[source: sowhatfaith.com]

Patheos’ Science On Religion points out that liberal Protestantism is dying even as more conservative Protestant movements thrive. This seems counterintuitive in the context of society as a whole becoming less religious and conservative. So what’s going on?

In the early 1990s, a political economist named Laurence Iannaccone claimed that seemingly arbitrary demands and restrictions, like going without electricity (the Amish) or abstaining from caffeine (Mormons), can actually make a group stronger. He was trying to explain religious affiliation from a rational-choice perspective: in a marketplace of religious options, why would some people choose religions that make serious demands on their members, when more easygoing, low-investment churches were – literally – right around the corner? Weren’t the warmer and fuzzier churches destined to win out in fair, free-market competition?

According to Iannaccone, no. He claimed that churches that demanded real sacrifice of their members were automatically stronger, since they had built-in tools to eliminate people with weaker commitments. Think about it: if your church says that you have to tithe 10% of your income, arrive on time each Sunday without fail, and agree to believe seemingly crazy things, you’re only going to stick around if you’re really sure you want to. Those who aren’t totally committed will sneak out the back door before the collection plate even gets passed around.

And when a community only retains the most committed followers, it has a much stronger core than a community with laxer membership requirements. Members receive more valuable benefits, in the form of social support and community, than members of other communities, because the social fabric is composed of people who have demonstrated that they’re totally committed to being there. This muscular social fabric, in turn, attracts more members, who are drawn to the benefits of a strong community – leading to growth for groups with strict membership requirements.

The evolutionary anthropologist William Irons calls demanding rituals and onerous requirements “hard-to-fake symbols of commitment.” If you’re not really committed to the group, you won’t be very enthusiastic about fasting, abstaining from coffee, tithing ten percent, or following through on any of the other many costly requirements that conservative religious communities demand. The result? Only the most committed believers stick around, benefiting from one another’s in-group-oriented generosity, social support, and community.

Since then, Sosis has also demonstrated that religious Israeli kibbutz members are more generous in resource-sharing games than both secular, urban Israelis and secular kibbutzim. He argues that this is, in part, because demanding rituals – such as having to pray three times a day and study Torah many hours a week – serve as a signal of investment in the kibbutz community. The more rituals you participate in, the more invested you feel – and the more willing you are to sacrifice for your fellows.

But if your community doesn’t have any of these costly requirements, then you don’t feel that you have to be really committed in order to belong. The whole group ends up with a weakened, and less committed, membership. Liberal Protestant churches, which have famously lax requirements about praxis, belief, and personal investment, therefore often end up having a lot of half-committed believers in their pews. The parishioners sitting next to them can sense that the social fabric of their church isn’t particularly robust, which deters them from investing further in the collective. It’s a feedback loop. The whole community becomes weaker…and weaker…and weaker.

Even though I’ve quoted like half the blog post, it’s worth looking at just to see the empirical and statistical arguments for their hypothesis.

Not that any of this should come as a surprise. This is the same principle of maintaining separation between in-group and out-group members which has worked so well for so many eons. But making the in-group follow specific rules to prove their dedication does seem particularly effective.

I’ve been thinking about this in the context of atheist religion-substitutes. I went to the Secular Solstice last weekend, and it was held in the New York Society For Ethical Culture building. As usual I avoided social interaction by beelining to the nearest reading material, and in this case that was a plaque detailing the group’s history. The Society for Ethical Culture was founded in 1877 by an ex-rabbi (of course it was an ex-rabbi) and looks pretty much exactly like every atheist religious substitute today. That got me a little depressed. Atheism has been trying the same things for the past one hundred fifty years and, I would argue, largely failing for the past one hundred fifty years. Religion substitutes are hard.

The biggest atheist religion-substitute I know of is Sunday Assembly. I recently came across their “Ten Commandments”:

1. Is a 100 per cent celebration of life. We are born from nothing and go to nothing. Let’s enjoy it together.

2. Has no doctrine. We have no set texts so we can make use of wisdom from all sources.

3. Has no deity. We don’t do supernatural but we also won’t tell you you’re wrong if you do.

4. Is radically inclusive. Everyone is welcome, regardless of their beliefs – this is a place of love that is open and accepting.

