Transcription
This map is crazy. It shows the world's four biggest religions: Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. And yes, this feels normal to us. But if you were an alien looking at Earth, you'd be like, "This is weird."
First, religion is weird. We got these crazy deities. We got these gods with the beard. And then second, why does everybody believe just one of four things? Like, there's a menu with only four items on it. And those four religions were all made in the same place, the holy belt in the Near East. And most of them were made at the same time during the Axial Age, like 800 to 200 B.C.E. And then finally third, these big four religions are so different from before. You know, for 50,000 years we were animist and then we turned into these funny new monotheistic religions. Why did that happen?
So today we're going to solve that puzzle for why these modern religions won. And fundamentally, these modern religions won because they made an alliance between church and state. And there are three parts to this puzzle, kind of going through time. First, we're going to look at this Cambrian explosion of all these new religions. And then second, we're going to look at this alliance between church and state that made these religions win. And then finally, third, we're going to look at how these old religions stay fresh by remixing.
And if you're new here, hi, I'm Ree and welcome to How Everything Evolved, where we do these research deep dives to answer history's juiciest questions. Okay, let's do it.
And now that gets the second piece of this puzzle, which is, okay, you have this Cambrian explosion of all of these different philosophers. And of all those philosophers, which ones win? Why do we get the four that we see today? And that gets to the main idea of this video, which is number two: this alliance between church and state. So you can think of this alliance between church and state as a symbiotic relationship where you have these new empires and these new big states with armies and things. They have all these resources, but what they don't have is legitimacy versus these religions. They can give up legitimacy and they can say, "Oh, we anoint you the divine king and ruler." And what they want in return are resources like land and things like that. And so this is kind of like the holy or unholy alliance that made these massive states feel legitimacy and spread more, and it made these religions also spread more in combination with these states.
So now we're going to look at each of these big religions and how they kind of collaborated with states in order to spread. So I want to start with the weirdest one actually, which is Hinduism. And Hinduism is, oh, crazy. Hinduism is so cool. I wish I understood it better, honestly. Hinduism is kind of different from some of these other religions because it wasn't created during the Axial Age. It's one of the only religions that we really have from Bronze Age times. And that's because we had this Vedic period kind of before modern India, this like, in this river valley civilization. And then as they moved east, they kind of turned into these, this weird Vedic religion with these Brahmins. And there's kind of like shamanism, and there's shamanism everywhere, but this shamanism stayed around.
So why did Hinduism stick around? Well, actually, I really like this line from Tamim in Destiny Disrupted. And what he says is that Hinduism is not really a religion, but it's more like a perspective on religiosity. And so what that means is that something like Hinduism can be super good at being adaptable to new situations. When they were kind of feeling selection pressure from Buddhism and Jainism, they like updated themselves through this Hindu synthesis thing where they're like, "Yeah, we're going to be more chill." And then, you know, in the 15th century, they became super devotional and they did the Bhakti tradition. You know, it's almost like you have two options if you're a religion. You can be one of these monotheistic, "Hey, it's my way or the highway," one true God, Jesus, Muhammad, whatever. Or you can go the other way and you can say, "Hey, we're going to be super polytheistic and whatever goes goes, man. Everything's chill up in here."
And the other crucial thing with Hinduism is that they were really connected to the existing kind of caste system and Brahmanic system within India. And I like this other line, I think also from Tamim, where it says that Hinduism kind of sacralized the existing, um, kind of hierarchy. And so here's a picture of that caste system in India. Oops. Wait, no, this is Egypt. Okay, here's a picture of the caste system in India. Oh, wait, no, this is the feudal system in China. Here's a picture of the caste system in India. Oh, wait, no, this is the feudal system in Europe. Okay, finally, here's the caste system in India. Okay, we got there. You know what that shows is that everybody has these kind of feudal systems where you have a bunch of different people with roles, and the caste system was maybe one of the most sticky of them. But yeah, places had it.
