The state,the gods and the imagination;or,David Graeber as a theorist of religion

Abstract

This short article suggests that the writings of the recently deceased anthropologist David Graeber have a great deal to contribute to the study of religion. Drawing from a wide array of works by Graeber and his collaborators, the article sketches out his basic social theory, focusing on his insistence on the creative dimension of human social activity. It then focuses on the relevance of religion – specifically, the fabrication and modification of ‘metahuman persons’ – for the creation of new social forms. Finally, the implications of this theoretical framework are sketched out – that is, that the study of religion should focus on its creative and imaginative aspects.

David Graeber, anarchist, activist and anthropologist, died suddenly and tragically in 2020, only 59 years old. At that time, Graeber had already published numerous articles and books, including both academic works of ethnography (e.g. Graeber, 2007) and social theory (e.g. Graeber, 2001) and such popular bestsellers as Debt: The First 5000 Years (2014) and Bullshit Jobs (2018). The premature closure of Graeber’s oeuvre was mitigated somewhat when, in 2021, The Dawn of Everything appeared. Co-authored with David Wengrow and some 10 years in the making, this book was, arguably, Graeber’s masterwork – an argument about social theory, about deep history, culture and the resilience of human creativity. What it does not appear to be, however, is a book about religion. It is, after all, written by an anthropologist and anarchist activist (Graeber) and by an archaeologist with an interest in comparing different neolithic and Bronze Age societies (Wengrow). Religion barely comes up in the book, aside from a tantalizing but underdeveloped claim that private property originates in conceptions of the sacred (Graeber and Wengrow, 2021: 158–163). And yet Graeber’s views, as articulated in this book and his other publications, combined with ideas found in other works by Wengrow (2020) and by Graeber’s mentor, Marshall Sahlins, seem to me to offer a potentially very productive avenue for thinking about religion, and especially about religious innovation and change.

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The core thesis of The Dawn of Everything is simply that people create, imaginatively and at least somewhat self-consciously, the cultures that they live in, and that their social worlds emerge from those cultures. The project of the book – and this is equally true of Graeber’s other interventions in social theory – is something of an ethnographically and archaeologically informed meditation on Marx’s (1972: 437) claim that people ‘make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past’. Marx himself and the Marxist tradition as a whole – as well as a great deal of non-Marxist scholarship – have tended to place the emphasis on the latter part of this observation: on the constraints, social and material, that inhibit our freedom to make ourselves, and on the various ways in which the social forms under which we live are alienated from us, imposed upon us, exempt from our control or will. This makes a certain amount of sense because Marx’s entire project can be understood as an effort to account for the stark observation of Rousseau at the opening of The Social Contract that ‘man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains’ (1968: 1). And so the greater portion of Marxist analysis has been devoted to working out how our own creations – social, ideological, economic and, yes, religious – rise up against us and dominate us in ways we have not chosen, ultimately with a view to counteracting those tendencies and liberating ourselves from them. But, ironically, by laying so much emphasis on constraint, there is a tendency to naturalize and universalize the condition of bondage. The same is true, mutatis mutandis, of approaches that focus on the ways in which human behaviour is bound by genetics, geography or other external constraints. ¹ By contrast, Graeber and Wengrow (2021) emphasize the first half of Marx’s formulation – the assertion that we collectively make ourselves. They insist that just as we creatively fabricate the physical world around us according to our desires and tastes, by producing the kinds of things we want to have, by decorating our spaces with the kinds of visual images we want to see, by creating music we want to hear and games we want to play, so also do we employ essentially the same process for our social worlds. The ability to reimagine the human universe is so crucial to our existence, they say, that it constitutes a primordial freedom. This same observation forms the basis for a criticism of Marx in Graeber’s (2005) article on fetishism – namely, that Marx does not accord the same kind of deliberate creativity to people in forming their social relations as he does for their material production.