5. Is free to attend, not-for-profit and volunteer-run. We ask for donations to cover our costs and support our community work.

6. Has a community mission. Through our Action Heroes (you!) we will be a force for good.

7. Is independent. We do not accept sponsorship or promote outside organisations.

8. Is here to stay. With your involvement, the Sunday Assembly will make the world a better place.

9. We won’t tell you how to live, but will try to help you do it as well as you can.

10. And remember point 1…The Sunday Assembly is a celebration of the one life we know we have.

But it’s tough for me to picture these on big stone tablets. And yeah, I know the reason we don’t have the original tablets is that when Sunday Assembly Moses came down from Mt. Sinai he saw the Sunday Assembly people only celebrating life 95 percent, and waxed wroth, and broke the tablets, and then ordered the Levites to slaughter all the men, women, and children who had participated in this abomination. And then…

…okay, that’s probably not the reason they’re not on tablets. But that’s just the thing. It’s impossible to imagine these commandments inspiring strong emotions in anybody. It’s impossible to imagine people sinning against them in a meaningful way. Most of them aren’t even commandments. They’re more like promises not to command. If you absolutely must compare this pablum to a list of ten points, the proper analogy is less to the Ten Commandments than to the Bill of Rights.

(“God shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”)

Atheist religion-substitutes seem unconcerned about or actively hostile to placing rules upon their members. I mean, there are a lot of things that are like “You must be tolerant”. But in practice everybody thinks “intolerant” means “more intolerant than I am, since I am only intolerant of things that are actually bad,” so no one changes their behavior. People say that we have advanced by replacing useless rules like “don’t eat pork” with useful rules like “be tolerant”, but rules against eating pork resulted in decreased pork consumption whereas it’s not clear that rules like “be tolerant” result in anything.

The only secular-ish group I have ever seen which is truly virtuous in this respect is, once again, Giving What We Can. They demand that members give ten percent of their income to charity. To join you must request and sign a paper copy of a form pledging to do this. Every year, the organization asks you to confirm that you are still complying. I don’t know what happens if you aren’t, but I assume it’s too horrible to contemplate. Maybe Peter Singer breaks into your house and kills you for the greater good.

But the point is, here’s an organization that has a very specific rule and demands you follow it. And even though their pledge form looked kind of like a tax return, signing that form was more of a sanctifying and humbling experience than any of the religion-substitutes that try to intentionally generate sanctification. Not because I was at some chapel where someone gave a rousing sermon overusing the word “community”, but because I was binding myself, voluntarily submitting to a higher moral authority.

Someone on my blog a while back used the word “nomic” to refer to a subculture based on following a rule set, sort of like an opt-in religion without beliefs or supernatural elements. I looked to see if it was a real thing but couldn’t find any references other than the card game. But I find the idea interesting. If it contains mechanisms for treating subculture members differently than non-members, it seems like an optional add-on module to government, and a strong candidate for the sort of thing that could develop into a healthy Archipelago.

So I’m the person you are insisting doesn’t exist – a completely pro-gay atheist who voted against Proposition 8 and thinks supporting gay marriage is a no-brainer, but who is also kind of horrified at Phil Robertson being fired for his comments.

You are 100% correct that freedom-of-speech only binds the government and does not constrain private actors from punishing people whose speech they don’t like.

But let’s compare and contrast. Freedom of religion *also* only binds the government and does not constraint private actors from punishing people whose religion they don’t like. If someone wants to picket a mosque while waving signs about how all Muslims are dirty terrorists who are going to Hell, Constitutional freedom of religion is a-ok with that. Heck, Constitutional freedom-of-religion is okay with Christian-owned businesses refusing to hire atheist employees or serve atheist customers – it’s only more recent anti-discrimination laws that prevent that.

Point is, there’s a big gap between “constitutional freedom of religion” and “the level of religious tolerance that is necessary to have a remotely civil society.” Some of that gap can be filled in by laws, but a lot of it can’t be. It’s supposed to be filled in by basic human decency and understanding of the principles that made freedom of religion a good idea to begin with.

