Modes of Religiosity: towards a cognitive explanation of the sociopolitical dynamics of religion

In this article is summarized the theory of "modes of religiosity", the doctrinal mode and the imagistic mode. It seeks to contribute to a growing body of research, by explaining, in terms of underlying cognitive mechanisms, some of the varied ways in which religious commitments are experienced, organized, transmitted, and politicized.

forms of religious activity tend to be much less stimulating: they may be highly repetitive or 'routinized', conducted in a relatively calm and sober atmosphere; such practices are often accompanied by the transmission of complex theology and doctrine; and these practices tend to mark out large religious communitiescomposed of people who cannot possibly all know each other (certainly not in any intimate way). But all the great scholarship so far devoted to understanding these contrasting sets of dynamics suffers from two major shortcomings. The first is that none of the theories advanced in the past was sufficiently comprehensive. Each theory focused on just a few aspects of the two modes of religious experience and action. The second major shortcoming is that none of the existing theories explained adequately why we get two contrasting forms of religious experience in the first place.
This article summarizes a new theory, set out in detail in two monographs (Whitehouse 1995(Whitehouse , 2000, which distinguishes doctrinal and imagistic modes of religiosity. These can occur quite separately, as the organizing principles of religious experience, belief, practice, and organization. But often the two modes of religiosity occur together, in a single tradition, and interact with each other. The aim of the modes of religiosity theory is to tie together all the features of the two modalities of religious experience that other scholars have already identified and to explain why these contrasting modalities come about in the first place.
The starting point is straightforward. In order for particular religions and rituals to take the form that they do, two things must take place. First, these religious beliefs and rituals must take a form that people can remember. Second, people must be motivated to pass on these beliefs and rituals. If people cannot remember what to believe or how to do a ritual, these beliefs and rituals cannot be passed down from one generation to the next, and so the religious tradition would not be able to establish itself.
Equally, if people do not think that particular beliefs and rituals are important enough to pass on, they will mutate or become extinct. Memory and motivation have the potential to present far bigger problems than one might suppose. Some religious activities are performed very rarely. Unless some very special conditions apply, there is a real risk that people will forget the details of what these activities mean, and even how to perform them correctly. A potential solution to this problem is to have a very repetitive regime of religious transmission. One advantage of such a strategy is that a substantial corpus of complex cosmology can be reproduced in this fashion.
People can learn difficult concepts, dogmas, and stories -and will remember these in the long run -if they repeat them frequently. But this can produce problems of motivation. Continually listening to sermons and performing the same rituals over and over can be extremely boring. And if people are bored, there is a danger they won't continue to follow, or pass on, the religion. There are solutions to all these potential problems, and these solutions have profound consequences for the forms that religion can take.
But before we can go into that, we need to grasp the general nature of memory functions (see Figure 1). There are basically two kinds of memory -implicit and explicit (Graf and Schachter 1985). Implicit memory deals with things we know without being aware of knowing (such as the varied forms of procedural competence required in successfully riding a bicycle).

Memory
1 Explicit memory deals with things we know at a conscious level, and can be further sub-divided into two types -short-term and long-term. to what' will be answered below, through an examination of processes of exegetical reflection and independent innovation in the imagistic mode.
6. The need for orthodoxy checks encourages religious centralization.
Not all innovation is a bad thing. The Principle of Agreement simply requires that innovation is seen to originate from authoritative sources and is accepted/ observed by all loyal followers. Routinization may have the effect of insulating orthodoxies from unintended innovation but it does little to obstruct the determined heretic. The problem here is clearly one of policing. As soon as a routinized religion becomes well established, we tend to see the emergence of a central authority and some sort of ranked, professional priesthood. 12 It becomes the task of delegated officials to police the orthodoxy across the tradition as a whole, and there will often be a proliferation of sanctions for unauthorized innovation and heresy (ranging from excommunication and ostracism to torture and execution). church-goer is not to be part of a particular group, but to participate in a ritual scheme and belief structure that anonymous others also share. 14 Of course, the anonymity principle only comes into operation if the religious community is large enough to ensure that no individual follower could possibly know all the other followers. And it turns out that there are factors at play in routinized religions that encourage rapid spread, and therefore large-scale religious communities. One of the most important of these is the emphasis on oratory and religious leadership.
8. The presence of religious leaders is conducive to the religion spreading widely.
The fact that the religious teachings are expressed in oratory, on the part of great leaders, means that these teachings are readily transportable.
Only one or a few proselytizing leaders or good evangelists are required to spread the Word to very large populations.

