In large part, the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century was an attempt to roll back the influence of religion, to lift what its leaders regarded as the scourge of religion from the necks of mankind. They looked back to the Greek and Roman thinkers whose rationality had far outdistanced religion. Religion was for these ancients an adornment or decoration that played little part in the real business of humanity. Enlightenment thinkers looked forward with anticipation and confidence to a rational world founded on the principles of natural science that were being developed rapidly in their lifetimes.

In spite of the early inroads of romanticism, in the nineteenth century their dream of a scientific, rational world seemed destined to be fulfilled. Yet in the early twentieth century the progress of rationality broke down under the blows of events they could not have foreseen. In Europe, biological and historical and economic "sciences" spawned new "religions" that seemed to fill in the gaps in popular consciousness that had been left by the waning of the traditional religions. A deep human thirst that rationality was not able to quench had not been anticipated by the Enlightenment, although the terrors of the French Revolution that brought the eighteenth century to an end should have warned them.

As science progressed into and through the twentieth century, it became increasingly compartmentalized. The pace of its development accelerated, but for most people it did not offer a coherent outline of a new way to understand or relate to the world. Indeed, in America and much of the less developed world the life-defining beliefs of the majority remained the same or became again those of traditional and reenergized religion. Within well-established religions, such as Christianity, the more primitive and simplistic sects tended to prosper at the expense of those that had participated to a greater extent in the Enlightenment world. (In our comparative analysis we will look into the different directions that religious belief took in America and Europe: the Enlightenment expectations for a steady decline in religion, in spite of the buffeting of events in the early twentieth century, are still alive and thriving in Europe; they are not in the United States.)

But when we say "religion", what do we mean? Another way to put this is "What is the key ingredient of 'religion' that separates those who support it from those who oppose it?" Perhaps the best current analyst in this area (Dennett discussed below) believes that we are dealing with a religion when people attempt to communicate in its terms with other, unseen beings, and believe that they can influence events in this manner. This seems to me a useful simplification. Many students have tried to distinguish religion from "magic", a key element of many primitive belief systems. But it seems to me that prayer in the context of a major world religion and magic in that of a primitive are both attempts at communication with the unseen. Whether the communication is coercive or pleading, or whether it is for material gain or world peace is important, but these vanities of prayer or magic do not obscure their commonalities. Most institutionalized religions depend on intermediaries, on community "practitioners of communication" rather than, or in addition to, direct communications between an individual and unseen powers.

There is, however, another key aspect of most religions that is not addressed by this definition, an aspect that the original enlightenment thinkers were particularly concerned with. This is reliance on unchanging, sacred texts that cannot be questioned. These may simply be ancient lore, or they may be said to have been communicated to humanity by one or another god. In some cases, such as the Christian Bible, a variety of originally secular texts (written traditions, stories, letters etc.) have through later authorization or sacralization come to be treated as "the word of God". In this case, God is said to have worked through ordinary human beings to create texts valid for all time. These holy constitutions are analogous to secular constitutions without mechanisms for amendment. They are, of course, amended in fact. But unlike secular constitutions, they cannot be amended by popular vote. Religious institutions generally claim a monopoly on amendment processes, whether we understand amendment to be "interpretation" or actual change in a text (extremely rare).

These, then, are the aspects of religion that are key to this discussion. The study of religion leads to much more complicated questions of belief. We will undertake a simple analysis of religious belief below. We will see that it is a kind of attenuated science. But the particulars of belief are not essential to the argument here.

Why religion? The history of religion is remarkably similar throughout the world. The earliest records we have of ancient peoples from the historical record or from information gathered by anthropologists about less developed peoples existing up to very recently reveal a primeval world in which fear and ignorance were organized into systems of religious belief. People have always wanted explanations of what went on around them, answers to questions such as how the world came to be, or how and why all beings aged and died. They wanted to know why there was plenty some years, while in others people starved to death. They wanted to know where disease came from, or how they could avoid the many apparently inexplicable accidents or natural disasters that plague humanity.

Sometimes it was possible for our ancestors to rationally consider and understand these problems. But frequently, they could find no rational explanation. In these cases, peoples developed pseudo-explanations. These were generally based on imagining an alternative world around them that were filled with unseen beings or forces. Responsibility for inexplicable events was thrust upon the inhabitants of this imaginary world. Over time, these beings and forces were rationalized and classified and organized by primitive systematizers. One can see fairly well developed examples of this process in Greek or Norse mythology.

The major organized religions, such as Christianity and Islam, are the result of a further rationalization and development of this ancient struggle of men and women to understand and organize the world they live in. We can see in the earliest parts of the Old Testament and in the books of the Zoroastrians how the magical beings associated with certain peoples were gradually abstracted into what came to be considered their high gods and eventually, in some civilizations, a single God. Christianity is essentially a Jewish sect that reorganized Jewish tradition in a more explicitly universal manner than had been common in the older tradition. While the first Christian communities were limited by the idea that only people from a Jewish ethnic background could be Christians, in a few centuries this had changed so that anyone could be baptized a Christian. Islam grew out of both Christian and Jewish traditions. But it retained some features derived from the primitive world of Arabia in which it developed. Muhammad's relatives had still worshipped "idols" in a manner that the Christians and Jews of seventh century could only read about in their earlier traditions. Although Muhammad originally understood his message to be a universal one for all peoples, after local Jews denied his universal prophecy there developed a subterranean tendency among many Muslims to see Islam as a religion granted by God to the Arabs. (To some Arabs, only Arabs can be real Muslims and vice-versa.)