I think the same is true of freedom of speech. Constitutional freedom-of-speech is a necessary but not sufficient condition to have a “marketplace of ideas” and avoid de facto censorship. But people also have to understand that the correct response to “idea I disagree with” is “counterargument”, not “find some way to punish or financially ruin the person who expresses it.” If you respond with counterargument, then there’s a debate and eventually the people with better ideas win (as is very clearly happening right now with gay marriage). If there’s a norm of trying to punish the people with opposing views, then it doesn’t really matter whether you’re doing it with threats of political oppression, of financial ruin, or of social ostracism, the end result is the same – the group with the most money and popularity wins, any disagreeing ideas never get expressed.

Atheists may one day be the group with the most money and popularity, but that day isn’t today and right now it’s neither moral nor in our self-interest to encourage using greater resources to steamroll opponents. It’s certainly not in gay people’s self-interest either. Why shouldn’t companies owned by Christians fire all gay people on the grounds that they are promoting sin? Right now it’s bcause we have a mutual truce in which we agree businesses should employ people based on their skills and merit rather than to reward their political allies and punish their political opponents. Once you undermine that, gay people are in a pretty precarious position.

So I would turn your own hypothetical scenario in Part 2 of your post back on you. Suppose Robertson had indeed, been a gay rights supporter – or a gay person! – who said on national news he thought everyone should stand up for gay rights. But his company was going for the fundie demographic and decided to fire him for his statement. Would you be so quick to attack everyone who was disappointed in this action, so eager to stand up for the right of companies to fire anyone they disagree with?

I’m an atheist blogger and I work at a Catholic hospital. Employer tolerance for dissenting opinions is *personal* for me. I’m disappointed in the tone of this post and I hope you reconsider.

I can’t tell how many other people have made similar points because none of the three browsers on my computer can successfully load Patheos’ nightmarish comment system more than once in a blue moon. But I hope some other Patheos atheists are saying the same. And I have huge respect for the few voices on the lefty blogosphere, like Ampersand, who have spoken out in favor of restraint.

CORRECTION: Mr. Robertson was suspended rather than fired, and has since been reinstated.

The King had a thousand and one reasons why
He hated the stars that appeared in the sky!
He hated the wise men! He hated the myrrh
And the frankincense also, whatever they were!

He hated the shepherds! He hated the manger!
He hated the way that his throne was in danger!
He hated the prophecies bearing the news
He would soon be replaced as the King of the Jews
Yes, the number one reason the King felt so down
Was the tales of Messiahs usurping his crown.

So he thought and reflected, he planned and he schemed
He wondered and pondered and plotted and dreamed
He came up with a plan! Such a terrible plan!
To stop the Messiah before he began.
He would steal all the innocent babies away
And with Christ gone for good, he would end Christmas Day

So he searched through his palace, the front and the back
Till he found a warm coat and a Very Big Sack
And when night fell in Jewville, his men searched the houses
As fast as the birds and as quiet as mouses
And they gathered the children, and brought them all back
And the king placed them all in his Very Big Sack.

The King hooted and laughed as they finished their mission
“Mwa ha ha!” he exclaimed, as his plans reached fruition
“Now all of the children are here in my sack
And I don’t plan on giving a single one back!
I’ve stolen their toddlers, I’ve stolen their babies!
I’ve got their Messiah, no ifs, buts, or maybes!
They can stop all their songs and their feasts and their fun
Because Christmas is OVER and FINISHED and DONE!”

But the King heard a sound coming over the sand
And he jumped in surprise, and could not understand
It was singing, and laughing, and feasting, and fun
It was families dancing in joy, every one

King Herod turned red at their festive behavior:
“How can Christmas still come, when I’ve stolen the Savior?
It came without Bibles! It came without churches!
It came without Wise Men embarking on searches!
It came without sermons and prayers, and moreover
It came without Heaven and Hell and Jehovah!”

Then a very strange thought made his heart rise and fall
What if Christmas was not about Jesus at all?

What if Christmas, he thought, didn’t come from a priest?
What if Christmas was not about that in the least?

And what happened then? Well, in Jewville they say
That King Herod’s small heart grew three sizes that day!
And the minute his heart didn’t feel quite so tight
He returned all the children he’d taken that night
And he ordered his cooks to bring food for the feast
And King Herod himself carved the course of roast beast!

