Purity and Danger

One of the assumptions at the root of our culture—reflected by some early anthropologists—is that primitive peoples lacked a truly spiritual conception of religion, believing instead in external and instrumental rituals like magic. This dichotomy recalls the tension between “interior will and exterior enactment” (74)—a tension seen in the religious history of Judaism (the Law versus the Prophets) and Christianity (the Protestant reformers versus the established church).

Our thinking on these matters has been influenced by the early anthropologists, some of whom had a blatantly anti-ritual bias. Such thinkers believed ritual incapable of expressing spiritual ideas. On the contrary, ritual fulfills a universal human need for structure and a vision of reality: “It is a mistake to suppose that there can be religion which is all interior, with no rules, no liturgy, no external signs of inward states. As with society, so with religion, external form is the condition of its existence” (77).