The essence of all religion is faith. To have faith is to believe without evidence. To believe without evidence is to make believe. To make believe is to play.

All human play involves an element of make-believe (see essay on the *definition of play*). Each player accepts, for the duration of the game, a certain imaginary world. In chess, for example, the imaginary world is one in which miniature horse-shaped figures are knights, and knights can only move in L-shaped hops. The purest form of make-believe is found in the pretend play of young children, who regularly enter imaginary worlds in which they may be witches, or trolls, or space travelers, or mommies and daddies, and where the living room couch may be a haunted house, or a magic bridge, or another planet, or the office where the mommy works. To enter into a game players don't ask for evidence that such and such is true, they simply decide or agree that it is true. Suzie is a witch and Jimmy is a troll, because all of the players have agreed to that. The truths of make-believe are truths by choice, not discovery, and so are the truths of religion. To accept a religion is to choose to believe in the religion's truths; and in that sense, at least, all religion is play.

The truths of play are true as long and only as long as the play continues. When play is over, or during time out, Suzie and Jimmy may say that they were only pretending to be a witch and a troll; but they would never say that during play. In fact, it would be impossible for them to say that during play, because the very act of saying it automatically stops the play and creates a time out. Religion, for the devout, has no recognized time out; so the devotees may have no opportunity to say that their religious beliefs are make-believe, even if at some level of consciousness they know that that this is so.

(I ask the devout reader here, please, to take a brief time out, just to consider my thesis. You will not lose your religion by doing so. Your religious devotion may even profit from the exercise. Children improve their play, and become even more devoted to it, by taking time outs to think about and possibly reformulate the truths; and the same can happen for adults with religion.)

My thoughts about the playfulness of religion originated when I was about 11 years old, an age when many people begin to puzzle seriously about the world around them. I was a regular church and Sunday school attendee, and like some of my childhood colleagues I had difficulty understanding how people could believe the stories. It was clear to me that belief or lack of belief had nothing to do with rational intelligence. Some people far more intelligent and rational than I, and some less so, were devout believers. I remember thinking then that religion might be a kind of game--a life-long game that people knew was a game but would not say was one. It was like belief in Santa Claus, but more valued. It was belief that people held onto throughout life rather than just in early childhood.[1]

These childhood thoughts about religion lay relatively dormant in my mind until quite recently, when they were stirred up by my reading about hunter-gatherer religions. As I noted in the *introductory essay*, this whole series on "Play Makes Us Human" was inspired by my recent immersion in the anthropological literature on hunter-gatherers.

Hunter-Gatherer Religions Are Overtly Playful

I discovered, in my immersion, that hunter-gatherer band societies (as distinct from more complex tribal societies) have certain basic characteristics in common, wherever they are found. Among these characteristics is a high degree of playfulness, which runs through all aspects of their social lives, including their religions.[2] The overtly playful nature of hunter-gatherer religious beliefs and activities renewed my thinking about the the idea that religion everywhere has its origins in the human capacity for play.

Hunter-Gatherer Religious Stories Are Playful and Often Funny

All hunter-gatherer religions are polytheistic; there are multiple deities, and the deities themselves are playful. They are not arranged in a hierarchy of power, taking or giving orders, but are equal players in an ongoing drama that takes place in a spirit world that parallels the physical world in which hunter-gatherers live. The deities themselves are neither all good nor all bad, but are a mixture of the two, much like real people. They are often whimsical and unpredictable. They are not necessarily concerned with human morality. They may help or hurt a person just because they feel like doing so, not because the person deserves it.

A common character in hunter-gatherer religions is what mythologists call the "trickster," a partly clever, partly bumbling, morally ambivalent being who manages to interfere with the best-laid plans of the other deities and humans. The trickster character is not necessarily represented in just one deity; it may be an aspect of personality that runs through most or all of them. The characteristics and actions of many of the deities are comical. Consistent with their egalitarian ethos and non-hierarchical means of governing themselves, hunter-gatherers do not worship their deities. They have no kings on earth, so they have no kings in heaven either. In fact, just as they use humor to level any members of their own band who show signs of arrogance (see *last-week's post*), they also use humor to level any deities who might otherwise think too highly of themselves.

Here is an example, taken from Elizabeth Marshall Thomas's book, The Old Way, about the Ju/'hoansi of Africa's Kalahari Desert:

One of the most prominent Ju/'hoan deities, Gao Na, has characteristics that might, at first, lead us to view him as equivalent to the single god of modern monotheistic religions. Gao Na is the creator of the universe. He created first himself, then the other deities, and then the earth, water, sky, sun, moon, stars, rain, wind, lightning, plants, animals, and human beings. Yet, despite such creative power, Gao Na is not particularly powerful in other respects, and he is certainly not especially wise. In fact, the Ju/'hoansi delight in portraying Gao Na as a fool.

In Ju/'hoan religious stories, Gao Na, the creator of everything, is unable to control the beings he created and is continuously being outwitted by them. For example, his wives trick him, again and again, into jumping into a pit full of feces. They tell him that there is a fat eland under a pile of branches, and he leaps happily into the pile to get it, only to fall into the pit. Later, after he has cleaned himself up, they tell him another story, about some other prize under the branches, and he jumps in again.

Whenever I think of this story I am reminded of the classic comic-strip character Charlie Brown, who repeatedly believes that this time Lucy will not pull the football away when he tries to kick it. Like Charlie Brown, Gao Na never learns. We know, each time that Lucy sets him up, that Charlie Brown will fall for it. We feel sorry for him, and yet we laugh. That is the plight of us humans, and it is portrayed in Ju/'hoan religious stories as it was by Schultz on the comics page.

Hunter-Gatherer Religious Rituals Are Indistinguishable from Play