[I recently locked my old blog and am gradually reposting some of the stuff that deserves to survive from there onto here. This seemed like an appropriate start.]

“This, therefore, is, in conclusion, my reason for accepting the religion and not merely the scattered and secular truths out of the religion. I do it because the thing has not merely told this truth or that truth, but has revealed itself as a truth-telling thing. All other philosophies say the things that plainly seem to be true; only this philosophy has again and again said the thing that does not seem to be true, but is true. Alone of all creeds it is convincing where it is not attractive”

Forgive me if I go into Angry Internet Atheist Mode for a second, but…

Yes, it’s told so many truths. Like that God created the world in seven days. And that there was a giant flood. And that it’s morally acceptable to condemn people to eternal torture. And that homosexuality is wrong. And that slaves should submit to their masters. And women to their husbands. And that the Second Coming will occur before the last of this generation passes away. And that people who are capable of doing so should castrate themselves. And that you should not suffer a witch to live. And that epilepsy is sometimes caused by demons. And that it’s a really really good idea to kill Babylonian children.

And that everything is a combination of essence and accidents. And that things have final and formal causes. And that the planets are arranged in a succession of crystalline spheres, each with a governing angel. And that capitalism is a terrible idea. And that church councils like the one that killed Jan Huss are infallible.

And after you’ve subtracted all the things that, in the light of modernity, obviously the Bible couldn’t have actually mean or obviously couldn’t really have been Biblically supported, what are you left with? Ideas like “humanity is flawed”. Gee, thanks religion. Surely only God could have noticed this startling and well-concealed insight!

When religion makes non-trivial testable claims, whether in its holy books or from later clergy trying to interpret those holy books, those claims have a spectacular record of being exactly as wrong as you would expect from chance – and then some. So what the stars are the “truth telling thing” people talking about?

Let’s ask one. From Unequally Yoked:

In some ways, I find myself in a similar position to Chesterton. I find that a lot of Christian theology works for me in a way that plenty of other philosophies have not. When I say ‘works’ I mean pretty much what Chesterton does—that it matches many of the core assumptions I make about the world, and it harmonizes some of the conflicting ones in ways I didn’t expect, but seem to fit.

Time for a metaphor here, and I’m going to sort of steal it from Alasdair MacIntyre.

Suppose that one of the Roman civil wars – let’s say the one precipitating the Year of Four Emperors – goes on for decades and turns into an apocalypse. Roman civilization and learning are destroyed. All the Romans have are fragments of their old culture. Something something Mt. Olympus. Some kind of apple thrown at some kind of party caused the fall of Troy. There are these books in a cave that tell the future, who knows how they got there? We should avoid hubris, but we don’t know why.

Then someone from a very distant colony arrives, bearing intact copies of the Iliad and the Odyssey and a few other important books that reveal all the tenets of Greco-Roman paganism.

Suddenly, everything makes sense! The reason we go on pilgrimages to Mt. Olympus is because the gods live there. The reason an apple caused the fall of Troy was because it was thrown by the Goddess of Discord! The reason these books in a cave tell the future was because they were written by the Sibyl, who gained the gift of prophecy after a love affair with Apollo. We should avoid hubris because Jupiter is jealous and will zap us with lightning bolts.

On the other hand, the Iliad and Odyssey would continue to be laughably wrong about all testable claims, like that the ocean is perfectly circular or that there’s an island inhabited by Cyclopses.

Because Roman religion was originally shaped by the Iliad and Odyssey and then fractured into confusing fragments, restoring exposure to the source of the religion will cause this feeling of “suddenly everything I believe fits together and makes sense.” But none of this subjective feeling of sense-making will correspond to ability to make correct claims about the external world.

Modern Western civilization spent about fifteen hundred years having its thought processes completely shaped by Christian doctrine. Over the past few centuries, changes in science and philosophy have shattered a lot of Christian doctrine and replaced it with more modernist ideas, but they haven’t succeeded completely and certainly not at the deepest level. Most people contain various strata of conflicting Christian and modernist ideas superimposed upon one another, and not all the Christian ideas are conveniently labeled “Christian”.

