What is Religion and How do Religions Begin?
By Daniel C. Peterson and William J. Hamblin

Throughout history there have been thousands of different religions.  Some, such as the tragic Heaven’s Gate movement, have had only a few dozen followers.  Like new businesses, many exist for only a few years or even months before disintegrating.  Indeed, most religious movements have been small ephemeral affairs.  Others, however—such as Christianity, Islam, Buddhism or Hinduism—have hundreds of millions of followers and have endured for thousands of years.  Like biological organisms or species, religions can be described as being created, growing, declining, and ultimately disappearing.

There are a number of different theories or perspectives which try to explain the nature of religions and how they come into existence.  The secular perspective maintains that religions are similar to other forms of human social behavior or belief systems such as governments, communities, political theories or philosophies.  Although religions may claim some type of supernatural origin, they are in fact entirely human creations.  Scripture is simply a form of literature.  At best religious belief is merely disguised philosophy; at worst it is a delusion.

From a secular or agnostic point of view, religion is ultimately an expression of human physiology or psychology.  At its most fundamental level, religion can be reduced—like the rest of human consciousness—to patterns of brain chemistry.  From this perspective, religions begin when some unusual or aberrant brain activity induces an altered state of consciousness.  The person who has such experiences merely interprets them as divine manifestations.  In its extreme forms religion is psychosis.

For those who believe in God, such explanations are inherently reductionistic and unsatisfactory.  They reduce the complexity of human religious experience to banal simplicity.  Consider the following analogy.  It is possible to describe a masterpiece of art or music quite accurately and precisely.  A painting might have so many square inches with certain patterns and colors; a symphony may contain five thousand notes of which the one thousandth is C#.  None of this, however, can replicate the experience of actually seeing the art, or hearing the music for oneself.  For the believer, secular psychological or anthropological descriptions of religious beliefs and practices may at one level be quite accurate and precise.  But all such descriptions miss the essence of what makes religious belief so very different from political opinions or preferences about ice cream.

Believers might be willing to agree with secularists that in many cases aberrant psychological states have been understood as divine manifestations and have contributed to the creation of new religious movements.  Some aspects of religious experience may be counterfeited or induced by hallucinogens or dysfunctional brain chemistry.  Indeed, some religions include the ritual use of hallucinogens to induce religious ecstasy.  But even there, the religious person would maintain that the experience of a believer using peyote, for example, is quite different from that of a non-believer.  The spiritual state of the user, ritual preparations, and preparatory fasting are just as important.  Peyote may assist in the attainment of a religious vision, but it does not, in itself, cause that experience.  For the peyotist, the use of peyote is a ritual—similar to Christian prayer, scripture reading, hymn singing, meditation, or sacraments—that brings one closer to a spiritual state which can lead to true religious experience.  The unbeliever using peyote simply goes on a drug-induced "trip”; the believer experiences a manifestation from God.

Believers maintain that authentic religious experiences transcend the chemistry of the human brain.  The origin of religion is outside, not inside the mind.  For believers, religions begin when someone—perhaps the first ancestor, a prophet, or a holy man—has some type of contact with the sacred or the divine.  Such experiences are shared with and perhaps duplicated by others, who form the nucleus of a new religious community.  When they are written and transmitted to new generations accounts of such experiences become scripture.  When enough people come to believe in and share such experiences, movements can coalesce into new religions.  At an anthropological level the secularist might be able to accept this model. 

The fundamental question and debate—both between believers and secularists, and between believers in different religious traditions—is this: are the foundational religious experiences of the believers authentic manifestations from God, or are they merely human phenomena that are falsely believed to be manifestations from God?  Trying to answer this question has elicited centuries of religious debate.  The answer to this question makes all the difference in the world, and in the world to come.