The other big religion in India that started in India was Buddhism. You know, and Buddhism started, and I like to think about Buddhism as this is a quote from a book where it was the main export of India around this time. And Buddhism is not even in India anymore. It pretty much spread to tons in Southeast Asia and tons in China. And so Buddhism was this kind of new religion around 500 B.C.E. But it was spreading okay. But a real reason why it spread is because of Ashoka the Great, who was one of these first big Indian emperors. And he had a revelation, was like, "I'm Buddhist. I love Buddhism." And then he built like 84,000 stupas all around India. And so that was the first big alliance between church and state for Buddhism.
But then it also started to spread into these other places in Asia. And then China got pretty into Buddhism, you know, especially during the Tang Dynasty, you know, 600 to 900-ish. They, um, were really into Buddhism and they built, as an example, this awesome Buddha in Sichuan. I've gone and seen this Buddha. This is the Leshan Buddha, and this is a big Buddha, you know. [laughter] This is like the state really loves Buddha. So, they're going to build this like 100-meter-tall dude, you know.
But sometimes Buddhism got too powerful. So after this guy Xuanzang brought Buddhism to China in around 600, and then Empress Wu also used these Buddhist monks within the state bureaucracy and administration for a long time. But then at around like 843, Buddhist monasteries owned 40% of all land. And so it was at that time that the emperor at the time was like, "Too much foreign influence. Don't love this Buddhism." And they took and they said, "Hey, we're going to..." They burned tons and tons of monasteries and they put all the monks back to work. They said, "Hey, 250,000 monks, you got to go back to work."
Oh, wait, no. This is a picture of, um, China in the '50s burning one of Tibet's main Buddhist monasteries. Uh, heads up, there's people doing leaf blowing outside, which should be illegal. Illegal for my nimi ass, but in any case, hope it's not too loud.
So, Buddhism wasn't the only religion in China. They had these kind of more organic, homegrown folk religions, is the way they're talked about now: Daoism and Confucianism, and also this fourth one, Legalism. And Daoism and Confucianism, Legalism, they played different roles. And so something like Daoism was really good at the self and thinking about your relationship to the spirit world and also kind of mystical things and maybe death. While Confucianism was more about kind of your family and relationships and piety and things like that. And then Legalism was really helpful for the state where they said, "Hey, you can't just do good things. Confucianism is not good enough." Um, it was kind of a mistake theory versus conflict theory thing where they said, "No, Confucian people think that everybody might be good if we kind of incept these ideas into them," while Legalism said, "No, people are bad and we need to make sure that they do the right thing." And so all of those were helpful in creating this new, you know, Han Empire. This is, you know, from 200 to 200, 200 B.C. to 200 C.E. And this was kind of a unified empire that emerged around this time. And this Han Empire was both super Legalist, that's what they took from the Qin folks who kind of unified them. It was also very Confucian, where you had some of these proto versions of the state examination and things like that. And then it was also very Daoist, where, you know, Daoist ideas were part of, uh, the culture generally, and also part of elites.
And now let's move west to Christianity and Islam. And the interesting thing is that both of those religions replaced religions that were already connected to the state. There was this Roman imperial cult and there was Zoroastrianism, and both those fell as Christianity and Islam rose. And so I like to think of this as a counter-example for when the church and the state are kind of too strong together. The Roman imperial cult wasn't able to perpetuate after the Roman Empire fell, and the Persian kind of Zoroastrianism was not able to continue perpetuating after the Persians fell. You know, so here's this picture of the Roman imperial cult. You know, people talk about as like paganism, and yes, there was some amount of animal orientation and things there, but, uh, paganism is Christianity's way to talk about Roman religion. But actually, Roman religion was just like a normal cult back in the day that was very connected to these state leaders. And so they would have these emperors like Caesar, like Augustus, and they would raise them to the rank of divinity where they'd say, "Oh, this is a really great emperor. We're going to put him in the god gods." And so you got these emperors that were elevated above the others. And you also got stuff like Virgil's Aeneid, which was kind of like a version of Homer's Odyssey, but written, you know, hundreds of years later. And in the Aeneid, and it was really a story about Augustus and how you had this amazing kind of Augustus-like figure who rose to power and was successful and things like that. And so that book was read a lot in the elite culture as a way to continue perpetuating this imperial cult.
