Religions Can't Be Tamed

 

December 30, 2021

What if we understood more about spiritual practices that exist outside the boundaries of organized religions? What if important and intuitive spiritual needs aren’t being satisfied within mainstream world religions? What if we could gain valuable insights from these “wild religions”? What if the ways in which religions address misfortune are actually key to their success?

Wild Religions Are Persistent

In Morocco, if a family member falls ill, a devout Muslim may bypass the confines of orthodox Islam and instead visit a marabou—a mystic healer who operates more or less underground. The marabou might write a verse from the Quran on a piece of paper, dip it into a glass of water, and then offer the water to the visitor to sip as a form of spiritual healing. This ritual is not found in the canon of Islam, yet it persists and is still practiced today.

Mystic healing, shamanism, ancestor worship, voodoo, spirit-warding rituals, tarot cards, and other forms of divination—these are the practices that characterize many of the world’s “wild religions.” And these are the practices that fascinate Professor Pascal Boyer, an evolutionary anthropologist and psychologist at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Boyer is widely considered one of the most influential founders of the cognitive science of religion.

“Wild religions existed before the emergence of organized religions in most prehistoric societies. They’re also found today in small-scale, so-called ‘tribal’ or ‘traditional’ societies. And they still persist alongside organized religions in most large-scale societies,” Boyer explains.

With support from the Templeton Religion Fund, Boyer has established a cohort of a dozen scholars from the fields of history, anthropology, psychology, and religious studies. Together, they plan to combine their expertise in a detailed, collaborative research project aimed at examining wild religions.

Looking Beyond Doctrines, Leaders, and Rituals

Despite their historical and contemporary prevalence, wild religions have been largely ignored or treated superficially by researchers, Boyer says. As a result, prevailing attitudes about religion are skewed toward those with well-established doctrines—Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, and so on. According to Boyer, “We’ve forgotten that a great deal of religious activity was happening before those doctrines—and is still being practiced at their margins.”

That oversight, he argues, is a serious one. Existing both outside and within organized, “tamed” religions, the practices of wild religion are authentic expressions of spontaneous spirituality. As such, Boyer believes they may hold important clues for understanding the psychology of religion—why people believe, what they believe, and how those beliefs function.

Harvey Whitehouse, Director of the Centre for the Study of Social Cohesion at the University of Oxford and one of Boyer’s collaborators, agrees. “Different scholars have different ways of trying to boil religion down to a single thing,” he says. “But I think one of the hallmarks of this project is that it doesn’t look for that kind of magic bullet. Instead, it fractionates religion into its myriad component features and tries to explain how they are grounded in different aspects of our cognitive apparatus.”

The Persistence of “Why Me?”

Initially, the project is focused on building a database to map the beliefs and practices of wild religions—both past and present. It will look for recurring patterns and analyze why these similarities exist. In particular, the research will focus on how wild religions address misfortune.

According to Boyer, unlike doctrinal religions, wild religions rarely deal with abstract questions such as the origin of the universe, the root of evil, or the salvation of the soul. Instead, they are focused on immediate, pragmatic concerns—curing illness, ensuring a good harvest, or understanding why misfortune strikes one person but not another. These traditions offer ways to deal with witches, ancestors, ghosts, and spirits.

Boyer sees this difference as critical. “Wild religions activate universal cognitive systems concerned with threat detection and precaution,” he explains. His research will investigate how this deep-seated cognitive response to risk—essentially, proactively “fighting” for safety and solutions rather than “freezing” or “fleeing”—helps explain the resilience of wild religions across cultures. “When misfortune happens, a very common human question is, ‘Why me?’ So maybe,” he speculates, “the way religious traditions address misfortune is crucial to their success.”

Later stages of the research will examine how religious traditions evolve, testing the hypothesis that wild religions enjoy a “sticky” cultural advantage, while doctrinal religions tend to hold greater institutional and political power in the present.

To truly understand human religious capacity, Boyer insists, we must look beyond “tame” religious traditions and expand our view to include the older, more widespread, and spontaneous forms of religious thought and practice. The research he now leads is a significant step in that direction.

Comparative Chart: Wild Religions vs. Organized Religions

Aspect	Wild Religions	Organized (Tame) Religions
Origins	Prehistoric; ancient, spontaneous traditions	Historically recent; codified systems that emerged later
Structure	Informal, decentralized, often individual or local practice	Formal hierarchy, institutions, leadership (clergy, priesthood)
Sacred Texts	Rare or non-existent; may use symbolic items (e.g., amulets, charms)	Central, codified texts (Bible, Quran, Torah, Vedas, etc.)
Doctrines	Few or none; flexible belief systems	Well-defined theological doctrines and creeds
Focus of Practice	Immediate, practical concerns (healing, protection, agriculture)	Existential questions (salvation, morality, creation, afterlife)
Practices	Shamanism, ancestor worship, divination, spirit communication, voodoo	Prayer, ritual worship, fasting, pilgrimages, sacraments
Cognitive Appeal	Activates threat detection and precaution systems; reactive	Engages moral reasoning, abstract reflection, communal norms
Persistence	Continues alongside or within organized religions	Maintained through institutions and formal conversion
Cultural Embedding	Deeply embedded in folk traditions and rural communities	Linked to empire-building, state sponsorship, education systems
Research Status	Understudied, often dismissed as superstition	Heavily studied in theology, history, and sociology
Example Figures or Roles	Marabou, shaman, witch doctor, diviner	Priest, imam, rabbi, monk, bishop
Influence Mechanism	"Sticky" through cultural transmission and need-based relevance	Institutional power and political alignment
Examples	North African folk Islam, Haitian Vodou, Amazonian shamanism, tarot readings	Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism