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By Root 2545 0

and interests of the culture that produced them, just as it shows us something about the origin of North American values. Secondly, this study will give us a very important clue as to the value of religion in our lives. The function, structure, role, and solace of religion are problems almost as puzzling as death itself, but unlike what awaits us after death, they are phenomena that can be verified with a variety of ordinary data. However we must be careful not to equate religion with the notion of life after death. It is logical for us in the West to assume that a belief in life after death, if not the explicit Christian one, is close to the essence of religion because a specific notion of the afterlife is so central to Christianity’s master narrative. We must therefore examine whether that perception holds across all the world’s religions.

Afterlife: The Essence of Religion?

PRIMARY INTEREST in the afterlife simply does not hold true across all human culture. Many religions-such as contemporary Judaism and Confucianism-give far less attention to notions of the afterlife than does Christianity. In what must surely be a parody of Jewish views, David Sloan Wilson reported in the New York Times: “A scholar at a religious conference told me that what little Judaism has to say about the afterlife is only there because Christians asked them.”28 The point David Sloan Wilson was making is that an afterlife belief is not necessarily the essence of religion. That seems correct.

But his statement about Judaism is entirely wrong. We shall discover that Judaism did indeed have quite vibrant views of the hereafter and those views flow quite naturally into Christianity where they are featured much more strongly. At a certain point, Jews began to desensitize themselves to discussions of the afterlife. The fact that mainline denominations of Judaism today de-emphasize notions of the afterlife has as much to do with their strategy for modern life-emphasizing that Judaism is a “religion of reason.” Some mainline American Protestant denominations do not give much attention to afterlife either, emphasizing social action and spiritual experience instead.

Every religion has an answer to the inquiry of an afterlife, even though it may borrow that answer from another source and adherents to that particular religion may want to criticize or correct it from within. Although not all religions put afterlife in the center of their beliefs, as does Christianity (at least in Tertullian’s estimation), the afterlife is one of the fundamental building blocks of religion. If we look at how the West constructed its notion of life after death, we shall gain some notion of the historical stages that conceptions of heaven went through, as well as the reasons for those conceptions and how they have changed. In looking at a particular religion’s afterlife belief, we will be looking at a society’s notion of transcendence, its ideas about what is most important in human life.

Scholars of religion have become skeptical of any of the suggested “essences” of religion-even such an obvious one as a doctrine of the continuity of life beyond the grave. It would be unwise to adopt as the essence of religion the very thing that most characterizes Christianity-the very religion that has most ruled the consciousness of the West for two millennia. Yet, if the net is thrown wide enough, if any kind of belief in the survival of personality is included in our search, all human societies contain at least the rudiments of a belief in life after death.

The Pygmies of Africa were once held up as a religionless culture because they have few dogmas, and they think that religion is a kind of intellectual slavery to their putative political masters. But even they hold certain beliefs about pygmy survival in a life after death that is much at one with the forest. Or take another example: Although some Chinese religions may easily be categorized philosophies (for example, contemporary Neo-Confucianists on the island of Taiwan), the Chinese continue to perform rituals, build