The Story of Religion

[Briar]

The Story of Religion

by Joe Volk

A former member of Congress and I were talking a few years ago. We were wondering how advocates of so-called national missile defense systems manage to win appropriations each year. He said, “We opponents win on the facts of the matter. We win on policy analysis. We win on policy recommendation. But then we lose floor votes in the House and the Senate. Why?” Then he answered his own question: because advocates of the national missile defense system have the best story. People - and law makers — go with the story rather than with the facts and the analysis.

This “best story” is a narrative about threats and fear. The narrative tells people about their world and their place in it. The national-defense story - like the war-on-terror story — is a narrative of cosmological proportion. The definition of the problem runs like this: good people and bad people inhabit the world, we are the good people, and the bad people are trying to kill us. The resolution to this problem is: if we want to survive, we will have to stop the bad people from attacking us by killing them first. The story defines the problem, and the problem definition leads to the “solution.”

Narratives give meaning to people’s everyday lives. Whether in politics or in houses of worship, narratives function as scripture and nurture what is essentially a religious worldview. The narrative orients individuals and groups to power, both temporal and eternal.

Today, we face another narrative about us and them. This time the categories are not communist versus anti-communist. Our world today presents the appearance of a new East-West conflict along a religious axis: a renewed conflict between Christians and Muslims. But this narrative, like the Cold War story, ignores that conflicts actually emerge from competition for resources, such as land, water, and oil. An overarching civil religion in the United States connects these two narratives and challenges us all to come up with a compelling alternative.

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http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/11/14/5231/