Counterposed to this core human freedom is social domination – the exercise of power. The authors identify three distinct ways that power can be, and has been, exercised in human societies, which they call elementary forms of domination (Graeber and Wengrow, 2021: 367, 413): sovereignty (i.e. the application of socially legitimate violence), bureaucracy (the control of access to knowledge and information) and charismatic contests of influence (what we today call ‘politics’). They apply the terminology of ‘first-order regimes’ to cultures in which political power is exercised mainly or exclusively through only one of these modalities (390–391). But ‘states’, as we imagine them today, are composite forms. The Roman state, for instance, the context of my own scholarly interests, controlled and exercised, in different ways, all three forms of social domination to different degrees. The Roman state in the imperial period is particularly distinctive in the way it made ‘politics’ (i.e. civic contests of aristocratic prestige) marginal to the exercise of actual state power – a move that makes perfect sense following the ruinous civil wars of the late republican period. Similarly, in the complex states of the modern world, these modes of power are employed in combination (Graeber and Wengrow, 2021: 365–367). For example, the police, as Graeber (2016: 73) argues elsewhere, serve as a combination of both violent force and bureaucratic power conjoined. The threefold schema of violence, administration and charisma is crucially important not only because these forms of domination act to constrain us, but also and especially because the impetus to create new social forms is often offered in opposition to modes of domination that are already present, through a process of ‘schismogenesis’ (a concept developed by Gregory Bateson in the 1930s). The idea that repudiations of extant structures form a major basis for the development of new social forms preserves the conflictual element of Marx’s thought, albeit in a slightly different guise.

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This rather schematic picture of political history is important for understanding religion specifically because, as Graeber, following Sahlins, argues at length elsewhere (Graeber and Sahlins, 2017), human beings have traditionally and until modern times viewed themselves as existing in polities that involve and are entangled with ‘metahuman persons’, that is to say, spirits, gods, demons, superheroes, sprites, elves – any number of entities that behave more or less like persons but have powers that differ from, and sometimes greatly exceed, those of ordinary humans. The terminology ‘metahuman persons’ is particularly Sahlins’ (2017, 2022) formulation. He avoids referring to this cross-cultural human entanglement with such beings as ‘religion’ out of an interest in avoiding the imposition of ‘our’ categories on ‘them’, and as a way of stressing this activity’s profound interpenetration with behavioural realms (economics, politics, etc.) that we treat as distinct from one another. Engagement with these metahuman persons is a durable, cross-cultural human phenomenon, but not one that is distinct from the ordinary mechanics of other aspects of human life: such beings have distinct characteristics (most especially their superhuman powers), but humans engage with them in ordinary and quotidian ways, including politically and economically. Indeed, their status as ‘persons’ dictates that we generally treat them as we do other people – engaging in reciprocal exchange, talking to them, showing them deference as to one’s social superiors, flattering them, building and/or decorating their living spaces, and so on. In spite of his avoidance of the term, Sahlins’ critical reformulation of our field’s subject matter is rather of a piece with recent work by Stanley Stowers (e.g. Stowers, 2008, 2011; see also Schilbrack, 2014) on the ‘ontology of religion’ insofar as both assert that the phenomenon we refer to as ‘religion’ reflects a more or less general tendency among human beings to posit agent-like entities with which human life is entangled, but, at the same time, both reject the distinctively modern segregation of religion from ordinary life and its processes.