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In sum, the doctrinal mode of religiosity consists of a suite of features that are causally interconnected. When these features coalesce, they tend to be very robust historically and may last for centuries and even for millennia.
At the root of all this are a set of cognitive causes, deriving from the ways in which frequently-repeated activities and beliefs are handled in human memory.
The Imagistic Mode of Religiosity  involving homicide or cannibalism. These sorts of religious practices, although taking very diverse forms, are extremely widespread.

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Archaeological and historical evidence suggests they are also the most ancient forms of religious activity. 17 As with the doctrinal mode, the coalescence of features of the imagistic mode derives its robustness from the fact that these features are causally interconnected or mutually reinforcing.
Once again, this claim rests on a series of testable hypotheses, depicted in Figure 3 and enumerated below.
1. Infrequent repetition and high arousal activate episodic memory.
Rarely performed and highly arousing rituals invariably trigger vivid and enduring episodic memories among the people who participate in them.
It appears to be a combination of episodic distinctiveness, emotionality, and consequentiality that together result in lasting autobiographical memories.

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These memories can be so vivid and detailed that they can take the form of (what some psychologists call) flashbulb memories. 19 It is almost as if a camera has gone off in one's head, illuminating the scene, and preserving it forever in memory. The effects of infrequent performance and high levels of arousal should be thought of in terms of processes of selection. Religious practices that are rarely performed, but which elicit low levels of arousal, are unlikely to be passed on: people will rapidly forget the procedures, and especially their meanings, during the long gaps between performances; 20 even if they could remember some aspects of the rituals, their lack of thought about these practices for long periods would not be conducive to high motivation. In short, rarely performed religious practices that survive tend to involve high levels of arousal, and this is due to the triangular nexus of causes indicated in Figure 2.
2. Activation of episodic memory triggers spontaneous exegetical reflection.
The combination of infrequent repetition and high arousal may provide excellent conditions for remembering the details of religious understandings are inspired by collective ritual performances, the unit of transmission is the entire ritual group (not a small number of talented orators). It follows that the spread of such traditions would be inefficient and costly: either the local group must perform its rituals with neighbouring groups, or the local group must be mobile (i.e. migratory or nomadic). But, either way, the practices are likely to mutate as soon as they get passed on. 28 In part, this is because of the lack of leaders and religious hierarchies, capable of policing an orthodoxy and, in part, it is because each ritual community is likely to be fiercely exclusivist (and therefore will tend to emphasize local distinctiveness over regional unity).

