one extreme and duty as the other, then we can draw a parallel to other social orders. If we consider the extreme spectrum of apprehension ranging to terror we find the basis of trust in despotic regimes. In any case, it is the level of this state of altered consciousness that determines our degree of trust in the cognitive concepts associated with it. The secret of religion’s success as a social structure is in simultaneously evoking a similar feeling of trust in all the members of a group. While it may not be a feeling of the same intensity, it can be a distribution of uniformly directed trust among all individuals in the group toward a common policy. What then is the source of this trust?

Religion seeks to draw a common foundation of trust for its adherents from a source outside the realm of physical experience. This forms the primary differentiation between religions and other social structures. As we will consider in greater detail in subsequent chapters, with specific emphasis in Chapter 7, trust can derive from causality. Religions, particularly theistic religions, establish basic causality from beyond natural sources; by supernatural means. Causality validation is in turn based on perceived results, a statement that we will expand on in Chapter 9. Did the believed causality lead to an ostensibly better understood outcome than might otherwise have been anticipated? Can successful predictions of perceived future outcomes be based on this causality? If trust derived from a supernatural source can thus be reasonably established, then a second order question to be addressed is, “How does policy derive within the infrastructure of trust that springs from this source?” With religion, the answer is virtually always through the same mechanism; from a shaman who acts as the intermediary between the source of trust and the specification of policy. In this manner, policy is established that determines the basis for subsequent interactions. The source and mechanisms of trust on which policy depends typically include the establishment of identity for the individuals who are subject to these policy specifications, including the rules governing interactions and the consequences of these interactions. The shaman, often acting under the guise of prophet or lawgiver, becomes the source of policy under the auspices of the source of trust. Simply stated, God dictates the laws to the prophets and the prophets convey the law to the believers. From this point on, all social structures behave in essentially the same manner. Trust and policy infrastructure may elicit different effects, but the mechanisms are much the same.

Illustrative of our contention that theology is, in fact, about trust and policy are the circumstances of at least one of the great schisms of the Western Church. A schism in reference to social orders is a process for change within social frameworks that foments as a product of diminished trust due to the effects of prescribed policy based on this trust.

This diminution often results in a subsequent reformulation of policy or perhaps in the creation of a whole new basis of trust. We view a schism as essentially an evolutionary process periodically encountered in social structures of all forms. In the Western World, the Protestant Reformation was such a schism and was most certainly about trust and policy. It was formulated by arguably one of the great policy wonks of any age, the erstwhile priest Martin Luther. Working from within the most powerful policy infrastructure of the day, the clergy of the Roman Catholic Church, he challenged the very precepts of that infrastructure. He questioned how both trust and policy were established, how trust was conveyed, how policy was implemented, the consequences of adherence or abrogation of policy, and the very boundaries of the trust and policy infrastructures. Consequently, he brought into question the details of the Church’s policy predicated upon the basis of trust originally established by the Church, and in so doing he incited a stark repudiation of that policy.

Martin Luther was a German monk described by Will and Ariel Durant in The Story of Civilization, from which we derive much of the following discussion, as an earthy man. He was

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