Freud asks us to suppose once again that a parallel can be found between what happens psychologically to an individual person over the course of a life and what happens in history, over a much longer time, to an entire community of people like the Jews." And he restates his view that religion is best conceived along the lines of a neurosis Those premises in place, he proceeds to the following ingenious argument.
���� Psychoanalytic theory has clearly demonstrated that cases of personal neurosis follow a familiar pattern. They start, often in early childhood, with a traumatic, disturbing event that is pushed out of memory for a time. There follows a period of "latency," when nothing shows; all seems normal. Then at a later point--often at the onset of puberty or in early adulthood--the� irrational behavior which is the sign of neurosis suddenly makes its appearance. We find that there is a "return of the repressed." Now if these stages� are indeed identifiable, Freud suggests that we can compare them with the� sequences discovered in the history of Judaism. And as we do, he adds, let� us recall as well the points made in the earlier books about ambivalent emotions, tribal murder, and religion as childlike desire for the figure of a father.� Do they not fit with an almost uncanny accuracy? The message of monotheism spoke to the Jews' natural human longing for a divine father. The powerful personality of Moses, whom the people may even have identified with� his God, recalled the imposing figure of the first father in the primeval� horde. His death in a desert rebellion was more than a mere historical accident; it can be read as a reenactment of the primeval murder of the great� father, an event no less traumatic for the Jews than the first murder was for� the sons and brothers in the prehistoric human community. Fittingly, once� the murder had been committed, the community, in an act of collective� repression, sought to relieve its guilt by striving to erase the entire memory of Moses--both the monotheism and the murder--frorn community life,� thus allowing the crude Yahweh religion of the second Moses to take its place. For the true Mosaic religion, this was the period of its latency, a long� period when it lay submerged and almost forgotten in the communal Hebrew� mind. And yet the law of neurosis is clear: Whatever is repressed must� return. After centuries in eclipse, the pure and ancient creed of the founder� made its powerful return in the oracles of the prophets. Henceforth, pure� monotheism, the religion of loving devotion to the Creator and Lord of the� Covenant, became again the faith all Jews, who on those terms rightfully� and to the present day claim the honor of being his chosen people.
����� Significantly, Freud adds, even the role of Christianity as Judaism's successor comes into clearer focus once we read its history through the eyes of� psychoanalysis. It is clear from the discussion in Totem and Taboo that the� revolt in the primeval horde had a two-sided emotional outcome: love and� fear. Judaism recalls the urge to idealize the Father, to make him into a� loving God and repress the guilt left behind by his murder. Christianity feels� the same mix of affection and guilt but responds by declaring the need for�atonement. As framed by its chief thinker, the Jewish rabbi Paul, Christian�theology centers not on God the Father but on Christ the Son and his�death--in other words, on God who, in the form of the firstborn Son, goes�to his death to atone for the original sin committed by the first sons in the prehistoric horde.