Modes of Religiosity
The key features of doctrinal and imagistic modes of religiosity stand in stark contrast with each other, as represented in Figure 4. It will be observed that these contrasting features are of two types. What gives these psychological features causal priority is that they are And yet lay participants are seldom in any doubt that their rituals possess authoritative meanings, known to religious 'experts' and elites. How is this to be squared with the expectation, outlined above, that frequent rituals will motivated by principles codified in language and stored in semantic memory? Surely, it is not enough to believe that somebody, somewhere has access to such knowledge?
Almost certainly this is not enough. If people are to be motivated to continue to reproduce in action a range of highly repetitive rituals, they must have some personal sense of the value and necessity of such activities.
This is one area in which the presence of an imagistic mode can have important consequences. It is precisely within those populations that lack access to the authoritative corpus of religious teachings, and so cannot be adequately motivated by these teachings, that we find the greatest profusion of imagistic practices. Elitist discourses would have us believe that the prominence of the imagistic mode among the uneducated and dispossessed is symptomatic of ignorance. Expressed more precisely, and less snobbishly, routinized religious rituals that lack a persuasive justification in dogma (i.e. learned via instruction) will die out unless they are motivated by forms of religious experience and understanding that are, at least to some significant extent, internally generated. A model for this sort of motivational base is provided the world over by the ancient imagistic mode of religiosity.
What is being offered here is a selectionist model. scenario is that core religious teachings are substantially restricted to elites, in which case lay versions of the religious tradition must be augmented and motivated by the imagistic mode. In the first scenario, both modes of religiosity are potentially self-sustaining (even though they may also be mutually reinforcing). In the second, lay religious practices which are incompletely modelled on a doctrinal mode of religiosity, depend for their survival on the presence of imagistic practices.
The above is not intended to be read as a functionalist argument, at least not in the sense normally used in social theory (see Kucklick 1996).
The features of each mode are mutually reinforcing but this does not imply stasis, as in classical forms of functionalism. Since modes of religiosity are generated through processes of selection, the theory does, however, lend itself to evolutionary arguments. It has been mentioned already that the two modes of religiosity are not equally ancient or widespread: the imagistic mode appears to be the more ancient and cross-culturally recurrent (see . Together with our collaborators, we hope to test out the theory of modes of religiosity much more thoroughly than I have so far been able to do on my own. And in the process, we hope to unlock many other previously unexplained mysteries of religious forms, ideas, and practices.