Exposure to the Christian ideas in their original form should allow a lot of aspects of modern culture to be viewed in a new light. To give a trivial example, dislike of homosexuality is pretty common in our culture, but has zero intellectual foundation outside of an ethical system that people generally aren’t exposed to unless they specifically study Christian philosophy. Less trivial examples might be beliefs about guilt, penance, justice, innocence, marriage, modesty, humility, etc, etc, etc.

If this were the whole picture, then things could go one of two ways. People could be exposed to really high-grade modern philosophy that removes the remaining Christian elements (like makes the consequentialist argument against stigmatizing homosexuality), suddenly have a revelation of beauty and consistency, and become full-on atheists. Or people could be exposed to the purest form of Ye Olde Time Religion, suddenly have a revelation of beauty and consistency, and become full-on religious people.

Buuuuut it’s more complicated than that because I think the modernist beliefs and the religious beliefs are held in different ways, although don’t ask me to get more technical than that. Maybe the modernist beliefs are held explicitly and endorsed? And the religious beliefs are held kind of subconsciously as aliefs? And so I think the high-grade modernist philosophy and the Ye Olde Time Religion are appealing in different ways and to different parts of our belief structure.

This applies not just to Christianity but to any claim that old ideas should be taken seriously because they match our intuitions and aesthetics. Reactionaries, I’m looking at you here.

Consider the average person’s experience with religious people. You see religious people going to church. You notice them wearing necklaces with crosses or Stars of David or dharma wheels on them. Sometimes they quote the Bible or the Quran, or they pray for things. Sometimes they run hospitals or schools or monasteries. The Pope occasionally shows up on TV telling people they should probably have fewer wars and famines and see if that works out for them.

And yes, occasionally religious people rant about how much they hate atheism, or the various other religions. But it’s hardly the only time you ever hear about them.

On the other hand, consider the average person’s experience with atheists. They may know many atheists. Their next door neighbor, or boss, or close friend might be an atheist. But they don’t hear about it. It rarely comes up in random conversation. Atheists don’t all go to one specific building, they mostly don’t wear necklaces, they don’t have holidays where they eat special atheist foods or dress up in special atheist costumes, and there’s no St. Lucretius’ Atheist Hospital.

Pretty much the only time you ever hear about atheists, unless you go looking for them, is when an atheist is criticizing religion or standing up for some kind of atheist cause. And so the reasoning goes: “Atheists must be bizarrely obsessed with religion, all the atheists I know about seem really into attacking it.”

But this is about the same reasoning pattern as “About half the medieval Europeans who I’ve heard of are kings; therefore I estimate medieval Europe had about one king for every two people.”

My guess is that most atheists, in the sense of people who don’t believe in God, rarely talk or think about it. But they don’t get much attention, and if they do, it’s not as atheists. “Famous atheists” brings up Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens – not Lance Armstrong and Maurice Sendak. If there wasn’t a selection bias in terms of whose atheism gets noticed more, we would end up with the stereotype that atheists ride bikes and draw awesome pictures of cartoon monsters.

I wonder just how far this bias goes in creating stereotypes. It seems most likely to be a factor when there’s a group that’s hard to identify except when it engages in activities stereotypically associated with that group, and which might be geographically/socially sorted well enough that members of other groups rarely come in contact with them naturally.

Anti-Muslim stereotypes might come from such a source. If people live in an area without Muslims – or if Muslims tend to be segregated from non-Muslims – then someone might only hear about them when they’re fulfilling some kind of negative Muslim stereotype. I actually think the same is true of Christians – if someone lives in a very secular area, most of the Christianity they hear about could be some kind of very extreme televangelist.

And although this is a stretch, the same might apply to groups that are easily identifiable if people don’t think of the concrete examples they know qua group membership. Imagine you interact with your friend Juan – because Juan is great – and your friend Pedro – because he’s great too – and then you hear a story about Mexicans illegally crossing the border, and that activates your “Mexican” category much more than Juan and Pedro do, because they’re just ordinary guys.

And okay, that’s just wild speculation. I’m pretty convinced about the atheism one, though.