We know that languages die out. We also know that religions die out. How many people believe in Zeus or Poseidon or Apollo? But could we see religions as a whole die out in modern societies? A new study predicts that that is exactly what is going to happen in Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland. The list is notable because in includes the two countries most similar to the United States. Both Canada and Australia were founded, mainly, by British settlers. How could it be that they are readying to bury Christianity and we’ve handed over one of our two viable political parties to a fundamentalist version of that religion?
I mean, Big Oil and Big Money operate in Canada and Australia, too. So, why haven’t the dollars gone to the megachurches in those countries? It might have something to do with political efficacy. It is easier to capture a major party in the United States than in Canada or, especially, Australia.
Still, it’s astonishing to think that Christianity may soon be extinct in Canada at the same time as it is morphing into something so powerful in our country that it can destroy reproductive choice and the teaching of biology, geology, and sex education.
We’re not inherently more religious than Canada. We just have a political system that allows financial elites to enlist religious fundamentalists in their service. In other words, religion has tremendous utility in our country.
“The idea is pretty simple,” said Richard Wiener of the Research Corporation for Science Advancement, and the University of Arizona.
“It posits that social groups that have more members are going to be more attractive to join, and it posits that social groups have a social status or utility.
“For example in languages, there can be greater utility or status in speaking Spanish instead of [the dying language] Quechuan in Peru, and similarly there’s some kind of status or utility in being a member of a religion or not.”
Dr Wiener continued: “In a large number of modern secular democracies, there’s been a trend that folk are identifying themselves as non-affiliated with religion; in the Netherlands the number was 40%, and the highest we saw was in the Czech Republic, where the number was 60%.”
The team then applied their nonlinear dynamics model, adjusting parameters for the relative social and utilitarian merits of membership of the “non-religious” category.
They found, in a study published online, that those parameters were similar across all the countries studied, suggesting that similar behaviour drives the mathematics in all of them.
And in all the countries, the indications were that religion was headed toward extinction.
I don’t care what people believe. I think the single best thing about our country is that we are allowed to believe whatever the hell we want. I don’t believe in mixing religion and politics, even to promote agnosticism. But I think it is fascinating how our political system actually encourages a form of religious fanaticism that is actually in the process of completely dying out in counties much like ours.
Could simple electoral reform destroy organized religion in this country?
I of course hope they’re right. It’s a blight on society. While some contend that it has a unifying function for progressive aims, it’s been an overwhelming overall negative.
See PZ Myers for more details on the study:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/03/imagine_a_perfectly_spherical.php
The Civil Rights Movement would not have happened without churches. Period. Full Stop. But, hey, one small step forward in human progress doesn’t balance out the Crusades or the Inquisition. Or even begin to compensate for the theocratic fascist movement currently marching thru our country.
Certainly the US civil rights movement was built around the church network. It was already there, it was the only solid institution the oppressed blacks had of their own, and betterment-of-society was already a theme of the “works” of the churches, so it was the obvious fit.
BUT, that doesn’t mean that in the absence of churches there would have been no such movement. Consider that the union movement in the North occurred mostly outside the churches. Unlike the black churches in the south, the union members came from a variety of churches and also that the churches were in many cases outside local control. They wouldn’t have been able to get the Catholic churches, for example, to get behind organizing the movement as the American Catholic leaders wouldn’t have risked their ties to the political and business leaders of the country at the time.
But, the need for a union movement was there, so they found a way. I suggest that the US civil rights movement organization was much easier due to their church network, but even without that they would have found a way.
This talk, “What Should Replace Religions?”, from Daniel Dennet seems apropos here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5tGpMcFF7U
IMHO, churches are primarily social institutions that just happen to be religious institutions on the side and church networks more so. I’d throw churches into the same group as the Lions Club, Rotarians, the Elks Lodge, and possibly even the local weekly D&D game.
Unitarian Universal organizations should replace them. I go to them every once and a while, and there’s atheists who attend regularly.
I think the weekly D&D group would be a better replacement myself.
But then I was raised Catholic, so I tend to think that if you don’t have someone at the front of the room muttering arcane formulas taken from a giant tome written in a language that is only vaguely comprehensible to anyone who hasn’t studied it for years, then your Sunday is wasted.
And that there should be donuts. Let me stress – the donuts are VERY IMPORTANT.
Yes, our current political and electoral institutions create incentives for the financial and religious right to work together. Its certainly a toxic mix, but not an ahistorical one by any means. The right in Latin America has historically been built on the powerful alliance of the catholic church and business elites; similarly in Europe, fascism also includes coalitions of religion and business.