NOTES
1 The dividing lines between explicit and implicit memory are difficult to draw (for a fine overview, see Schachter 1987), but evidence from studies of normal cognition (e.g. Roediger 1990) and amnesic patients (e.g. Graf, Squire, and Mandler 1984) show that such a distinction (or a series of more fine-grained distinctions) is difficult to avoid (although see Baddeley 1997: Chapter 20). 2 This particular distinction has a long history, and certainly predates cognitive science. It is apparent, for instance, in William James' (1890) discussion of 'primary' and 'secondary' memory, and the first experimental studies of short-term memory date back to the same period (Jacobs 1887). 3 The distinction between semantic and episodic memory was first fully developed by Tulving (1972), and is now used by psychologists studying a wide range of phenomena, including amnesia, aphasia and agnosia, story grammars, schemas and scripts, and framing and modelling. For a thorough overview, see Baddeley 1997. 4 See Whitehouse 1992, 1994, 1996a, 1996b, 1996c, 1998, 2000a, 2000b, 2001a, 2001b. 5 A recent pilot study by Barrett, Martin, and Whitehouse suggests that repetition is not only important for the learning of religious doctrines, but also to ensure that they are remembered in the long run. In this study, a class of religion students heard twice-weekly repetitions of the 'four noble truths' of Buddhism over four weeks. Recall for these doctrines was tested after the second repetition (Time 1), after the eighth repetition (Time 2) and after a six-week interval, during which period no further repetition took place (Time 3). On a scale of 0-8, the Time 1mean score was .91 (11.4%), the Time 2 mean score was 3.2 (40%), and Time 3 went back down to 1.18 (14.7%). These findings would seem to suggest that eight repetitions, each spaced by a few days, would not necessarily be sufficient to transmit even quite limited doctrinal information (the Time 2 score is not impressive, although motivational factors in genuine cases of religious transmission may produce better results). Rather more interestingly, we observe a very rapid decay in recall for the information that has been successfully learned (possible low motivation among learners notwithstanding  1997. 13 The reality is a bit more complicated than that. Consider, for instance, conversion experiences in some Christian traditions, which appear to be constructed around episodic memories. From the viewpoint of my argument, three points are crucial to make about these sorts of phenomena. First, where episodic memory plays a significant role in the doctrinal mode, it is typically in relation to highly personalized rather than collectivelyexperienced episodes (episodes of the latter sort tend to produce something altogether different -an imagistic domain of operation, discussed below). Second, these highly personalized episodes tend to be subjected to such frequent verbal reiteration that they eventually give rise to quite rigidly schematized, even stereotyped, narratives (thus 'dissolving' into the standardized schemas of semantic memory). Third, religious experiences encoded in episodic memory are invariably superfluous to the doctrinal mode, in the sense that the reproduction of the doctrinal tradition in a recognizable form does not depend on their preservation. In short, being a member of a doctrinal tradition (e.g a 'Christian') minimally presumes some level of commitment to schemas encoded in semantic memory -no more and no less. 14 See Whitehouse 1992 and 2000a: 9-12, 40-1, 50-2, 113-7. 15 See Whitehouse 1992, 1994, and 2000a For ethnographic examples, see Lowie 1924, Kluckholn and Leighton 1974(1946, Turnbull 1962, Meggitt 1962, Allen 1967, Strehlow 1970, Barth 1975, 1987, Tuzin 1980, Herdt 1981. 17 See Lewis-Williams 1977, Pfieffer 1982. 18 The evidence here is somewhat complex, but useful overviews are presented by Christiansen 1992, McCauley 2001, andAtran (in press). 19 This term was first coined by Brown and Kulik 1982, and has since been examined in a variety of major studies (for further details, see Winograd andNeisser 1992, Conway et al 1992). The role of flashbulb memory in recall for ritual episodes has been most extensively discussed in Whitehouse 1996a, 2000aand McCauley 2001 The only cases of low-frequency, low-arousal rituals known to me are ones that use external mnemonics and/or a compositional hierarchy of ritual elements (i.e. rarely-performed rituals composed of an assortment of more frequently-performed rites). For examples, see McCauley 2001 and Atran in press. But such exceptions seem to prove the rule -not only because they are hard to find but because they always constitute practices that are inessential to the reproduction, in a recognizable form, of the doctrinal traditions in which they occur. 21 A recent pilot study by Barrett and Whitehouse suggests that recall for rarely-transmitted verbal exegesis is extremely poor, and certainly very much poorer than for rarely-transmitted behavioural procedures. In this study, a class of 100 first year anthropology students participated in an artificial ritual requiring them to carry out a series of unusual actions. They were told that the purpose of this was to learn about the pressures of ethnographic fieldwork, especially the effects on stress-levels among researchers of having to participate in strange activities. Participants were instructed not to write down what they had heard. The theological statement was delivered loudly and slowly, to maximize the chances of successful encoding. Participants then completed a short questionnaire asking them to rate their emotional states during the performance. Seven weeks later, participants completed a questionnaire asking them to record both the action sequence they had performed, the stated reasons for the experiment, and the fictitious theology they had heard. The elements and sequence of the ritual actions were recalled more or less perfectly by the entire class. By contrast, recall for the fictitious theology and even for the stated reasons for the experiment was virtually nil. This particular experiment was unsuccessful, insofar as it was intended to establish correlations between emotional self-ratings and recall for various aspects of the artificial ritual. The lack of significant variation in recall performance made this impossible. Nevertheless, our findings do suggest that the cultural reproduction of ritual actions does not require very great frequency (even quite rarely performed actions sequences will be well-remembered). By contrast, even the simplest exegetical and theological concepts cannot survive relatively long transmissive cycles. In order to be learned in the first place, and sustained in semantic memory in the long run, they must be repeated and rehearsed. 22 All rituals have the potential to trigger SER, by virtue of being 'symbolically-motivated' actions (Sperber 1975). Nevertheless, it has been suggested above that frequent repetition can reduce the likelihood of an internal 'search' for symbolic motivations being initiated, by causing habituation and reliance on implicit procedural knowledge. This is not the case with respect to low-frequency, high-arousal rituals activating episodic memory. Whenever recall for the rituals is triggered, this will involve recall of an explicit kind which is, in turn, eminently capable of setting off a search for symbolic motivations. 23 See Barth 1975, Whitehouse 2000a, andMartin in press. 24 See especially Whitehouse 2000a: Chapter 4. 25 In other words, the position of leader (if it exists) does not afford opportunities to transmit, shape, or direct any systematic programme of belief and action. 26 See, for instance, Aronson andMills 1959 andMintz 1972. 27 Ethnographic evidence for this is presented in Whitehouse 2000a; historiographical evidence is presented in Martin, in press. 28 Classic ethnographic studies include Williams 1928, Schwartz 1962, and Barth 1987 (for an extended discussion, see Whitehouse 2000a).