In any case, Sahlins, especially, argues that relations with such metahuman persons constitute the original and primordial political society – that even in egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands, for which there may be no human hierarchy whatsoever, the people live in a steeply stratified cosmic polity in which they are sharply subordinated to persons (i.e. gods and other spirits) who are deemed to control vast quantities of space or to preside over the entire human race:

Even many loosely structured hunting and gathering peoples are thus subordinated to beings on the order of gods ruling over great territorial domains and the whole of the human population. There are kingly beings in heaven even where there are no chiefs on earth. (Graeber and Sahlins, 2017: 2)

Sahlins’ (2022) posthumous book specifically on religion offers extensive ethnographic support for this claim. This is rather Durkheim turned on his head: instead of society calling the sacred into being, it is the gods who embody the first political structures that humans inhabit, and instead of imaginary sacred realities being reflexes of real society, society is a realization of imagined cosmic worlds:

Neither do kings on earth have the hegemonic scope and powers of the gods they imitate. This structural disproportion is one reason (among others) that the common human science of the ‘supernatural realm’ as a discursive ideological reflex of the people’s sociopolitical order, being designed to functionally support it whether by mystification or replication, is a theoretical practice as seriously flawed as it is habitually repeated. (Graeber and Sahlins, 2017: 20–21)

One implication of these claims is that the notion of sovereign power (which can establish moral codes and make, destroy and remake social bonds) is religiously derived – a form of domination borrowed from the realm of the spirits. The logic for this is straightforward. In most cultures for most of human history, the sources and causes of human flourishing – natural influences on animal or agricultural wealth, control of the conditions of life and death, fecundity, health and illness – have been outside of human control and external to the human world (Sahlins, 2013: 178–180). Awareness of the alterity of the conditions that govern our existence means that human cultures are always in relationships – relationships that we could call political – with external and alien powers and sources of value:

The proposition is that people must depend for their own existence on external conditions not of their own making – hence and whence their notions of other-worldly powers. Nothing foreign is merely human to them . . . If people really were in control of their own existence, they would not die. Or fall ill. Nor do they control the biological workings of agriculture or sexual generation. Or the weather on which their prosperity depends. (Sahlins, 2013: 181)

Or, in his pungent summation, ‘taken in its social totality and cultural reality, something like the state is the general condition of humankind. It is usually called “religion”’ (Sahlins, 2017: 24). ² External derivation also applies to morality, societal values and the like on the basis of what Graeber (2017: 393) describes as ‘a very common bit of cosmological reasoning’, namely, that any system of governance, morals or values cannot authorize itself but must be established by an external force that is not bound by it. The Constitution of the United States of America, for example, was established by a revolution – an act that would constitute a crime under the regime of law established by that very constitution. Closer to home, the British North America Act of 1867 that established Canada was enacted by the Parliament not of Canada but of the United Kingdom.

Graeber adds his own distinctive spin, with a characteristic emphasis on human creativity and freedom. It is not the case, he avers, that we only experience alterity in connection with the natural world, agriculture, health and so on; we also experience alterity in connection with our own creation of novelty. As many artists and poets will attest, our creativity appears to us, routinely, as something outside of ourselves, something over which we are not in complete control. The word ‘inspiration’ reflects this. Societies are, in fact, created by people, not outside forces, but in general we fail (or refuse) to see it. This is, indeed, the problem of alienation as tackled by Marx and as reformulated by Cornelius Castoriadis – that all societies are instituted by themselves but are blind to this reality (Castoriadis, 1987, 1991, cited in Graeber, 2005: 409). Likewise, if we live in worlds populated and governed by metahuman persons, they are nonetheless persons we ourselves – sometimes knowingly and self-consciously – create. They are products of our imagination. This generalization continues to apply to the modern ‘disenchanted’ world, but its relevance is correspondingly greater in contexts (the majority of human history and, arguably, the general practice and intuition of the majority of the world’s population) in which gods and other metahuman persons are immanent and pervasive aspects of quotidian existence.