And of course I always go back to this after reading one of your insightful posts: why didn’t we tackle institutional reform in January 2009? Is Obama to blame or did he shrewdly realize it was better to focus attention elsewhere? I think its clear that the right certainly has the upper hand given our political, electoral and media institutions. They’ve adapted and exploited these institutions much more effectively than we have. And yet, those institutions are not set in stone; things could be changed if we have the will to change them.
Like Seabe, I hope this is right.
Both Canada and Australia were founded, mainly, by British settlers. How could it be that they are readying to bury Christianity and we’ve handed over one of our two viable political parties to a fundamentalist version of that religion?
In the early centuries of the American colonies the predominant immigrants were extremist puritans. How else could you explain something like the Salem witch trials — something you would not have seen in a place like Holland or Britain in that century.
You know the Thanksgiving myth — “the Pilgrims came to America after suffering religious persecution in Britain and Holland”. The religious persecutors were the pilgrims themselves, who were the military-funeral-protestors of their time, posting signs and warning everyone around them that they were going to hell. The pilgrims had all the psychological features of a modern fundamentalist. Confident that they were God’s chosen people, they sailed off for Virginia but missed by hundreds of miles and ended up on their own in Massachusetts. Rather than realize they would need help to survive and get back on the boats to look for Jamestown they decided God would provide, settled down, and half of them died that first winter. When they did finally manage to become self-sufficient they started to kill off the local “other” — the savages who’d helped them survive. And of course all the while they were intensely sexually repressed so were constantly having secret affairs and trysts, some of which have survived in stories to this day.
THOSE are the American founders. The reason the educated elite fought so hard for separate of church and state and to keep “God” out of the Constitution is that they knew large parts of the country were infested with these puritan sects and that those groups had to be kept completely out of government.
By contrast, Australia was founded by deported criminals and Canada was populated mostly by later migrants who were seeking economic improvement, not the freedom to practice religious extremism. And both Canada and Australia have had the majority of their population — literally — arrive as immigrants from all over the world since WW2.
And while you might think that events of nearly 400 years ago can’t influence today’s culture, they really do. Consider this post on the topic from a writer in the Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/mar/23/religion-dying-out-census
She doesn’t believe the study, not because of any actual evidence, but because of anecdotal events she experience in the US. She’s right of course, for the US. People in the US even now are subtly told all the time that religion is good. But if she’d grown up in, say, France or Australia, she’d have had an entirely different experience. In the US if you say someone is a “person of faith” it is high praise, with connotations that the person has high moral and ethical values and is trustworthy. But in some other countries that phrase wouldn’t carry the same connotations at all — in fact you’d tend to distrust the person a bit until proven otherwise.
Puritan thinking still pervades America today. It’s why we have funny, repressed attitudes about sex and alcohol. The idea that you can be drafted for war at age 18 but not drink until age 21 is something that only a Puritan country would dream up. Another example is the notion that a TV network can lie incessantly and openly 24/7 but if they show a partially covered tit they will be fined $500k.
WIN! YES! God. I can’t tell you how shocked I was to learn the truth about the Puritans versus the lies we’re peddled here in America. The Puritans were not seeking religious freedom, they were fucking booted out for their hostile nature towards people of other faiths.
Try and talk about the “real American history” and see people fly into a rage. I know. I’ve tried it. It is amazing how pissed off people get. And as long as the moniker “person of faith” enjoys reflexive respect and praise in this country, we will have a long, uphill battle. In most, but not all, applications in this country, being a “person of faith” is indicative of one who is proud to believe in things for which there is no supportable evidence. It is not a virtue. It is the worst of vices.
Try and talk about the “real American history” and see people fly into a rage.
This fact combined with parental control of school boards is why history education in this country sucks. And it perpetuates itself, since only a minority of people ever get exposed to our real history and build up the callouses necessary to take the good with the bad and pass the real history on to their children. So schools hire football coaches and have them teach history to make sure no parents get too upset by their children finding out what our history is actually like.
Not that school boards without parental control would be better – they would end up worse. And if anything history education at private schools is even worse because outraged parents can pull their tuition dollars directly rather than having an angry school board election about it.
I don’t see a good solution to this either – the root of it is American nationalistic pride that prevents us as a country from being willing to admit that we make mistakes – sometimes horrible ones – and that deifies our Founding Fathers despite the fact that they were, on the whole, men of their time and did some nasty awful things (like, for example, owning other people like a farmer might own cattle).
