The Three Stages of Religion, and Why Stage Two Is Not the End

It is possible to sort the condition of religion into three stages. We have moved from the first to the second, which is genuine progress, and there is a widespread assumption that the second is where we should stop. I think that assumption is a mistake, and worth examining directly.

Stage One: Sincere Belief and Open Contempt

The traditional condition. People believe their religion is true and the others false, and they are easily mobilised for holy war on that basis.

The belief is sincere. The contempt for rival faiths is open and unembarrassed. These two features travel together, and the combination is what makes religious violence recruitable — you can raise an army from people who genuinely believe the other side is in league with the adversary of all creation.

Stage Two: Mutual Respect

Where much of the world now sits. You respect other religions and expect respect for yours in return.

This is better, and I want to be clear that it is genuinely better rather than merely different. Holy wars are much harder to recruit for. And the reason is structural rather than sentimental: it is difficult to take your own faith entirely seriously while granting equal standing to faiths that contradict it.

If Islam is a legitimate path and Christianity is a legitimate path, then whatever either of them is, it is not what it claims to be — the unique revelation of the creator of the universe. Extending respect requires holding your own claims a little more loosely. The tolerance is bought with a quiet reduction in conviction, and that trade is why the violence declines.

So stage two is a real achievement. The question is whether it is the destination.

Why Stage Two Cannot Be the End

The settlement we have reached is that Allah, Yahweh, and Jesus are all somehow aspects of the same thing, that the differences are matters of cultural expression, and that the polite response to any of it is appreciative silence.

This is a watered-down version of every religion involved, and it is not what any of them says. It is a diplomatic fiction that all parties maintain because the alternative was worse.

And the objective was never to construct an imaginary plane on which all religions are equivalent and everyone tolerates everyone. The objective is to find out what is true. Our problems are located in the real world, and religions are off in hyperspace making claims about it — claims that are either accurate or not, and that do not become harmless by being held gently.

A stage-two believer still thinks a book written by iron-age men records the intentions of the being that made the universe. He simply does not press the point at dinner. The false belief is intact; only its social expression has been sanded down.

Stage Three

Stage three is not believing false things. That is the actual objective, and it is worth saying plainly because stage two is comfortable enough that people forget there was a further step.

I do not think stage three arrives by argument alone, and I am not proposing that anyone be pressured. I am making a narrower point: we should stop treating the current settlement as the finished state. Mutual respect between incompatible falsehoods is an improvement on war between them. It is not the end of the project.

What Needs Working Out

Two separate lines of argument are required here, and they are usually run together.

First: why remaining at stage two is itself a problem. Not merely incomplete, but actively costly — what does a society lose by maintaining a large body of politely unexamined false belief?

Second: the positive case that connection to reality is worth having for its own sake, independent of any harm from the alternative.

The second is the harder one and I have not made it here. It is the argument that everything else in this area depends on, and I keep discovering that I have assumed it rather than established it.