The logic by which this all happens is that already outlined: social orders, we seem to feel, cannot be underwritten by themselves (although, in fact, they are) but must be established and authorized by some power or force external to them (Graeber, 2017: 447). One such external force can be found among the alien metahuman powers that, we imagine, govern our material flourishing. This implies that the modification, fabrication and rearrangement of external others – cosmic forces, metahuman persons, gods, spirits – is an intrinsic aspect of the creation of new social forms, ³ an expression of the human freedom to envisage (and enact) alternative polities. It also happens to reflect the alterity experienced in the act of creation: this novelty comes not from me but from the spirits. This process occurs in quite tangible ways: new gods and spirits, new metahuman persons, involve the creation of new relationships (and vice versa). On this point, Graeber relies on West African data, pointing to the ways in which afflictions by the same spirit can create a new relationship between otherwise unconnected people; this logic serves as a mechanism for creating a new social relationship with someone by deliberately sending a spirit to afflict that person. ⁴ The same logic is at work, Graeber argues, in West African ‘fetishes’ as reported by European traders in the 16th century. These made-up-on-the-spot deities – constructed from physical objects but above all else by shared rituals involving those objects – unite the participants in bondage to the god, and were constructed precisely for the purpose of undergirding, and enforcing with their power, the completely new relationships created by contact and trade with Europeans. ⁵ The kinds of behaviours we tend to call ‘religious’ are a vector for the introduction of new ideas, new relationships and, in general, the exercise of social creativity. Fundamentally, this is an imaginative activity – an emphasis Graeber shares with, for example, Jonathan Z Smith (1982). Social structures and social maps do not really exist in reality; they are, per Graeber,

imaginative constructs that were only realized during ritual moments – when dividing up the carcass of a sacrificial ox, or installing a new earth priest – when ‘society’ in this total sense is momentarily brought into being: generally, so one can manipulate or change it. (Graeber, 2013: 227)

Although Graeber does not make this point, I would like to suggest that, in many ways, we operate in the same fashion today, in our supposedly disenchanted world. Modern nations are very much notional entities, products of our own actions and creativity, products of the mental maps we use to negotiate the world. And they end up undergirding a great deal of our activity, including our relationships. As enacted by artefact (my passport) and ritual (my citizenship oath), I am in relation to a superhuman entity known as ‘Canada’, to which other individuals are also related. We therefore have the relation to each other of fellow citizens, which brings with it a variety of norms and obligations. Or again, just as Graeber observes to be the case for hunter-gatherer societies, so too do we today create and modify the imagined polity of ‘family’ most emphatically at shared rituals like weddings and funerals.

The main driver of social and cosmological creativity, Graeber believes, is value, not necessarily in the sense of the cost of things, but in the sense of whatever it is that we have decided to treat as the goal(s) or point(s) of human existence – beauty, strength, abundance, solidarity, love, life itself and so on: ‘value will necessarily be a key issue if we see social worlds not just as a collection of persons and things but rather as a project of mutual creation, as something collectively made and remade’ (Graeber, 2013: 222). ⁶ Graeber defines value rather technically as ‘the way our creative actions take on meaning for us, by being placed in some larger, social, framework, by being embodied in some social “form” like money or commodities’ (Graeber, 2005: 435n21; see also Graeber, 2013: 225). This allows him to consider at length the relationship between, precisely, value (in the economic or monetary sense) and values (in the sense of what it is we opt to cherish, desire and pursue). Ultimately, following Marx, Graeber returns to labour, ⁷ to the collective human work we do to produce the things and circumstances (including relationships and conceptions of ourselves) that we most desire. Human flourishing, in whatever form we happen to imagine it, is the ultimate value of any society based on a project of mutual conception (Graeber, 2013: 222), ⁸ and specific elements of its system of values will point to the kind of human flourishing that is desired. It is worth stressing once again that we are referring here to imaginary polities. They may, and often do, lead to real governance structures (especially when people identify the values expressed as their values, act them out and so actively inhabit the imaginary universe thus created) but they need not, and, presumably, most of the imagined polities that have ever existed have not led to tangible governance structures. The point is that our creations are not dumb reflexes of society but conscious responses to it, assertions of what we desire and interventions in the world as it exists.

