On the flip side, I think religion has had a monopoly on the idea that only it can provide that kind of space for such relationships. I don't think that's true.
On the flip side, I think religion has had a monopoly on the idea that only it can provide that kind of space for such relationships. I don't think that's true.
Talk to some really old people, who recall the 1950's. At least in America, there were a huge number of non-church social groups. And families tended to be both far larger, and considerably better connected.
If some churchgoer was saying, today, that the churches have some sort of monopoly on providing such spaces...my interpretation would tend toward "we have a monopoly, while we last, because every other provider is already gone".
(Yes, if you go further back, especially in Europe, the church had somewhat more of a monopoly. Partly that was because governments were rather authoritarian, and didn't want organizations to exist, beyond their tightly-controlled churches.)
Certainly not. But a good church (and not all of them are) actively promotes parishioners to connect in deep ways, sharing vulnerabilities and weaknesses in ways that usually don't happen without some intentional guidance. Unfortunately, this "feature" also opens up churches to be places where different kinds of abuse can (and does) happen.
I don’t know, I haven’t seen a great replacement. The only things that come/came close are things like Elks Lodge, VFW, Country Clubs/sports clubs, and things like that. I don’t think most of these have thrived into in the 21st century.
After that, maybe kids’ schools if you have the energy.
At least in SE Michigan, some of the lodges of the Loyal Order of the Moose (fraternal organization) are really good.
OTOH...the Moose are a pretty religious organization, in many ways.
Thanks for that second paragraph, because my (otherwise neutral and uniformed) alarm bells on the subject were blaring with the notion that we should replace religious-institution-backed schools with secular schools run by… The Loyal Order of the Moose.
I haven't either, but I'm hesitant to suggest that there's something particular about the religiosity of faith communities that make them work the way they do.
My take is that it's a familiar social institution and we haven't yet formulated the social protocols to reproduce a secular version. You mention a variety of semi-institutionalized social groups. To me they are associated with older folks, which naturally leads to the question: why aren't young people[1] making their own formal groups? why do young folks communities tend to be anarchic? And what would empower young folks to form their own formal social institutions?
1. We're talking about a rather wide swath of 18-50 yearolds, but that doesn't necessarily mean specific groups must correspondingly be as age-inclusive
Think of this in terms of game theory. Some religious communities, e.g., Christianity, explicitly ask for personal sacrifice for community good with compensation to be provided post-death, e.g., eternally blessed life.
In game theory terms, cooperative behavior is rewarded from outside the observable system! That's the faith part of faith communities. Even if only a relatively small fraction truly hold these belief, those communities naturally get pay-it-forward dynamics.
I'm not sure how game theory can lead to the same result in non-faith communities (i.e., closed systems). Someone has to pay the cost of "redeeming" the effects of cheaters / defectors.
Maybe a tangent idk, but how do unitary universalist groups work or religious communities without afterlife reward doctrines? They exist, but I don't necessarily think their minority status means there isn't something they're doing that we can learn from or expand our model with.
> Maybe a tangent idk, but how do unitary universalist groups work or religious communities without afterlife reward doctrines?
Unitarian-Universalists aren't growing, they are shrinking. Most denominations are shrinking, but on the whole, conservative denominations are shrinking rather more slowly than liberal ones, including the super-liberal UUs. I remember, when I was younger, I tried out a few different churches. I saw more than one conservative Protestant church overflowing with young families. I also went to a Unitarian church (only one, but there aren't many around here), and I was the only person there under 50.
In general, religious communities without afterlife reward doctrines, struggle to survive and thrive in the long-run. Their members tend to defect either to secularism or to religious communities which make bigger promises
The real answer unfortunately is that they mostly don't. They're an absolutely tiny minority of active religious people and because of that they struggle to take effective group action based on their values or sustain their communities across generations.
Look at the Quakers for a really admirable but ultimately pessimistic illustration of it. A long and almost uniquely sound history of true dedication to causes of human freedom, safety, comfort, and thriving, but with no shared creed per se. At times united in their activism and influential because of it (abolition, prohibition, civil rights). Now generations removed from any unifying cause, they are fragmented into an entire continuum of irreconcilable beliefs; fewer than half a million left globally. And the only thriving, growing communities among them are in africa, with belief and worship virtually indistinguishable from the local main stream of evangelical christianity.
