In his book Moral, Believing Animals, sociologist of religion Christian Smith expounds a sociology of culture in which he conceives of human beings as "moral, believing, story-telling animals". In your essay, first explain what it means to describe human beings in this way, and then secondly explain why Smith thinks that this way of understanding human beings can account for human religiousness.
When Christian Smith described human beings as “moral, believing animals” he meant that all throughout history and across many cultures, there is overwhelming evidence that systems of morality and religious belief are part of human nature and biology. In this he is part of the same tradition as Immanuel Kant and other philosophers who argued that all persons had a natural or inborn moral sense. One of the main purposes of all human action therefore is to “sustain moral order, which helps constitute, directs, and makes significant human life itself” (Smith 8). Although people do not always act morally or live up to the highest standards, if they did not have this moral sense then human life would not have any meaning nor would it even be recognizably human. Sociopaths and psychopaths lack any concept of morality in their brains and personalities, but even this is proof that the normal person is a moral animal because “we label them as sick, as abnormal, as repulsive deviants” (Smith 14). This is true even of very intelligent and efficient sociopaths who manage to gain wealth and power but whose behavior toward others finally gives them away. Humans are also the only animals who have an inner sense of morality, and even if the exact genes or combinations of genes responsible to this are unknown at present, its effects on culture and institutions are clear and obvious.
Throughout history, billions of people have accepted the basic idea that the Golden Rule or Love Thy Neighbor is the highest form of morality. Even for those who do not live up to this standard, hypocrisy is indeed the compliment that vice pays to virtue. Because we are moral animals we also have a “persistent practice of sacralizing physical and mental objects” (Smith 56). Until fairly recent times, when humanistic philosophy separated religion from morality, the moral sense was always very closely related to the religious sense, and moral law was generally ordained by supernatural beings and recorded in sacred texts, as when Moses came down from Mt. Sinai. For this reason, human life was also considered sacred while destroying it was always one of the worst crimes, unless of course commanded by the state in wartime. There are a wide variety of religions and religious experiences, of course, but even those that practiced human sacrifice believed that they were offering the greatest gift of all to their deities. In the Christian Bible, God even requires the sacrifice of his own son to atone for the sins of humanity and many religions of history had similar ideas. In the Western world, at least up to the time of the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment, all morality was based on religion and theology, and it remains so today for billions of people on earth. This does seem to prove Smith’s contention that “we are believing animals, and the character of our believing inevitably inclines toward sacralization” (Smith 150). Even when this was no longer the case in modern times, there was always a long, drawn out conflict with traditionalists who always maintained that morality, law and culture had to have a religious basis in order to survive at all.
WORKS CITED
Smith, Christian. Moral, Believing Animals: Human Personhood and Culture. Oxford University Press, 2003.