For Graeber, the things we choose to value are the ultimate sources of the conceptual universes we create and abide in. In his words: ‘It is value . . . that brings universes into being’ (Graeber, 2013: 231). None of this is to deny that alienation occurs, or to deny that we are constrained and shaped by the real and conceptual worlds we already live in – that is, the problematic of Marx and of Feuerbach before him. Some of this occurs as a result of the sheer complexity of our social and productive structures, which are of a sort that cannot be grasped in their entirety. Some of it also occurs because of the ways we realize value – that is, make those values socially present. These usually involve tokens of value (money for productive labour, diplomas for education, accolades for honourable actions, etc.), which can come to be mistaken for the things they signify (see Graeber, 2005: 428–429; 2013: 223–226). Notwithstanding these kinds of confusions and opacities, however, Graeber stresses that the centrality of value makes belief in our imagined universes somewhat beside the point:

Whether anyone believes in the reality of these universes is usually inconsequential. This, in turn, is what makes it so easy, in contexts characterized by complex and overlapping arenas of values, for so many actors to simply stroll back and forth between one universe and another without feeling any profound sense of contradiction or even unease. (Graeber, 2013: 231)

Exemplarily, no less a figure than Paul explicitly acknowledges such ‘strolling back and forth’ in 1 Corinthians 9:20–21: ‘To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews . . . To those outside the law I became as one outside the law’.

As a result of sidelining ‘belief’, Graeber rejects the language of an ‘ontological turn’ to describe his own (or Sahlins’) projects. Ontology implies deep-seated and fundamental convictions about the nature of reality. One can imagine, dream or create without needing to feel that the creations themselves refer directly to anything real:

At its sloppiest, at least, the term ‘ontology’ is given the power to take the place once given to ‘culture.’ This strikes me as unfortunate, because it implies that questions about the ultimate nature of reality actually matter to most people; in actual practice, what seems striking is the degree to which they do not. (Graeber, 2013: 229) ⁹

This observation strikes me as an important one: there is a tendency to treat religious belief as if it were one (kind of) thing when, in fact, ‘belief’ describes a spectrum of attitudes, from the provisional to the certain, from the absolute to the negotiable, from the pragmatic to the speculative. Graeber’s point, in any case, is that we behave as if these imagined realities are true when we care about the stakes and, in fact, do so differently in different contexts: we do not use the rules of chess when playing football, or of football when playing baseball. What is required is not so much conviction of the reality of the imaginary worlds as identification with the values – the stakes – that they embody. A really fine example of how this works can, strangely enough, be found in Bruce Lincoln’s (1989: 148–159) analysis of American pro wrestling. Lincoln argues that wrestling provides an imaginary world that serves as ideological support for the status quo. But I would argue that the appeal of this imaginary world resides in the way it, per Lincoln’s analysis, articulates certain values: it does not simply assert that justice and American identity are perfectly congruent with one another, but play-acts into being a world in which this is so. The satisfaction derived from watching such play-acting has less to do with any actual conviction that the spectacle is ‘real’ than with congruence between the values of the viewer and those on display. In a sense, performance of these imaginary realities is the primary vector for their realization. There does not seem to be, for Graeber, a qualitative distinction between the (very many) unimplemented social visions implied by the wide range of human creativity and those that actually come to be manifest in tangible social structures. Rather, these ideas are materialized, if at all, first and foremost in the production of art, imagery, text and the like – in short, again, performance. It should perhaps go without saying that the nature of both the creation and the dissemination of these performances will be affected by the character of, and access to, communication technologies. Effective dissemination, in turn, makes the social realization of these visions that much more likely.