Whatever it is that makes religions culturally impactful does not seem easily separable from whatever it is that makes them religions. People have tried over and over, not all of them completely unsuccessfully. But I don't know of any with the kind of durable cultural influence we see in the mainstream religions that don't value or attempt that separation.
> Look at the Quakers for a really admirable but ultimately pessimistic illustration of it
> And the only thriving, growing communities among them are in africa, with belief and worship virtually indistinguishable from the local main stream of evangelical christianity.
To add to what you say, not just in Africa but also in the West, the branchers of Quakerism which seem to be in the greatest health, are at its evangelical Protestant end – whereas, the end of the Quaker spectrum which you are talking about, is the one in the worst health
The origin of Unitarians as a movement is fairly instructive. The Congregationalists (descendants of Puritans, kind of) were hard-core Reformed and determinists with a very strict view of God. They ended up not believing it was possible to know whether you were a true Christian ("Elect") since God decides and is inscrutable.
Within about a generation, most Congregationalists became Unitarian Universalists, which is strongly linked to uncertainty over eternal blessedness/damnation. (Generalizing the history quite a bit, TBH.)
The main thing churches have going for them is that they are "all ages" and specifically family.
The VFW, Elks Lodge, Masons, Knights of Columbus, they're all old and mostly men.
KofC is also very specifically tied to the Catholic Church, so it has no reason to try to substitute for the role filled by a Church.
As an atheist, I disagree. The power of the church has been dying at the same time as the availability of other, non-religious "third places". Thirty years ago you not only had a stronger church, but you also had more shopping malls, community centers, diners, and parks. Superficial electronic socializing and personal isolation is killing the concept of community across the board.
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That shows the power that a politician has over churches, not the power that churches have over society.
Furthermore, I think one reason he has that power over them is they are desperate to regain power and influence they've been losing in society. That's why they're willing to make this deal with the devil (so to speak).
Why do you think religious people embracing someone like Trump says anything at all about the relative power of religion? Would a stronger church not demand greater conformity in its supported candidates, not less? In twenty years, the percentage of Americans who are members of churches has dropped from 70% to 47%. In 1991, 87% of Americans ages 18-35 identified as Christian. In 2019 it was less than fifty percent.
I don't know. I live in the American South and it seems like Christianity is so universal that it's simply taken for granted. And I don't think you get a repeal of Roe v. Wade, then half the country banning abortion outright, in a truly secular society.
Why not? The secular French Revolutionary government abolished slavery in 1794; the abolition of abortion represents essentially the same scientific, non-theistic recognition of human beings, no matter their ethnicity or stage of development.
Really, they are independent axes: a religion can preach that some kinds of human being should be enslaved and/or killed; a religion can preach that no human beings should be enslaved and/or killed; an atheist can support enslavement and/or homicide of some human beings; and an atheist can oppose enslavement and/or homicide of some or all human beings. As a general rule, the vast majority of atheists think that it should be illegal to kill a 5-year-old; I believe that the vast majority think that it should be illegal to kill a 5-minute-old; it wouldn’t surprise me if a fair number think that it should be illegal to kill a negative-five-minute-old.
>the abolition of abortion represents essentially the same scientific, non-theistic recognition of human beings, no matter their ethnicity or stage of development.
It really doesn't. Opposition to abortion in the US is entirely premised on Christian ideology and the belief that a human is ensouled by God at the moment of conception, thus making abortion at any stage equivalent to murder, whereas scientific consensus is that abortion is a perfectly valid and sometimes necessary medical procedure, not fundamentally different than removing an appendix. Science certainly doesn't support outlawing abortion outright, or banning contraceptives or forcing women to carry nonviable pregnancies to term, all of which anti-abortion states have now made law, often with politicians directly citing the Bible while doing so.
