246 religious revolution nowfor themselves. Or they may content themselves with holding the state
to a standard of their design without governing themselves.
Th e history of religion shows that three conditions have been impor-
tant, if not indispensable, to the survival and spread of a religious mes-
sage in the world. Th e fi rst condition is that the message be embodied
in texts that achieve canonical status. Th e authoritative scriptural
sources do not prevent later acts of religious innovation outside the
canon. However, they provide a touchstone of true doctrine, which dis-
putes about the interpretation of the teaching can never entirely erase.
Th ey also make all thinking and writing aft er or outside the canon sub-
ject to direct challenge by appeal to the canon.
Th e second condition is that the community of belief be or ga nized.
Such arrangements may or may not involve a distinction between priestly
experts claiming a special closeness to the divine (or at least a special
expertise in the canon) and the believer at large. It therefore may or
may not take the form of an ecclesiastical or ga ni za tion, appearing with
distinct personality in the social world. Th e apparent absence of a church
may be misleading if the custodians of the canon colonize some other
or ga ni za tion, notably the state. Such was, famously, the relation of the
Confucian scholar- bureaucrats to government. Th e primary role of the
or ga ni za tion is to uphold right doctrine. Its secondary role is to imple-
ment the message in the world.
Th e third condition is that the religion become the religion of at least
one people, or of a group of nations, not just of a collection of individu-
als separated and submerged in the societies to which they belong. Th e
bond between religion and people, even in the most universalistic
world religions— Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam— creates commu-
nities of faith that keep the religion alive across generations. It anchors
the faith in the matchless power of family life. It endures even in the
face of a constitutional separation of church and state.
Th e third condition may sometimes serve as a substitute for the
second condition, or the second as a substitute for the third. More com-
monly, the two have been combined, although in the resulting combi-
nation one element may be overt and the other covert.
An inverse relation exists between the second and third conditions.
Th e more the religion becomes a people, the less the apparent need for