And things are deteriorating at a very rapid pace.
Just this month.
They are working to implement this all over the country. I know it’s happening here in Ohio. Is it any wonder that such a large percentage of people in this country believe patently false things? We are in a full fledged promotion and celebration of ignorance in this country, from top to bottom. This cannot end well.
And of course teachers’ unions are the reason that our schools rank poorly compared to the rest of the world too…
I hope you are being sarcastic.
Speaking of Glibs:
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0311/51836.html
THEY’RE TEACHING YOUR KIDS THE TEH GAY AND EVOLUTION!!!
So Ron Paul tell home schoolers, of all people, that public schools are “indoctrinating their kids” and the efforts of home schoolers are simply to counteract the propaganda of public schools?
A comedian couldn’t write shit that funny if he tried.
I agree with you about the Puritan influence. The shenanigans of the GOP today is so similar to the 17th century. To take just one example: in those days the great bugbear was the Catholic Church and the Pope. For along time it was Communism. Now it is Islam. But they must have that antichrist, and the narrative is exactly the same no matter who the great antichrist happens to be. In other words, they are not a reality-based community, they are a scripture-based community, however the scripture has already been interpreted in a particular way (about 350-400 years ago) and that’s that.
If you go to England, you will be surprised that the left there tends views the Puritans as “progressive.” They were reponsible for two major revolutions in the 17th century, weren’t they? England has an established church, and the Puritans were the “nonconformists.” In the USA, the Puritans were “the establishment” and we, especially since the assassination of JFK, that Catholic president who (according to the right) was either soft on, or in league with, the commies — the left has a much less positive view of the puritan strain, which as you point out, is still very much with us today. That’s the real reason why Obama MUST be a Muslim born in Kendonesia, by the way — the narrative.
You should probably make a distinction between the people we call “the Pilgrims” and the Puritans.
Perhaps the US, which has a habit of jumping from overreaction to overreaction, will begin to correlate the massive fraud of the TParty nation with the organized religion that walks hand in hand with it.
And we will see them both dissolve.
Organized religion today has been so incestualized with the small core of those who claim to speak for god that it is only a matter of time before their overreach sinks in to even the most closed minded.
I’ve always believed that religion is God’s weakest link.
Given that organized religion, at least in this country (which has a large say in the matter), tends to deny climate change and resource depletion, I think the phrase “religious extinction” is far more likely in the future to refer to religiously fueled ignorance causing our extinction.
While it is clear that the nature of the modern republican party has been largely shaped by religious trends, the converse is only partially true. I do not believe that the religious revival in America, which goes back to the late 1960s, was political in origin. It did have an unorganized political resonance — much more on the left than the right. It was similar to, and parallel to, the “roots” movement — a search for meaning, a search for cultural authenticity — which had little counterpart in Europe.
Compare two of the greatest music groups of that time (and of all time), the Beatles and The Band. The Band was absolutely in search of American cultural roots, as were so many other musicians of the time. Interestingly, all but one of the members were from Canada (Ontario), but if you check, the Canadians –Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, and Garth Hudson — were all were brought up in, and greatly influenced by, the church. The one American, Levon Helm, came from an amazingly traditional background in Arkansas (near Mississippi). I would love to know his thoughts about the state of American religion today, but clearly he never fell for the kind of fascist BS that characterizes a lot of the south today.
As much as I love them, the equivalent of that on the side of the Beatles was no more than a kind of campy 20s-30s or faded British empire nostalgia (cf. Viv Stanshall and Bonzo Dog Band), especially McCartney. True, George Harrison became very religious — as a Hindu. Spiritual but not cultural roots.
I think this is pretty representative of what was going on in the respective cultures.
The American religious revival was soon corrupted by the con-artists so prevalent on the extreme protestant side, and capitalized on a lot of social issues that we all know. This is where the Puritan heritage really does apply.
The GOP and the religious right developed a symbiotic relationship, but a very substantial portion of American religion today remains either non-partisan or liberal. The bottom line is, I do not think right-wing politics fully explains why the US is more religious than Europe or Canada, because this phenomenon extends far beyond RW politics. Since the assassination of JFK, etc., etc., etc., the US has been undergoing a profound spiritual crisis that has little equivalent in Europe or Canada.
The converse was definitely true in the case of the Southern Baptist Convention. Two large-city church Baptist preachers, one in Dallas the other in Atlanta, engineered the takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention by “conservatives”. It was really a takeover that turned the Southern Baptist Convention into a Republican front group in time to support Ronald Reagan’s election. (Jimmy Carter was a Southern Baptist at the time.)