> Opposition to abortion in the US is entirely premised on Christian ideology and the belief that a human is ensouled by God at the moment of conception
Historically, many Christians (e.g. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas) opposed abortion from the moment of conception, yet didn’t believe in ensoulment until later in pregnancy. This is because they accepted Aristotle’s belief that ensoulment only happened at around 6-12 weeks gestation; but they classified abortion from the moment of conception as a form of contraception, and they believed contraception was a sin. This was arguably the mainstream Christian position from time immemorial up until the 19th century. Maybe a rare position today (especially if you are limiting your consideration to American Christians), but it demonstrates that time-of-ensoulment and morality-of-abortion are (at least partially) logically independent questions
> Science certainly doesn't support outlawing abortion
Whether to outlaw anything isn’t a purely factual question, it is a value judgement. And the question of whose values are correct is fundamentally beyond the scope of the natural sciences. So, science really doesn’t support outlawing or not outlawing anything. It is true that, if we agree on what are the right ethical principles, then science can (sometimes) resolve factual disputes that arise in trying to apply those principles; but if we don’t agree on which set of fundamental ethical principles to adopt, that is a dispute for which science cannot help us
> Opposition to abortion in the US is entirely premised on Christian ideology and the belief that a human is ensouled by God at the moment of conception, thus making abortion at any stage equivalent to murder
‘Entirely’ is a strong word: the existence of a single non-Christian American opposed to abortion refutes your contention.
Anyway, abortion isn’t (necessarily) murder: it’s homicide. Homicide can be legal, e.g. in the cases of capital punishment and self-defense.
> scientific consensus is that abortion is a perfectly valid and sometimes necessary medical procedure, not fundamentally different than removing an appendix
I think that you are confused here. The universal scientific consensus is that neither a blastocyst nor an embryo nor a fœtus is an organ of his mother, but a separate organism. That is, there is a fundamental scientific difference between removing an organ from a human being and removing a human being from another human being.
> Science certainly doesn't support outlawing abortion outright, or banning contraceptives or forcing women to carry nonviable pregnancies to term
‘Science’ doesn’t support any particular policy decision all, but only deals in facts; it doesn’t support outlawing abortion and it doesn’t support mandating it, and likewise with anything else. All science can do is provide estimates of facts, and predictive estimates of outcomes: it can’t say whether those outcomes are good or not, because good and evil are not intelligible to science.
I suspect that you think they are, because you assume that whatever makes the most people the happiest is the best outcome, but that’s a moral call, not scientific: someone who wanted to make one single human being the happiest possible could just as easily use scientific means to achieve that goal instead.
I would not even agree with your contention that science says that abortion is a necessary procedure, because it begs the question of what ‘necessary’ means. Science says if that an ectopic pregnancy is not aborted, the mother will almost certainly die; some (most? all?) moralities say that it’s wrong to prevent taking action to prevent that outcome — and probably a few say otherwise. Certainly it cannot address ‘validity,’ because again that doesn’t even make sense. Science says if one achieves a certain physical arrangement of items in a certain condition then one can release a tremendous amount of energy; it can predict what the effects will be; it can’t say anything whatsoever about whether or not bombing Hiroshima is ‘valid.’
All of that is true but it has no bearing on whether the power of religion is waxing or waning, or whether religious institutions have discouraged non-religious community gatherings.
We're pretty deep into an experiment to see if it's otherwise. A lot of people have been confident that other structures will emerge, and a lot of institutions have presented themselves as the alternative. I haven't seen anything convincingly comparable, though I'm sure others see it differently.
People keep waiting for this new concept / institution that can replace religion for community building, moral cohesion, and cross generational culture to emerge... but at this point I'm fairly certain it aint coming. I consider this hope the optimism of mid-wits who believe in emergence and evolution, but can't grasp why ideologies that co-evolved with humanity for a few thousand years might be better at filling those roles and needs than their fad secular prophet's intelligently designed philosophies. The modern Nietzscheian free thinker of the day is rebelling against conventional wisdom and propaganda by saying maybe we DO need religion. Oh the irony.
But what else is the secular world to do? Suppose you're right and we do need religion. Surely the solution isn't for atheists to pretend that religion is true, right? Even if they did, the psychological benefits of religion are probably at least greatly weakened (if not absent) when the follower doesn't even believe it's true.
Step one would be to acknowledge that many of the criticisms of religion are merely criticisms of human nature itself, as secular ideologies and individuals fail in the same sorts of ways by the professed moral standards of most secular individuals. The next would be for for secular thinkers to admit that (from an anthropological perspective) their atheistic philosophies are more or less proto-religions and admit to taking certain value judgements and stances about reality on faith.
The issue is, almost no secular thinker comes away from admitting those two honestly and then stays within the purely secular realm for very long.