Rationalists have assumed that with the development of knowledge, and particularly of science as we understand it, there should no longer be a need for religious explanations of the vicissitudes of life. Most ancient Greek and Roman and Chinese philosophers no longer believed that life could be understood by reference to unseen and unknowable forces. They did not in their time have the tools to understand in any detail what was going on in the world. They lacked real science, and they wrongly understood much of what they thought they understood. But they knew enough to understand that natural processes combined with the operation of chance was the way to think about human life and its context.

But influential, even dominant groups in the American population, unlike comparable groups in other advanced and developed countries, have not followed the path toward higher rationality in the scientific age that ancient philosophers and the men of the Eighteenth Century Enlightenment had mapped out for their successors. Some questions that will occupy us within the Enlightenment network are: Why this is the case? What difference does it make? and How might this impediment to future human progress be overcome?

Below we will offer short answers to the first two questions. As the discussion matures, we will develop a fuller appreciation of what might be involved in effectively answering the third question.

Evidently, religion and religious institutions fill voids in human lives that are difficult to fill in any other way. Adhering to scientific rationality or pure secularism, for example, apparently does not offer average Americans access to a satisfying spiritual community, of shared identification with something larger than themselves. Human beings also have needs for ceremony and ritual and tradition that cannot be easily and quickly satisfied outside a religious context. Fascist and communist leaders saw these needs within the modern societies where their ideologies became victorious. They were able to quickly establish and popularize alternatives. Yet in retrospect, their efforts were built on sand. With military and social defeat their quasi-religious institutions and rituals have in most respects quickly evaporated. It may well be that the failure of such ideologies to take root in the United States was due in part to the fact our religious beliefs and institutions were stronger and there was less room for such alternatives. In any event, in the early twentieth century Americans have had neither the experience of the breakdown of religion or the substitution of quasi-religions that Europeans have had. This needs to be explored further, as does the return to secularism rather than religion in most European societies after the breakdown of the new ideologies.

The continuing power of religious belief in American society poisons the atmosphere in which progress would otherwise occur and thereby endangers the survival of humanity. Obvious examples of opposition to birth control and abortion in an overcrowded world. More serious are the positions of people within the major religious traditions that fervently hold extremist beliefs. Those Jews that strongly hold the mythological belief that God gave them what we now label Palestine or even a "Greater Palestine" will brook no opposition to their views, even if it means building Israeli nuclear weapons and using them if necessary. Many conservative Christians also hold a parallel belief about Palestine. First, to bring about the end of time, the Bible tells them that Jews must first control all of Palestine. Second, they believe that with the inevitable second coming of Christ the world will be consumed by fire and destruction and only those who follow Christ will survive. In their writings, it appears that such Christians might see a cataclysmic world war as a necessary part of God's plan. On the other hand, many Muslims have their own ideas as to what God has in mind. They may well come to believe that Muslims need a nuclear weapon and that in Muslim hands such a weapon can and should be used to bring about God's peace on earth.

There is no sense that to be enlightened one needs to deny and sweep away all religions and all religious people. We are not proposing a secular "Second Coming" bringing with it the destruction that the evangelists imagine. Yet as religion functions today, especially in the United States, it represents an enormous burden that must be significantly lightened before the country's political responsibilities at home and abroad can be met.

No one should underestimate the size of the problem. From birth to death most Americans live within the cocoon of religious belief, religious symbols, ceremonies, and institutions. In many communities, the central focus of society is the local church, and social and charitable life revolves around this core. Think with us for a moment of the religious songs at both the most ramified reaches of our culture and on the most popular and prosaic levels, and what these songs have meant to most of us at some time in our lives. Think of the meagerness of the fine arts without religious themes.

Taking the "good for you" approach to religion, which fits the native pragmatism of American life but conflicts with the need to lift the weight of falsehood from our daily lives, it is probably true that for many people religion, or the particular forms religion takes in their lives, is a positive value. It should not be valued as a magical form of cultural voodoo, as a kind of vitamin supplement. A recent study of the value of prayer by strangers for people with serious illness shows, not surprisingly, that their prayers did no good. It may also not be true that religious people are, on average, "better" than the irreligious. The rates of criminal behavior in the least religious countries compared with those in the most religious suggests no connection, as does the fact that murder and divorce rates in the bible belt states are higher than in the less religious states in the United States. Yet these are statistics and statistics does not influence personal experience. In spite of such statistics, for many persons religion plays a positive role. Outside the religious community in which they have found a "home", they would not thrive. These are facts with which the enlightenment movement must deal.

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