Thanks to Jeremy for tipping me off to this very interesting article about animals and religion from the Martin Marty Center. One of the issues it raises is the upsurge of interest in the “religiosity” of animals:

There are ancient precedents for the claim that nonhuman animals have a religious sensibility. Pliny the Elder (23-79 CE) claimed that elephants, the animal “closest to man,” not only recognized the language of their homeland, obeyed orders, and remembered what they learned, but also had been seen “worshipping the sun and stars, and purifying [themselves] at the new moon, bathing in the river, and invoking the heavens.”

Today, scholars such as Harvard’s Kimberley C. Patton provide theologically informed readings of many traditional claims about the religious awareness of other beings. Patton deals, for example, with “ways in which animals are believed to possess a unique awareness of holiness,” noting that “in many religious worlds…mutual intelligibility obtains between God and animals that exists outside of human perceptual ranges.” Assertions of a special relationship between animals and God are routinely dismissed in our human-centered world. But the increased attendance at Jigenen temple reflects that we are fascinated by our fellow creatures and the idea of their potential spirituality. In fact, “religion and animals” themes appear in a surprising number of places—one example is Peter Miller’s article “Jane Goodall” in the December 1995 National Geographic, in which he discusses Goodall’s belief that expressions of awe by chimpanzees at a waterfall site “may resemble the emotions that led early humans to religion.”

The Bible certainly seems to suggest that animals have a relationship with God. It speaks repeatedly about the animals (along with the rest of creation) praising God, and God makes his covenant after the flood with human beings and animals. In fact, the biblical worldview in general seems to see human beings and animals as part of a single community, which is obviously closer to the view of modern science than to the Enlightenment-inspired view of human beings existing on one side of an unbridgeable gulf from “brute” creation. And just as we’ve come to see that most capacities once thought of as uniquely human have analogues and precedents in the animal kingdom, it wouldn’t surprise me at all to find a religious sense among them. In fact, if, as Thomas Aquinas I think suggested, animals do by instinct what human beings have to freely choose to do, they may exist in a kind of pre-lapsarian state of grace and unity with God that we have divorced ourselves from.