A note on your spin about the “roots movement”. The 1960s started with the folk music revival that rehabilitated several musicians blacklisted during the McCarthy era. And with regard to Harrison, India had ceased to be a British colony less than 20 years before he went there. On the West Coast US, the spiritual movement during the same period tended toward Zen. And during the early 1970s, I noticed that lapsed Catholics tended toward Hinduism and lapsed Protestants tended toward Zen.
The spiritual crisis in the US has its roots in US civil religion and the discrepancy between that civil religion and the reality of life in the US. The US is not the “city on a hill” or “committed to democracy and freedom” or even “the richest country in the world” anymore and that trend downward started with the 1970 recession and the capture of government by conservatives. And personal life has not been one of “living by the rules brings success”, or “education is the key to success” or “you can change the world”. Social participation has declined (see Bowling Alone). People are to busy and distracted. And retreat inward in moves toward fitness, spirituality, art–some place or space of comfort away from multitasking and constant demand for attention. And that spiritual crisis also causes the American civil religion to degenerate into chants of “USA! USA! USA!” just as the collapse of religion is illustrated by cute sloganeering (in the name of evangelism) and bumper stickers saying “Jesus Saves” and “WWJD”.
I think I get your point about George Harrison’s cultural roots. Chicken Tikka Massala is now considered the English national dish.
“A survey in the United Kingdom claimed that it is that country’s most popular restaurant dish. One in seven curries sold in the UK is chicken tikka masala. The cross-cultural popularity of the dish in the UK led former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook to proclaim it as “a true British national dish”. British companies now export chicken tikka masala to Pakistan, India and Bangladesh.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tikka_masala
One of the historical difference that the US has with all those other countries is that the US early on disestablished the church through instituting the separation of church and state. That means that the cultural influence of religion has developed in different directions.
But the same trend away from historical institutional Christianity is occurring in the US as well. That is why the folks who seek to preserve its dominance of the culture are in such a frenzy. It’s just like the frenzy of the “English-only” anti-multiculturalists. That intensity of feeling and the authority structure of congregational-form churches is what the MOTUs who are using churches for political purposes have tapped into. Those churches of episcopal or presbyterian form (excepting the Mormons) are the ones in the US that have seen declines in membership. Note that established churches tend to be episcopal in form.
Religious fanaticism actually is slowly dying in the US. The authority of the Christian church essentially has died with the politicization of Protestants, the hypocrisy of the Catholic church with respect to issues of sexuality, and the dwindling and irrelevance of “mainstream” Protestant denominations. The entrepreneurial revival preachers are trying to whomp it up once again through megachurches and media and youth campaigns. (Entrepreneurial religion is a refuge in a time of economic difficulty; always has been. Congregations are obligated to support their pastor.) But it is all ever more frenetic sound and fury.
Have to remember that Canada’s second founding culture (after aboriginal) was from France, not Britain. Francophone Quebec, once devoutly Catholic, threw off the Church during its ‘Quiet Revolution’ of the 1960’s.
British Columbia (so named in order to fend off threats of US annexation by force — remember ’54-40 or fight’? is the least religious place in all of North America. The least religious states in the US are more religious than all of Canada: http://asweweresaying.blogspot.com/2010/01/bc-least-religious-place-in-north.html.
(BTW, ‘British’ gets equated with ‘English’ when most of the settlers from those islands actually came from Ireland and Scotland, just as most of the ‘French’ setters were from Brittany and Normandy. All these places had their own languages and history of oppression by the dominant cultures.)
Rightwing political thought in this country requires a hierarchical structure, obedience to authority and belief in magic (as opposed to actual solutions for social problems). Cutting taxes of the rich to make the rest of wealthy is a prime example. It doesn’t work, it demonstrably hasn’t worked for the last thirty years and yet Republicans still repackage and sell it to reactionaries who still eat it up. American wars are built on lies (magical thinking) because to say: “We are spending everyone’s tax dollars and going into debt so that private oil companies can control petroleum flowing from Central Asia to factories in India where your jobs went” would not fly with the general public. Better to talk about the dangers of Islam while peppering rhetoric about God being on our side.
So why is religion so important in America? It’s necessary for the oligarchy.
About half of the white people in the USA have German roots, mostly, but not entirely, Protestant. Note the Germanic names of many of the religious right, especially those not from the South. This is a major difference from Canada and Australia.