But as the Roman Empire began to degrade around, you know, 200-300 A.D., Christianity, which was already bubbling for hundreds of years, that's when you start to get someone like Emperor Constantine who was like, "Hey, Christianity is sick. I'm going to convert. I'm going to make the Edict of Milan that says that's no longer illegal. I'm going to move the capital to Constantinople."
And so you had a similar process happen in the Middle East where you had, you know, the world's first big empire, the Persian Empire, the Achaemenids. They got really big and they got big connected to Zoroastrianism, which was this religion with, you know, light versus dark. And if you were to be a betting man around, you know, 0 C.E. and you say, "What religions are going to exist 2,000 years from now?" you would have said the Roman imperial cult and you would have said Zoroastrianism. But Zoroastrianism was so connected to the kind of Persian state, so that as that thing fell, it was not able to continue being around. Versus when you got our boy Muhammad started in, you know, Medina and Mecca, he rose to power. He rose to power super tied to this new state that he was building, this new kind of Islamic state, these caliphates. And they were able to conquer the world in this really amazing, beautiful way. And it created this kind of pan-Islamism and this like Pax Islamica or whatever, which was a very peaceful period where you got the Golden Age, the House of Baghdad, and things like that. And this is probably the most extreme example of church and state being allied. And in fact, maybe arguably the place in the world where they are still the most tightly coupled.
I want to say one other thing about church and state, which is that if you're a church without a state, then you're a diaspora. It's really hard to continue perpetuating your religion. So, here's kind of like a random image of diasporas, and you can think about, you know, the Jewish folks. And for Jewish people, they had their own land for a bit, then the Romans were there, and then they burned the temple and stuff. And so, there was this diaspora, and then the Jewish folks were always trying to hunt for their own land. And then the Holocaust, you know, two-thirds of them died in Europe. And then they did get their own land and they got Israel now, and that's obviously very complicated. But to be a diaspora population is really hard. And so, and Judaism has these other issues why they haven't spread because it's hard to like become Jewish if your parents aren't Jewish and all this whole thing versus like the Gentiles. It's like, yeah, anybody can be Christian.
There are lots of other diasporas too. You think about like Tibetans and Tibetan Buddhism. It's like, okay, you know, China kind of took you over, and so you're now this new diaspora of population, and who knows how long you can perpetuate without a state. And then there's similar things with some of the religions in Africa when they had this, you know, the massive slave trade, and you lose a lot of that kind of past religious orientation. And then same obviously with North and South America, where you think about going 60 million to 10 million people with all the genocide and deaths from disease during the Columbian Exchange. And so that's why you get the Mayan and the Aztec kind of indigenous temporal complexes and religions. Why those don't really exist anymore.
This is all to say there are very, very few religions that are able to succeed without a state.
There's another puzzle here though, which is: Did churches create states? You can imagine some of these new moralizing religions, these monotheistic religions like Christianity that say, "Hey, look, we're going to be looking at you. There's going to be supernatural punishment. You're going to need to be nice to your neighbor and don't steal, or else you're going to go to hell." Did those new religions emerge and spread? Did they kind of like keep empires sane and keep them kind of cohered, or were they just like a byproduct of those empires?
And this is an interesting question that was answered by our boy Turchin at with Seshhat, which is this database of empires over time and populations and beliefs over time. And you can see here what he's showing is across all these different places in the world like China or India or Mesopotamia or Europe. You can see them transition over time. Here's time on the Y axis from an MSP of zero. This is a moralizing supernatural punishment. So these are these like polytheistic, you know, kind of religions to these more like, like, you know, monotheistic moralizing religions that we know today. And you can see there is this massive shift over time from these kind of more chill religions to the ones that we know today, which are ones where you're going to go to hell.