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It seems to me that this framework for understanding religion – or at least aspects of religion – has a number of attractive entailments. First, scholars of religion should think twice about any approach to religious subject matters that denies or occludes the role of creativity and imagination, or that denies or diminishes people’s active agency in making religion and in making religious change. Our field tends, I think – and I would not exclude my own work from this criticism – to seek explanation in constraints. We often think we have really understood a phenomenon, a historical or sociological datum, when we have determined why it could not have been any other way: when we, in essence, eliminate choice, desire or values in favour of extra-human forces. This is true of many theological approaches to religious data, which can tend to treat the invocation of human creativity as a denial of the divine or supernatural element of religion. But it is equally true of many efforts to explain religion in scientific terms: often the result is some form of biological, or social, or economic or linguistic determinism. I am not a little convinced that these two observations are related – that is, that many of the scientific approaches to religion that focus on the various ways we are not in command of our own ideas and practices are driven by an implicit (and probably unrecognized) theological intuition that it is dangerous to attribute religion to human imagination, inventiveness or desire. Put positively, we should acknowledge and foreground the role of active creativity in religious practice.

Second, if Graeber, Wengrow and Sahlins are correct, we need to acknowledge the fundamentally political nature of religious belief and practice. The point is more basic than simply observing that religion sometimes (or even often) has political implications. The claim, rather, is that doing religion, making religion, is in itself a political act, even if it involves no direct interaction with the state or its institutions (and, indeed, even if no such thing as ‘the state’ is present). When we populate the world with imaginatively produced persons, or when we modify the metahuman persons already deemed present in that world or modify the nature of their relationships with each other and with human beings, we are actively changing the conceptual socius in which we reside. We are changing its contents, its structure, its overall shape and, thereby, we are altering our relations with one another. Religion is not an influence on or a shaper of politics; it is politics. This implies that one of the most productive forms of inquiry into religious materials (especially those that evince creative modification of religious ideas) is one that focuses on the transformation of conceptions of power. We might analyse, for instance, elements of Paul’s letters as focused on sovereignty, that is, as understanding power, whether that of the ‘rulers of this world’ (e.g. Rom. 13:3–4) or that of the Judean God (e.g. 1 Cor. 10:5–10; Gal. 3:10), as the application of (violent) force rather than as control of knowledge (e.g. see 1 Cor. 2:4) or as charismatic competition (which he derides specifically in 1 Cor. 3:3–7). The problem for Paul is that his core value, appropriately, life – that is, human flourishing – does not seem to be actualized by means of the kinds of violence that Paul imagines undergird the governance of both state and cosmos. But the mythological fate of Jesus – resurrected, vindicated and given a spirit-body after his obedient death – allows for an inversion of the logic of sovereignty so that the power of death opens the door to a new kind of life, one that – notably – is no longer subject to violent force.

It is significant that the popular (i.e. non-academic) intuitive understanding of religion in our contemporary culture is one in which politics and religion comprise more or less exclusive categories. It has always seemed to me that this folk view of religion is – insofar as it influences scholarly perceptions – one of the biggest obstacles to an accurate and sophisticated understanding of religion. This has always been the source of my attraction to Durkheim: he treats (in my view, rightly) the link between religion and the sociopolitical as utterly fundamental. So, too, do Graeber and Sahlins, albeit in a way that is critical of Durkheim’s specific views. They also preserve the insight of Feuerbach, Marx and Durkheim (in different ways) that metaphysical symbols have essentially mundane referents. More recently, Tomoko Masuzawa (2005) has observed that the concept of ‘religions’ as bounded entities has been used since the 19th century to deny ‘them’ the rationality and intentionality that ‘we’ associate with ourselves under the rubric of ‘politics’. This implies, by the way, that the problem does not entirely rest with the reification of ‘religion’. The reification of ‘politics’ and its direct equation to the state is equally to blame. In any case, adopting Graeber’s approach might serve as a salutary corrective to this problematic tendency.