It was very possible to be an intelligent introspective atheist when the consequences of that stance were not on display so readily. The "forward thinkers" who might have been capable of forming secular religions are instead embracing established faiths. Perhaps it's an issue like attempting to create life from scratch again. Hard to do when existing life just crowds it out. It would take dedicated committed atheists, admitting that they are intentionally attempting to establish a secular religion as a sort of memetic symbiote to fill the same space as religion, but when you're biggest rallying cry for converts is, "People don't need religion!" it's neigh impossible to do.
>The issue is, almost no secular thinker comes away from admitting those two honestly and then stays within the purely secular realm for very long.
I'm not so sure about this, though it depends on what you mean by "purely secular". I don't know if there's any data on this, so I can only speak anecdotally - I know people who are sympathetic to religion and believe it can be useful (even one who's a fan of Jordan Peterson, the person who has made a career about talking about religion in a secular way. Aside - I think it's telling that Peterson continually says good things about religion but is still atheist and still doesn't go to church.), but still are within the purely secular realm.
To be sure, I'm not saying that you're necessarily wrong about secular institutions not being able to fill the role that religious institutions can. But at the same time, it doesn't seem like getting people to agree on the benefits of religion gets them to accept the resurrection of Christ, existence of God, or anything like that. Which kind of makes sense, right?
(Another aside - I have always sort of felt like this emphasis on religions being useful over religions being true is a kind of implicit concession to atheism. It's as if religion actually is just a shared delusion, but that's ok, because it's a useful shared delusion. I have no trouble seeing why an atheist would not see this as a compelling case. But the case for religion being true isn't nearly as weak as this "pragmatic delusion"-style argument implies.
Not a criticism of what you're saying, it makes sense to say what you've said in the context of the thread. I'm just thinking out loud.)
Religion is useful / Religion is a virus, are both utilitarian arguments because some people care more about what is useful than true AND because some people's standards for what is true is based on judging its utility.
To focus on Christianity (since you brought it up), religion not being useful would be a blow to the "Loving God" claim, as a God who (like a bad parent) gave lousy advice that harmed us wouldn't seem very loving. Similarly, if a utilitarian secular philosophy continuously failed to be useful based on its own utilitarian standards, it's self defeating.
Certainly faiths that don't assert a loving God, and secular philosophies that don't include utilitarian moral and ethical frameworks aren't effected. The usefulness of religion compared to secular philosophies doesn't PROVE one is correct, but if you can DISPROVE one or some of your largest competitors for mindshare, I get why the argument is so stressed.
Agreed. I recently made it out of a high demand religion. When talking to my brother-in-law (still in the religion) about it, he said something along the lines of "I don't think the church is necessarily true. But I think I personally need it in order to be a good person."
Well.. of course that is what the religion you were born into, brainwashed by, and are currently paying crazy amounts of money to wants you to think. It is necessary for the churches survival.
People need to be careful about believing anything taught by an organization when that organization's very survival depends on you believing that thing.
> People need to be careful about believing anything taught by an organization when that organization's very survival depends on you believing that thing.
I think you're off the mark here. Your brother-in-law doesn't believe what the church teaches. He believes in the effect he sees it having on his own life (and maybe also the effect that not having it has on his own life).
Yes. And he has been told every day of his entire life, by said church, that he can only get that effect through them. High demand religions are an entirely different beast. They control every aspect of your life.
I'm not religious, but I don't see a lot of evidence of other forces filling that space. In part, it takes a lot of commitment (and resources) to do it well. Religious communities have been motivated, but I don't see other groups filling the void as they depart.
Yeah but I think the issue is the loss of tight knit communities, not that the churches are the only way.
I think they are simply the ones that survived the most in our current era of narcissism and consumerism because they were bigger to begin with.
I mean I live in an old fashioned, traditionnally poor gipsy neighborhood. Most people around here don't go to the church, but this is a tight knit community. As a stranger, and for good reasons[1], it took me a long time to be accepted as part of it, and in a sense I will never be completely part of it. However I have already been shown that my neighbors are ready to give me a hand when I need it and even that they are ready to fight for me had I been in a situation that required it, no question asked. Which is funny because these are the same people that initially tried to rob me!
[1] first and foremost because the presence of expats working remotely for big corps like me is one of the reason the rents are ever increasing and becoming out of reach to
It's not necessarily true, but functionally ... we lack a lot of counterexamples that have really scaled to the level churches have.
Just wait a couple thousand years, and add the threat of murder/dismemberment/incineration for not participating, and I'm sure some alternatives would arise...