And when he looked at the data and found some causal weights, you can see that moralizing supernatural punishment, aka religion, these new religions for these empires, it was not a precursor for sociopolitical complexity. It didn't allow these states to emerge. Instead, the way to think about is that we got agricultural productivity in the world. We got all these new farming civilizations with lots of population. And then more importantly, we got military competition where we domesticated horses. We got cavalry, and those things both from the steplands started to push down like kind of the proto-Mongols and then also against each other these new super powerful states. And because of that, if you were conquered by the Persian Empire or you were conquered by the Roman Empire, whatever it might be, then your state started to become more complex. You started to, you know, war made the state, and the state made war. You started to make these massive kind of taxing operations, which then made these also administrative bureaucratic operations.
So yeah, these new monotheistic religions and states were both created by farming and military competition.
The other interesting thing with churches and states is that they're in this like co-opetition with each other where they are both, they have their kind of zones of influence, you know, the Pope versus Jesus or whatever, but they also compete over resources. And so that leads an interesting question that political scientists have asked over time, which is: How do states and religions kind of balance each other through time? And here's one answer to that, which is from this guy Daron Acemoglu, who I've had on my podcast. He also won the Nobel Peace Prize last year or two years ago for economics. And in his book, The Narrow Corridor, he talks about the state over here having lots of power. You want the state to have power because they can have strong state capacity. It can do things, you know, China can build a lot or whatever. But you also want to have society have some power too, so that you have some accountability in the system.
And what he shows here is that what you want, you know, he uses the term Leviathan. That's the Hobbesian term for this strong state to kind of make humans be better. And he looks at something like in the US or the UK, we have this shackled Leviathan where we do have a strong state, but that strong state is balanced by the power of society, is balanced by things like religion and also democratic accountability and law, versus something like these despotic Leviathans like in China or Turkey, where they have really strong state power, but society in a place like China, there's not that much accountability or, you know, laws within the system.
This balance between the state and society was really interesting in Europe around the Middle Ages when you had this Investiture Controversy. And this is when you had the Pope and the Emperor were kind of fighting, and they're both battling for power. And so back in the day, you had the Holy Roman Emperor, and he would be the one who would say what the new Pope was. This is called Caesaropapism, where Caesar got to choose the Pope. The king gets to choose the Pope, and he would do it through this thing called investiture, where he'd like give you the crown and say, "Boom, you are the new Pope," or whatever. And so the way that the emperor would choose the Pope is by investing in him. He'd give him an object or whatever. So I think this image is actually reversed. I think that this looks like it's the Pope giving the king something. In fact, it was the king giving the Pope something. So in any case, when the king gives the Pope something, the Pope was eventually like, "No, man. I want to choose the next Pope. I want to choose the next bishops." And so the Pope's kind of revolted. And this was in 1122, the Concordat of Worms, where he said, "No, no, no. I'm going to be my own man."
And so what this meant is that the church was able to kind of escape from the power of the state, and that created this new kind of proto-feudal system where you had this bureaucratic system besides the state that wasn't that militarized. You had this new set of laws and ideas that were kind of emerged from religion around how to be good and bad. And this led to the Industrial Revolution, which we'll talk about later. But it did so because essentially it was this thing outside the state that was able to push back against the state.
And as one final note, a lot of these ideas are in Fukuyama's great two-part series on The Origins of Political Order and then his second one, Political Order and Political Decay. And in these things, he talks about state power versus legal power and democratic accountability as kind of balances to state power and why in all these different places around the world, why state power was like really powerful in China while there wasn't very much powerful kind of accountability on the other side. And so 100% recommend this kind of deep dive into these topics.
Thank you as always for watching and thank you to Roots donors for supporting this channel. If you want to understand more about the past and how we got here, check out the previous videos here. And if you want to understand the future and where we're going, feel free to subscribe here. Hope to see you then. Bye.