to distort the official message or to add all sorts of officially incorrect
interpretations. This is in fact inevitable, because the official messages
themselves must be understood by people; which means that they
must produce inferences to make them coherent or relevant; which in
turn implies that their mental constructions must complete, often in
divergent ways, messages that are by nature fragmentary, in this as in
other domains of cultural constructions.
As I said a few chapters back, people tend to construe gods and
spirits as agents with strategic knowledge, and therefore explain their
moral intuitions as the fact that supernatural agents are monitoring
their actions. Some literate guilds accept that notion, but they gener- [283]
ally try to promote a more abstract and internally coherent account of
morality, in terms of precisely listed rules and prohibitions. But this
somehow never replaces the notion that the gods or spirits are around
and concerned with people's behavior. Indeed, when the literate
account is too abstract, people just addto it the notion that their
ancestors and some spirits are around and concerned with people's
actions anyway. It is very difficult for literate groups to counter peo-
ple's tendency to make their religious concepts more local and more
practical.People are never quite as "theologically correct" as the guild
would like them to be.^10
THE TRAGEDY
OF THE THEOLOGIANWhy this tendency? Given the coherence, wide diffusion and stability
of the guilds' message, it seems surprising (not least to the religious
guilds themselves) that this influence is constantly threatened by less
organized, less coherent and less general versions of religious con-
cepts. But, as anthropologists have suggested, these latter features
may well be the very reason why nonstandard versions arise and
become successful.
Sociologist Max Weber emphasized this phenomenon, contrasting
a routinized version of religious authority where everything is defined
and described by the appropriate religious officials, with periodic out-
bursts of charismatic or revolutionary activity. The latter are generally
centered around individuals who inspire and rekindle people's reli-
gious passion, blunted by the repetitive and bureaucratic teachings of
the religious guild, around spectacular rituals and renewed enthusi-
WHYDOCTRINES,EXCLUSION AND VIOLENCE?