Moreover, if the emphasis in The Dawn of Everything on the schismogenetic element of cultural or social creativity is granted, then we can and should try to understand acts of religious creativity – say, the claim that a recently crucified criminal has been given a spirit-body and raised into the heavens – as repudiations and rejections of the polity as it is experienced. Religious innovation is – or, at least, can be – oppositional, and oppositional again not simply to other religious ideas but to the totality of the experienced social world of the innovators. It should be stressed, however, that oppositional is not the same thing as revolutionary or subversive. We can, and do, encounter countless examples of elite creativity, including religious creativity, which aims to correct and counter more ‘popular’ or status-quo conceptions, not in the interest of elevating the masses (or what have you) but in the interest of protecting, justifying, retrenching and even enhancing their own elite status. We can consider, for example, the religious ideas of Plato, with their strong emphasis on νου̃ς as the essence of the divine, and the material world as a shadowy derivative therefrom, as a prescriptive reformulation of civic religious practice in the interests of his own elite, intellectual, class. Or again, Plutarch (De Iside et Osiride) recasts the traditional Egyptian deities of Isis and Osiris as allegories of Middle Platonic metaphysics – an act of cultural appropriation, among other things. Stanley Stowers (2011), Dan Ullucci (2013) and Heidi Wendt (2020), among others, have recently emphasized the way that intellectuals, literate experts, in the ancient world aimed to transform the conception (and practice) of ancient religion from one of economic exchange of material goods to one that emphasized states of mind, internal dispositions, whose praxis was more oriented to ethics, and to reading and interpretation – exegesis – than to the exchange of material goods. In all of these cases, we see an oppositional, schismogenetic, kind of activity, but action offered more in the service of the status quo than against it. At the other end of the spectrum, and in rather sharp contrast, we encounter texts such as the Nag Hammadi Hypostasis of the Archons, which presents a scathing critique of political power as the author perceives it, in the form of its burlesque characterization of the ignorant, buffoonish and sexually driven Yaldabaoth.

Third, if Graeber is correct, we should decentre, or at the very least complicate, the issue of belief. If indeed it is value that brings universes into being, if the driver of our imaginative cosmogonies is not intellectual assent to evidence about the way things are but is instead a desire and hope for the way things ought to be, it makes very little sense to seek the evidentiary sources for beliefs or to focus much on belief at all. This insight, it seems to me, sheds tremendous light on the central and thorny problematic of religion since at least the 18th century – namely, the problem of false consciousness or, differently, of people believing things that are unevidenced or at least differently evidenced than ordinary objects. In fact, there is no false consciousness at work at all. It turns out that ‘living in a world in which such-and-such is the case’ is not the same thing as ‘believing that such-and-such is the case’. Religion appears to be rather more like playing a game: we accept the rules of play (or modify them as we see fit) without needing to claim that they have any special ontological status. I think this helps explain the deeply strange phenomenon of people messianizing a character like Donald Trump, who by no objective or evidentiary standards meets the criteria for a figure of religious awe. But that really is not the point. Trump manifests a certain set of values, and assent to or agreement with those values therefore takes the (admittedly, rather outré) form of fabricating a reality in which Trump attains some metahuman status. I strongly suspect that the fabrication of new gods (as with Jesus among the earliest Christians) took a similar form, and appeared to their contemporaries as the deification of Trump appears to (most of) us. This implies that we should not, for example, be seeking an explanation for early Christian claims that Jesus rose from the dead in terms of evidence of such or its inherent plausibility, or even in terms of the persuasiveness of those who made the claim. Rather, assent to the claim will have been motivated by the values encoded by that claim, whatever those might have been (one imagines something countercultural or inversionary).

Fourth, and closely related, human activity makes imagined worlds become real, brings them into being; they are not destined to remain wispy phantoms of a purely mental kind. Imaginary worlds, relationships and polities are (again, like games) brought into being by being performed and enacted – that is, by behaving as if they were real. We should therefore try to be more attentive to the ways in which religious innovations are accompanied by play-acting – by, in effect, LARPing: engaging in live-action role play. A really nice religious example of this kind of thing is the codification of the Mishnah and subsequent commentaries to dictate, essentially, the ‘rules of play’ as if the temple were still standing and as if the people still lived in the land of Israel. ¹⁰ It is not as though those who collected and commented on these materials failed to understand that the temple was gone and that the Jewish people were living in diaspora. Rather, in light of knowing precisely those two things, their values dictated that they should enact, play at and abide in a reality in which the temple did indeed still stand, and the people still lived in the land of the covenant.

