A recent debate on the semiotics of religion ended in a discussion of an idea that goes from Machiavelli to Rousseau and beyond: the Roman concept of a “civil religion,” meaning a body of beliefs and obligations capable of holding society together. It was believed that this notion, in itself virtuous, is just a short step away from the idea of religion as an instrumentum regni, an expedient that a political power, perhaps represented by unbelievers, uses to maintain control over its subjects.
The idea goes back to writers who had experienced the civil religion of the Romans. For example, in book VI of The Histories, Polybius wrote in relation to Roman rituals that “in a nation formed by wise men alone, resorting to means such as this would be pointless, but since the multitude is by its nature voluble and subject to passions of every sort, from immoderate greed to violent anger, the only alternative is to entertain them with such contrivances and with mysterious fears. I am therefore of the view, not that the Ancients had no reason to introduce religious faith and superstitions about Hades among the multitudes, but rather that those who seek to get rid of them today are foolish . . . The Romans, while handling much larger sums of money in public offices and embassies, remain honest only out of respect for their oath; among other peoples it is rare to find those who do not touch public money, whereas among the Romans it is rare to find someone who taints himself with such guilt.”
Although the Romans behaved so virtuously during the republican period, clearly at some point this stopped. And we can witness this because, centuries later in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, Spinoza gave another interpretation to the instrumentum regni, and to its splendid and captivating ceremonies: “But if, in despotic statecraft, the supreme and essential mystery be to hoodwink the subjects, and to mask the fear, which keeps them down, with the specious garb of religion, so that men may fight as bravely for slavery as for safety . . . yet in a free state no more mischievous expedient could be planned or attempted.”
From here it is not hard to arrive at Karl Marx’s famous definition of religion as the opium of the people.
But do religions always have this virtus dormitiva? A very different opinion has been expressed, for example, by José Saramago, who has repeatedly attacked religions as the instigators of conflict: “Religions, all of them, without exception, will never serve to bring harmony and reconciliation among people; on the contrary, they have been and continue to be the cause of unspeakable acts of suffering, slaughter, monstrous physical and spiritual violence which constitute one of the darkest chapters in man’s miserable history” (La Repubblica, September 20, 2001).
Saramago concluded elsewhere that “if all of us were atheists we would live in a more peaceful society.” I am not sure he is right. Pope Benedict responded to the statement indirectly in his recent encyclical Spe salvi, in which he says that, on the contrary, nineteenth- and twentieth-century atheism, despite being presented as a protest against the injustices of the world and of world history, has led to “the greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice.”
My sense is that the pope was thinking of such godless folk as Lenin and Stalin, but was forgetting that the Nazi flag was inscribed Gott mit uns (“God with us”); that phalanxes of military chaplains blessed the Fascist pennants; that the Spanish butcher Francisco Franco was inspired by devoutly religious principles and supported by Warriors of Christ the King; that the people of the Vendée were devoutly religious in their fight against republicans, who themselves had invented a goddess Reason (an instrumentum regni); that Catholics and Protestants have happily slaughtered each other for years and years; that both the crusaders and their enemies were spurred on by religious motives; that Christians were fed to the lions to defend the Roman religion; that people were burned at the stake for religious motives; that Muslim fundamentalists—the attackers of the Twin Towers, Osama bin Laden, and the Taliban who bombed the Buddhas of Bamiyan and who for religious motives oppose India and Pakistan—were all devoutly religious; and finally, that it was with the words “God bless America” that Bush invaded Iraq.
So it occurred to me that perhaps, if religion is or has sometimes been the opium of the people, more often than not it has been its cocaine.
2007