Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept by Brent Nongbri
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There Is No Old Time Religion

For some years I have proposed the thesis that Christianity is an historically aberrant religion. By defining itself in terms of ‘faith’ Christianity, or more specifically the Jew, Paul of Tarsus, who invented Christianity, made religion into something it had never been before - a matter of belief. Or so I contended. The consequences of this invention have been both profound and disastrous for humanity, and quite possibly for life on Earth.

It turns out that I was mistaken. Paul did not invent a new form of religion; he invented all of religion as we have come to know it. His definition of religion as faith has come to be applied to customs and practices that are historically remote from any idea of belief or truth, metaphysical or practical. Whole cultures have taken up the Pauline concept of faith - religion as belief - as their own, completely unaware of how alien this concept is to their traditions. Paul, therefore, has much more to answer for than Christianity.

Paul’s real genius was not in the formulation of any particular doctrine peculiar to Christianity. Rather it was his skill and insistence on the dual psychological/sociological role of what has since become known as religion that created a new global category of human thought. Paul made religion both solely personal and solely communal simultaneously. This is the great innovation of ‘faith’. It created not just Christianity but also religion as a modern phenomenon.

Nongbri‘s extensive analysis of language, traditions and cultural practices shows that there is no such thing as ‘ancient religion.’ He examines four historical episodes involving progressive Jewish, Roman, Christian, and Islamic developments of the idea of religion. He makes his point succinctly: ‘The real problem is that the particular concept of religion is absent in the ancient world. The very idea of ‘being religious’ requires a companion notion of what it would mean to be ‘not religious,’ and this dichotomy was not part of the ancient world.”

Hence my error: I have been giving Paul much less credit than he deserves. He didn’t just change what religion means, he permanently altered the consciousness of the world. Religion wasn’t even a ‘thing’, it had no ontological status, before Paul created it. Nongbri made me aware of an enormous gap in my knowledge.

Nongbri understands the centrality of Christianity to his thesis when he says “It is thus not surprising that various Christian texts have been identified as marking the beginning of the concept of religion.” Incredibly, however, Nongbri has almost nothing to say about the Christian foundational texts by Paul of Tarsus. Paul doesn’t even appear in the index.

Nongbri‘s focus on the 4th century church historian Eusebius as a key point of Christian development of the idea of religion seems almost absurd since Eusebius’s concept of Christianity is solely Pauline. For Eusebius, all religions were already ‘faiths.’ Christianity had by then re-interpreted Judaism as such and was on the verge of inspiring Islam as a faith opposed to its own. Nongbri completely ignores the Pauline and pseudo-Pauline writings which would not only definitively prove his point about the invention of religion but also would explain the consternation Christianity provoked in Roman civilisation, the relationship among all his ‘episodes,’ and the subsequent European wars of religion. If for no other reason, Occam’s razor would seem to demand he look in Paul's direction.

Because of this crucial hiatus in Nongbri’s analysis, he is unable to notice the source of the private/public distinction which became so important in the Renaissance. Nor is he able to appreciate to drift back to a reunion of these spheres, drawn together by the gravitational pull of Pauline faith. This faith is simultaneously totally private - a personal relationship between a human being and the divine - and totally public - requiring an approved relationship with other human beings.

John Locke, in response to the 16th and 17th century wars of this new thing called religion, attempted to put the genie back in the bottle by separating the political from the religious. He accepted faith for what it is and suggested a ‘hack’ that would ease the tension. But his was a patch not a fix. His solution seemed to work and inspired what is recognised as the secular state in which religion is a private matter best kept out of politics.

More recently, however, we have discovered that faith will not tolerate this separation of the private from the public. Faith is a category which is not just dominant but also all-inclusive. Taken seriously, faith is not just political action, it is also apolitical (or anti-political) militancy, that is to say, terrorism. Hence our modern faith-based wars of religion.

Nongbri knows that faith is the fulcrum of the development of the modern idea of religion. And he is aware of the political consequences of faith. His 2008 thesis is entitled ‘Paul Without Religion: The Creation of a Category and the Search for an Apostle Beyond the New Perspective.’
Yet he unaccountably neglects the person who made faith his life and death issue in this volume of 2013. And I am at a loss to account for this.

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