An essential question through the ages has been whether human nature is basically good or basically evil. If it is good, general human progress may be assumed; if it is intrinsically flawed, then the American Founders were right in declaring that nature has to be constrained by justice. Though G. K. Chesterton and others have suggested that original sin is the only empirically demonstrable Christian doctrine, views on what original sin is vary. In this reflective, original, and witty book, Wheaton College English professor Alan Jacobs displays wide learning worn lightly as he examines the views of writers as diverse as Benjamin Franklin and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Jonathan Edwards and C. S. Lewis, and Sigmund Freud and J. R. R. Tolkien.

The concept of original sin predates Christianity, Jacobs points out, citing not only Genesis 3, in which Adam and Eve eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and are expelled from Paradise, but also Psalm 51, which declares that humans are conceived in sin and born in iniquity. “The universality of sin,” Jacobs concludes, “is certainly a Jewish belief.” He explains that the traditions of both Eastern and Western Christianity, though varying in their details, have it that God created human nature intrinsically good, that goodness must entail freedom if it is not to be robotic, and that Adam and Eve freely chose their own will over that of God, thus committing original ­sin—­an alienation from God common to all humanity. All humans participate in original sin, whether it is transmitted from generation to generation through time, or whether the entire human race chooses in one eternal moment to disobey ­God.

Jacobs efficiently defends Augustine (AD 354–430) against the many attacks against him as the author of original sin, demonstrating that doctrines of original sin similar to Augustine’s preceded him by at least two centuries in both the East and the West. Jacobs quickly dismisses the still widely held belief that original sin was ­sexual—­Adam and Eve practiced free sex in Eden before their eviction. Original sin is the initial assertion of human

 against God. Augustine did maintain that original sin, once it existed, was

 sexually through generations, in much the same way that today we understand genetic flaws are passed on. Contrary to another common misconception about Augustine, he was adamant that the source of sin does not lie in the body but rather in the corruption of the will. In fact, he spent a great deal of his career denouncing the Manichean belief that the human body is essentially ­evil.

Jacobs’s most original and provocative argument is that original sin has strong democratic impli­ca­tions. Denial of original sin leads to elitism: Take, for instance, the duchess who simply refuses to believe that she shares a common nature with the unkempt commoners of field and street, or the ­self-­righteous people who believe that they can make themselves good by stacking up a higher pile of good deeds than of bad ones. Their underlying assumption is that some people have exempt status, or higher virtues, or brighter minds, that others ­lack—­plainly speaking, that some people (usually 

). Original sin, on the other hand, is egalitarian because it means that 

 is alienated from God and has an innate tendency to sin. Equally egalitarian is the belief that Christ died in order to give 

 the liberty to escape sin. No one person can dare to consider himself or herself better than others, and no nation or race should dare to do so either. Jacobs offers this fascinating angle on the ­age-­old debate in a splendid ­book.

 is emeritus professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is the author of 17 books and numerous articles on history, religion, and philosophy. His most recent book is 

Paradise Mislaid: How We Lost Heaven and How We Can Regain It

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Jeffrey Burton Russell looks at original sin. 

Bad to the Bone

 is not an account of how God himself evolved (though a few theologians find that not impossible). Instead, Robert Wright’s personable, often witty, and occasionally persuasive book traces human perceptions of the divine from “primitive” religions through the three monotheistic faiths. Traditional Jews, Christians, and Muslims will find their beliefs challenged on virtually every page. Yet Wright is not one of the currently fashionable ­antitheists. It may well be, he avers, that there is an overarching metaphysical Purpose for (or of) the cosmos, though he will only go so far as to allow that “there might be a kind of god that is real.”

 (1994), does not take religious ideas seriously in themselves. He concedes that they may serve the social function of promoting cohesion, but he proposes that they exist only as “memes” (an unfor­tunate term coined by Richard Dawkins). Much as genes mutate and develop through biological time, memes are hypothesized to mutate and develop through the history of human culture. Hence the “evolution” of God. Perhaps. But, as is so often the case, Wright’s beguiling rhetoric sweeps him along from “this might have been the case” to “this was so.”

Materialism supplies the assumptions and the arguments of the book. Wright mainly draws on soft Marxism, ­neo-­Darwinist evolutionary psychology, anthropological functionalism, and the current fashion to consider power the motor of history. He offers no comfort to antitheists such as Christopher Hitchens who want to blame the world’s ills on religion, for he argues that religions develop mainly in response to political and economic events, and so can hardly be their main ­cause.

Wright predicates his argument on the assumption that “history” creates progress, and here is one of the many instances in which his rhetorical powers lead him to skate on thin ice. Historians will assure him that “history” doesn’t 

 anything. So let’s take his repeated references to “history” as metonymy for the development of human thought. Certainly human thought changes, but whether it develops in any particular direction is doubtful. Progress with a capital P is the great superstition of our age. Scanning the last hundred years, it is hard to accept that overall progress has occurred in the course of the genocides, the Holocaust, the wars, the development of atomic weaponry—brutality generalized to a degree unimaginable in 1909. Only in one sphere of human endeavor can progress sensibly be argued: technology. Wright believes that technology, which has paved the way for globalization, will make people more humane as we come to understand and respect one another more. But technology is ­value ­neutral, enhancing the human power for both good and evil by a staggeringly vast ­amount.

Wright believes that religion begins with animism (the belief that everything in nature has a spirit). He offers a history of humanity’s procession from polytheism to monolatry (worship of only one god among many) to monotheism to (he hopes) a more loving religion. In this he is faithful to the ideas of Auguste Comte and the anthropologist Edward Tylor; he even shares some thinking with the Scottish social anthropologist James Frazer, Saint Augustine, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. No one since Frazer has made “primitive” religion as colorful as Wright does. Wright argues that the Israelites’ monotheism became fully fixed only from the time of the Babylonian Exile (the banishment of most of the Jewish people to Babylonia during 586–538 bc). Most Jewish and Christian scholars would agree, though they hold that the change was brought about more through revelation and theological reflection than politics and ­economics.

Wright flatly denies that any ­scriptures—­Jewish, Christian, ­Muslim—­are inspired. This stance is inevitable in a materialist take on the subject, but Wright tends to subscribe to radical reinterpretations of history, sug­gesting, for example, that there was no Moses. Wright’s treatment of Jesus is particularly weak. He relies exclusively on the theories of the “historical Jesus” tradition, which contrasts a putative “real” ­Jesus—­a relatively obscure prophet who was executed by the Romans for being a public ­nuisance—­with a mythical Christ that emerged sometime around the end of the first century through an anonymous and mainly oral tradition. The thousands of scholars who subscribe to this hypothesis pay little attention to critics such as Richard Bauckham, who has argued that the Gospels most likely grew from eyewitness accounts. It turns out that the “historical Jesus” is, 

, more like the Jesus of the New Testament and the early church than he is like the Jesus of Robert ­Wright.

 is peppered with intriguing ideas. It is worth reading, with a skeptical eye ­peeled.

 is emeritus professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is the author of 17 books and numerous articles on history, religion, and philosophy. His most recent book is

 Paradise Mislaid: How We Lost Heaven and How We Can Regain It (2006).

 by Robert Wright, Little, Brown and Company, 554 pp, 2010.

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Human perceptions of the divine have evolved over time. What does that fact tell us about culture?