With agriculture, religion changed. Agriculturalists attempt to control nature, and so the gods of agriculture are controlling gods. With agriculture, and with the land ownership and accumulation of wealth that accompanies it, egalitarianism lost its sway and concepts of lords and masters, and of servants and slaves, emerged. It is not surprising, then, that hierarchical concepts of the spirit world emerged in post-agricultural religions--peaking in the Middle Ages, in the dominant monotheistic religions, Islam and Christianity. At a time when most people were servants, it was only natural that religious stories and beliefs would focus on the value of servitude and duty to lord and master, and that God would be understood as the supreme master, the king of kings, lord of lords. Such beliefs gave meaning to a life of servitude and helped the rulers to justify their power.
Religion Turns Bad When the Element of Play is Lost
As religion evolved (or should I say devolved) from the hunter-gatherers' comic pantheons to the medieval monotheisms it became less playful and more dangerous. As nature became an enemy rather than a friend, and as the spirit world became hierarchical, the element of fear began to overwhelm the element of play. God became not a playmate, but the supreme source of punishment and reward, to be worshipped, served, and feared. As religion became serious, people began to confound the imaginary religious world with the real world.
If children playing that they are witches and trolls did not know that they were just pretending, we would worry. We know, for children, that failure to distinguish imagination from reality can be dangerous. We should know that this is even truer in the case of adults and religion.
The religions that emerged with agriculture and feudalism have promoted horrors that would be unimaginable to hunter-gatherers. The Aztecs sacrificed human beings to their angry gods. Christians tortured people they called witches and murdered heathens mercilessly. Today among some groups of Islamists we find promoters of suicide bombings, who put religious beliefs above their concerns for people. If service to God is the highest value, and if God is fearsome and egotistical and punishing, and if religion is confounded with reality, then all these horrors in the name of religion become possible. Religion of that type does not "make us human," in the sense by which I mean that statement in the title to this series.
The remarkable thing, today, is that as our societies continue to evolve so do our religions. As we have left medievalism and entered an era of growing democracy, many people have taken the monotheisms of their ancestors and made them more playful. God becomes once again a friend rather than a power to be feared. People stop arguing about which religion is right. They begin again to acknowledge that such arguments make no more sense than do arguments about whether chess or checkers is the one true game. If this hopeful trend continues, we may complete the circle and once again enjoy playful religion as hunter-gatherers did.
To keep religion on the side of humanity instead of against it, we need continuously to refresh its playfulness. Sacred play promotes the best of our human nature, improves our wellbeing, and is fun. Religion lacking play is suicidal.
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Notes
[1] I have since learned, of course, that my early thoughts about religion as a game were not original. A number of highly respected theologians and theological scholars have put these same ideas into writing. One such book, for example, is David L. Miller's (1970) Gods and Games: Toward a Theology of Play. An interesting and relatively recent article on the topic is "Play and Religion: Indication of an Interconnection," in the Journal of the Asian Research Center for Religion and Social Communication, 2 (#1), 2004. There, K. P. Aleaz, an Indian scholar, makes a special case for the playfulness of Hindu religions, which, more than most other modern religions, have retained their historic folk-religion roots.
[2] An account of my conclusions from this immersion into the hunter-gather literature can be found in my article, *Play as the foundation for hunter-gatherer social existence. American Journal of Play, 1, 476-522, 2009.* Most of the ideas in the present series of essays, on "Play Makes Us Human," are presented there with documentation. In this essay I have repeated, in parts of several paragraphs, some of the same language I used in that larger article.
[3] Mathias Guenther, "From Totemism to Shamanism: Hunter-Gatherer Contributions to World Mythology and Spirituality," in R. B. Lee & R. Daly (Eds.), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gathers (1999), 426-433.
[4] See, for example, Daisaku Tsuru, "Diversity of Ritual Spirit Performances among the Baka Pygmies in Southeastern Camaroon," African Study Monographs, Suppl. 25 (1998), 47-83.
