What Religious Art Reveals About The Evolution of Religion

For thousands of years, human beings have rendered their sacred beliefs, myths, and deities within sculptures, paintings, literature, and song. Up until about 200 years ago, religious themes dominated art, including some of the earliest rock paintings (~25,000 BCE), the theriomorphic sculptures at Göbekli Tepe (9,500 BCE), the Egyptian Book of the Dead (1,550 BCE), the sonorous Hindu Rigveda (1,400 BCE), Homer's Iliad (700 BCE), the Leshan Giant Buddha (803 CE), and Michelangelo’s painting in the Sistine Chapel (1512).

Although less conspicuous today, the protracted relationship between religion and art suggests that they either co-evolved and are two branches of the same behaviour (i.e., a common ancestor) or that religion “hijacked” art to extend its appeal.

Do Religion and Art Have A Common Ancestor?

Beneath the surface, religion and art have much in common. Both are skilfully-crafted ideas that grab our attention, evoke emotion, represent hidden meanings, embellish reality, communicate the messages and beliefs of the artist/priest, and influence the imagination and behaviour of observers in ways that appear to have been beneficial during human evolution (e.g., to prepare us for the unknown, to extend our imaginative reach, to reassure and comfort us, and to reinforce social norms and moral behaviour).

Some scholars have even suggested that art and religion evolved as a single behaviour, only diverging recently into their current forms (see the book An ethology of religion and art). Indeed, religion has historically been behavioral (worship, mass, ritual, divination, sacrifice, etc.), with the doctrinal beliefs of the Abrahamic religions being an outlier. It is easy to see connections between religious behavior and theatric performance, religious beliefs and art theory/criticism, religious texts and literary fiction, and so on.

Where Do Art and Religion Diverge?

There are some differences between art and religion. While art does beautiful things (applying a broad definition of beauty), religion does sacred things. In each case, these are special things that are skillfully-wrought, valuable, attention-grabbing, evocative, inspiring, embellished, and filled with messages (e.g., from an artist or priest). However, sacred things go further by acknowledging some superempirical reality that may endow people with reassuring meaning, wisdom, and a pattern to reality: an invisible order to which people can align their actions.

In this way, art may become religion when a mutually reinforcing network of art objects (idols, texts, ritual performances, body art, costumes, hymns, dances, etc.) are grouped together in such a way that a meaningful pattern can be perceived, and such that their author, whose message we are supposed to understand, may not be a mere artist or priest, but a god (or a god working through a priest).

This theory would suggest that religion was a younger brother of art, originating after a few augmentations to art during the course of human evolution. Given that much of the earliest rock art does not appear to be religious, this story seems plausible.

Did Religion Hijack Art to Spread More Effectively? 

An alternative story is that religion and art share no evolutionary “DNA” with the former parasitizing the latter to extend its appeal. Several scholars have applied this argument to religion’s hijacking of other human traits. For example, people naturally imagine beings and entities around every corner (see Faces in the Clouds), attend to novelty and unexpected things in their environment, see minds as non-physical, mistakenly see design and purpose in their environment, engage in rituals to establish a sense of control, and have a difficult time imagining being dead.

Religions tap into these biases to extend their appeal by giving us novel gods, mindful statues, creation stories, intense rituals, and an afterlife, so it wouldn’t be a surprise if it also hijacked our natural attraction to art. However, if religion were an augmented form of art, none of these features would be too surprising. Art is already about design, performance, and the presentation of novel, imaginative, attention-grabbing worlds.

The Functions of Religious Art

The hijacking hypothesis gains support if we examine the functions of religious art, which can be separated into at least three categories (see the book The Materiality of Divine Agency). Art tends to do the following:

1. It embodies a deity. Sculptures, idols, and portraits are useful stand-ins for gods because they provide a material form for an invisible entity. This material form provides believers with a more involved and natural experience when worshiping, praying, or communicating with the god. Aspects of the form may be exaggerated to highlight the god’s role (e.g., large eyes to represent a watchful god), and these may become so recognizable that they become shorthand symbols (e.g., rays above a head/circle to represent a sun god).

2. It is instructional. Pictures and songs allow illiterate people to learn and understand myths and doctrines, and literate people to imagine them in new ways.

3. It stimulates devotional feeling. Art is an effective way to communicate the emotions attached to the myths and doctrines it depicts and, thus, to stimulate an emotional reaction or “devotional feeling” in observers. This reaction may strengthen people’s beliefs in the myths and doctrines, diverting more attention to them.
   
   

These functions help religion to convert and retain followers by providing a more involved, educational, and emotionally fulfilling experience. Thus, each function supports the view that religion parasitized art to extend its appeal. However, further study is necessary because the functions are also consistent with the co-evolution view: art already is representational, instructional, and evocative, so religious art should be too.

What Can We Learn From Religious Art?

The lack of artistic license in religious art — because gods must not be offended and believers must not be misled — provides researchers with valuable data about how believers perceive their gods over time and circumstance. 

Analyses of this data could help researchers to understand how religion evolves and what attracts people to it today. For example, it may be that gods look more anthropomorphic (like humans) now than in the past. Ancient gods were sometimes theriomorphic (like animals, e.g., Anubis), and a transition to anthropomorphic gods might be associated with an evolution toward religions that focus on morality, wisdom, prayer (i.e., communication and knowledge), and other traits that are more intuitively human.

It may also be that today's gods look more benevolent and less punishing, which may be due to society becoming less dangerous. When bad things happen, people want/blame divine punishment. Thus, safer places and times should have fewer punishing gods.

Simple physical features may also be informative. For example, the objects that gods hold (e.g., weapons), their facial expressions, and even the size of their eyes could tell us whether gods from particular eras were more watchful, angry, or protective.

These data could enable scientists to understand the types of gods that are common, compelling, memorable, and likely to be talked about, believed, and worshiped, informing several theories in the psychology of religion.

(For a deeper dive into the topic of this article, see the book An ethology of religion and art: Belief as behaviour.)