Perhaps an even sharper example can be found in ancient apocalyptic literature, which famously imagines a political restoration of God’s people and a re-establishment of a divinely sanctioned state and monarchy. We are often presented with the idea that ancient Jews and Christians eagerly awaited this transformation, implying that they viewed its imminence as a fact – in much the same way that I expect spring to roll around (eventually) after winter. But might we not also consider whether the seer’s apocalyptic trance and the repetitive nature of the recited visions (especially marked in the canonical Revelation of the New Testament) are not efforts to inhabit, in the imagination, in play, the desired state? If so, might it be better to avoid the language of apocalyptic expectation and replace it with something like apocalyptic desire – that is, a wish for a different kind of world? Paul, in fact, seems to show a self-conscious and explicit awareness of this dynamic. In 1 Corinthians, he closely links apocalyptic ideas to an activity of ‘play-acting’ a new (or restored) socius:

the appointed time has grown short. From now on, let even those who have wives be as though [ὡς] they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no possessions. (1 Cor. 7:29–30)

Similar patterns of behaviour as if may be found among such disparate groups as the Latter-Day Saints, the Nation of Islam, neopagans and the Satanic Temple. Ultimately, the successful implementation of creative revisionings of the world depends on the extent to which other people can be persuaded to ‘play along’ with those visions, to live as if they were true.

This sort of activity, incidentally, illustrates once again the easy slippage between what we tend to think of as religion and what we tend to think of as politics. LARPing, as the enactment of a new and desired reality, describes a very diverse array of activities that can be seen virtually everywhere. Examples include actual cosplay focused on superheroes and literary figures like Harry Potter, Renaissance fairs, the act of dressing in academic gowns during convocation ceremonies, Tea Party activists and their penchant for costuming in 18th-century garb, and others besides. As these instances show, the desire to be enchanted is hardly restricted to religious phenomena, which in its turn suggests that the ‘secular’ world we live in is perhaps not quite as disenchanted as we sometimes like to think.

Fifth, as the above examples illustrate, the act of making up new social forms is relatively ordinary. This is not to claim that it is banal or uninteresting. But it is not a special zone of human doing and it is not anything we need to go out of our way to see. We experience it in the formation of new friendships; in the development of new families; in any and every subcultural current, each and every high school clique, each and every fantasy or sci-fi fandom; among Elk Lodges, Masons, bike gangs and so on. There is an academic tendency – not without reason – to treat religious doings as in some way segregated from more ordinary aspects of life. Religion may indeed at times be marked and treated as special or extraordinary, but that does not require us to think that it necessarily involves processes that are foreign to our day-to-day lives, or that it accomplishes things that other kinds of social activity can and do not. Religious architecture may serve to instantiate and actuate a particular social vision as encoded in the cosmic polity imagined by the religion in question. But the decor in my living room does essentially the same thing, making real and tangible a certain self-conception and conception of the world on my part, not simply representing it but – albeit in a limited way – bringing it into being. The religious person is not behaving any differently in their stance towards the world than the non-religious person, or doing something incomparable with, or even necessarily more serious than, the quotidian activities that comprise our days.

For these reasons, I think that a work like The Dawn of Everything, when read alongside other material by, especially, Graeber and Sahlins, is something that religionists, including those who study ancient religion, ought to think seriously about. I want to stress that I am not claiming that there are no other ways to get to these kinds of conclusions, or that the observations made here about religion are especially novel. Other scholars and areas of scholarship have arrived at similar conclusions via different paths. But Graeber’s body of work provides a coherent focal point for gathering these important issues together and, I think, helps to open the door to a wide-ranging series of interesting applications, limited only by our own imaginations.