In the Fall 2004 issue of Tricycle, there is an interview with Robert Bellah, who was asked the following question:

Religious evolution is an area rife with controversy— Those who argue for an evolutionary view of religion often assume that newer is somehow better… Walk us through this minefield of ideas.

To which he responded (in part):

 …since we are bio-socio-cultural beings, humans are part of the evolutionary process and always will be. There is no built-in guarantee of “progress” in either biological or cultural evolution. Both have plenty of examples of extinction.

Not only does things not necessarily progress in evolution, it also doesn’t guarantee perfection. Take for instance, our eyes. It is quite easy to ascend rung-by-rung from photo-receptive cells in plants and simple animals to the eyes in birds, fish and mammals. You’d think that since we haven’t changed the eye that much in millions of years, it would be perfect.

Well, it certainly is adequate, but it has its flaws that evolution just can’t work out because it is “good enough.” For instance, what are all of these blood vessels doing on the wrong side? They cut off a large portion of our field of vision. But because our eye works well enough to keep us alive until we procreate and pass on our genes, there is no need to work out that slight flaw.

We can see the same thing in religious evolution as well. Some things are “good enough,” and it becomes difficult to upheave an established system in order to “make improvements.” In fact, a religious organism needs to start to get elderly (even corrupted) before its child will get enough food from its parent to grow.

And sometimes, the birth of these unruly children will actually revitalize the aging parent. The Protestant Revolution got the Catholic Church off of its corrupted deathbed and back into (albeit smaller) cultural mainstream. Hinduism didn’t die because of the birth of Buddhism, etc.

But religion is a creature, and must feed off of the creatures in each new culture it finds itself in. And it often needs to adapt in order to catch more prey. Heh … I didn’t mean for that metaphor to sound so sinister.

Most of the religions that came from other countries to land in America have been getting quite hungry, and each has been adapting. America has gay priests and Buddhist practitioners that aren’t monks. These religions have bred lots of children… and it is interesting that in a relatively short time, America has been (along with our bad pop music and bad food industry) exporting our religions.

The article also addressed a theme of his book, The Meaning of Dogen Today, that it is important to understand “the particular cultural context in which the words of Dogen, or any religious figure, were recorded.” Bellah commented:

Zen Buddhism began in Japan at a time when strong social structures hemmed in individuals on every side. The family you were born into determined most of your life chances. Buddhism was a way to step outside those constricting structures. Becoming a monk was called shukke, literally, “leaving the family.”

We live in an almost completely opposite kind of society, where all institutions are weak and the family is in shambles. You don’t need Buddhism to “leave the family.” To emphasize primarily the individualistic side of [Zen] Buddhism in America is only to contribute to our pathology, not ameliorate it.

Perhaps this explains why I’ve like Dogen (and Zen) so much.

This concept of taking the teachings without the context is an American characteristic (remember New Age?), because this is what we do. We cut down a South American rain-forest to find a plant with certain properties, and then we extract that one chemical we were looking for and package it in a pill.

I wonder if either cultural maturity (or even cultural evolution) will solve this problem.