In the December issue of the Atlantic Monthly, Yale Professor Paul Bloom published a piece¹ in which he argued that religion -- in the sense of belief in the supernatural -- is an inescapable accident of human mental structure and an inherent part of our society. He cites numerous points of data to demonstrate the intractability of our religious beliefs, but most of these data support one basic observation: that even as a growing body of scientific knowledge has shown various religious texts to contain out and out falsehoods, the percentage of people believing in generic supernatural phenomena -- such as ghosts or angels, the power of prayer, and the afterlife -- has remained virtually unchanged over the last hundred-odd years.

In many instances, Bloom's facts are astonishing. Among other things, he shows that close to half of all scientists and virtually all other Americans, roughly the same percentage as at the turn of the last century, believe in the power of prayer. Yet the fact that these generic spiritual beliefs remain prevalent does not mean that the appreciation of religion -- and the purpose of religious institutions in society -- has remained the same over that time period. Despite the widespread reporting of a recent upsurge in religious fundamentalism (both here in America and elsewhere) and the reemergence of religion as a powerful political force, I would argue that by simply looking at the questions we ask about our society, we can see that religion plays a different role in American society than it once did.

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To explore this topic a little further, let's take a quick detour to Tibet. In the late 1990s, thanks in part to some high profile support from the Beastie Boys among others, the Free Tibet movement became one of the most widely recognized social causes on American campuses. And what was there not to love about this movement? It was nonviolent, organically-generated, and in opposition to oppressive autocratic rule.

The arguments surrounding Tibet's wish for independence from the People's Republic of China are complex. As with most modern conflicts, it is hard to even begin to define the parameters of the discussion. Various people have various takes on when Tibet last maintained its own governing bodies (either the 1950s or the 1910s or the 1750s or the 1500s or the 1200s) and what land area actually constitutes Tibet in the first place (any one of these combinations). But there is one dimension of this conflict that normally escapes discussion of who gets sovereignty: the Free Tibet movement is fundamentally based upon the desire of a group of religious authorities -- namely Buddhist monks -- to gain control over the government of a country.

In the 10th century, Tibet's rulers divided land into three types of holdings: freeheld lands, estates of noble families, and estates of Buddhist monasteries. As a result of this type of land ownership regime, vast numbers of Tibetan citizens lived as serfs on the land owned by nobles and monks. This form of rule lasted for over a thousand years, until the People's Republic of China invaded the country in the 1950s. At the time, Tibet had a population of 1.25 million people, 700,000 of which lived as serfs. Serfs. In the 1950s.

This system of land ownership led to massive poverty in the country and extremely high rates of infant mortality, illiteracy, and malnutrition. And that's not simply among the peasant class. Tibetan monks practice their religion by memorizing texts. Memorizing them, and not reading them. As such, high rates of illiteracy persisted among the upper classes of Tibetan society as well. This is part of the reason that such a system of government -- or any system of government, for that matter -- could persist for a thousand years.

And so rather than worry about whether the Tibetan people -- led primarily by Buddhist monks -- should regain sovereign control over the land they have historically ruled because they were largely self governing after the Mongol invasion of the 1200s or because they sent delegates to various international meetings in the early part of the 20th century, maybe it makes sense to ask which group of governors would do a better job of raising standards of living in Tibet.

According to the official historians of the People's Republic of China, there were about 8 million people living in Tibet in the mid 18th century. Over the next three hundred years, misguided rule by the Tibetan theocracy led to a precipitous decline in the population until somewhere between 1.2 and 2.5 million people lived in the country by the 1950s, when the People's Republic of China regained significant control of the country. According to the official census from 2001, 7.3 million people now live in Tibet, 5 million of which are ethnic Tibetans. The Chinese government largely credits its own Western Development Economic Plan and its Qinghai-Tibet Railroad for this increase in population and the attendant rise in living standards. Many ethnic Tibetans, on the other hand, see these instruments as part of a broader plan for "cultural genocide," in which the migration of Han Chinese into the region simply dilutes the Tibetan population out of existence.

Granted, the Chinese government has significant interest in making any other potential rulers of Tibet look as foolish as possible and granted this is the same government that destroyed thousands of Tibetan temples and killed hundreds of thousands of Tibetan people. And it's hard for me to believe that the population of ethnic Tibetans living in Tibet has just about doubled in only two generations. But at the same time, China has become the development posterchild of the last two decades. Life expectancy has risen tremendously, as have literacy rates. China now produces more than twice as many college graduates annually than the United States. If the Western Development plan and the Qinghai Railroad really are meant to bring inclusive, widespread growth to the region -- though a good bit of anecdotal evidence suggests that they are not -- then maybe it's better to have the communists running the show instead of the monks.

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So how, exactly, does all this relate to Paul Bloom? Bloom argues that the spiritual -- which is to say the generically supernatural -- aspects of religion are innate to humankind and here to stay for as long as we are. The moral and political convictions that tend to accompany our religious beliefs, however, need not be. I take the Tibetan society from the tenth century to the 1950s -- a time in which nearly three quarters of the population died -- to be indicative of what can happen to a country under religious rule, even when that religious rule is premised on the pursuit of peace and kindness.

In a religious world-view, things like literacy and living standards don't matter. The only thing that matters is the next world. It is hard to tell whether the Tibetans would be better off under the rule of the People's Republic of China or their own monks. But the very fact that people have begun to ask that question -- that people have started to think about the well-being of people existing in this world -- indicates that religion has taken on a less central role in civil society since the beginning of the industrial age. This is what makes things like suicide bombing, the teaching of creationism in public schools, and the shades of violence creeping into the Free Tibet movement so troubling. These actions are all signs of a worldview focused on the next life.


¹You can read the whole Bloom piece here. After you've clicked the link, scroll about a fifth of the way down the page or search for "wired for creationism."