sometimes forced to participate. The history of early Christianity also
includes many difficult conflicts between the competing claims of a
still fragile Church with considerable political backing and a host of
local cults that somehow deviate from the doctrine. In the case of
Christianity, the great difficulty at first was to decide exactly what the
doctrine was. The essentials of the doctrine did not originate in a
scholarly group but were those of a messianic, revolutionary move-
ment, a loose federation of groups with not entirely compatible inter-
pretations of not entirely similar accounts of the Revelation. When
the movement did become an organized religious guild with great
[282] political leverage, this created a series of complex struggles between
political factions that identified themselves in terms of these different
interpretations of revelation and morality. Hence the long succession
of Councils supposed to establish, once and for all, coherent founda-
tions for the doctrine and therefore to determine who was in and who
was out.
In some ways, Hinduism achieved a more balanced equilibrium
between the general, literate version and the inevitable local variants
and additions. This was realized mostly through the convenient divi-
sion between great gods of cosmic significance and local deities, more
generally goddesses, that are mainly relevant at the local level. More
or less every settlement has its own goddess who is specially concerned
with the inhabitants of that special place. Such deities are no less
"Hindu" than the great gods but this arrangement gives people some
leeway in the creation of concepts and ritual practices that are not
entirely defined by the religious guild. However, tensions remain even
within this apparently stable division of labor between deities. As
anthropologist Chris Fuller notes, "There is clear evidence that deities
particularly favored by Brahmans, who are offered only vegetarian
food and are worshiped in Sanskrit by Brahman priests, are disparaged
by some low-caste Hindus, who see them as much weaker than other
deities such as village goddesses, who are offered animal sacrifice and
praised in the vernacular by non-Brahmans."^9
This process of addition, re-creation and modification of concepts
isconstantand in all likelihood destined to go on as long as there are
organized groups of literate religious scholars. People may well resort
to the services of various literate guilds and even identify themselves as
followers of that guild, but this does not mean that their supernatural
concepts are really organized by the messages delivered by these spe-
cialists. Actual religious concepts always seem to stick out, as it were,
RELIGION EXPLAINED