more fragile than that of other groups. Specialized craftsmen often
have no difficulty maintaining exclusive supply, either because other
people would not want to perform their dangerous and polluting tasks
(gathering garbage, burying the dead, butchering animals, etc.), or
because these tasks require technical knowledge and a long appren-
ticeship (most crafts). In contrast, religious specialists supply some-
thing—rituals, a guarantee that they are efficient in dealing with
supernatural agents—that could very easily be provided by outsiders.
Indeed, in most places with such castes of religious specialists there are
other providers: local witch-doctors, healers, shamans, holy men and
[276] knowledgeable elders (in other words all the "local" specialists
described above) who can always claim that they too offer some inter-
action with supernatural agents or protection against misfortune.
This is one of the reasons why religious castes or guilds very often
try to gain maximal political influence. Not all religious guilds
achieved control over the whole political process as the Christian
Church did for a large part of European history. For instance, the
Indian groups of scholarly Brahmans did to some extent impose a spe-
cific form of religious practice but they did not displace the political
supremacy of kings. The Chinese "schools" (Taoism, Confucianism,
Buddhism) never imposed themselves as paramount political forces.
However, all these groups in these different circumstances did wield
considerable political influence.
The fact that religious groups are so involved in political intrigue and
manage to find a political niche in most places with centralized author-
ity is very familiar to all of us, so familiar indeed that we may forget that
it is a specialcharacteristic of such groups. For instance, castes of crafts-
men also try to garner some political support and lend their weight to
various political factions, but they are not usually as important as groups
of religious scholars. This is not because the goods and services pro-
vided by craftsmen are less indispensable or important. In fact the rea-
son may be exactly the opposite. Since the services of literate religious
groupsare dispensable, the religious schools that do not yield some
measure of political leverage are very likely to end up as marginal sects,
a process that has happened repeatedly in history. So priests and other
religious specialists are not necessarily central to large-scale political
organization. But the ones that do not manage to garner some political
leverage fall by the wayside. (Incidentally, this is why it is both largely
true and somewhat misleading to construe religion as the ally of the
oppressors, as an institution that invariably supports centralized political
RELIGION EXPLAINED