I Doubt It
Irradiated by LabRat
Study Says Religion May Become Extinct In Nine Nations
The upshot of this is the researchers responsible built a complex mathematical model based on the idea of “social utility” in religion, surveyed nine secular democracies in which religiosity is on the decline, and concluded that, based on rate of decline and what the same model shows in other factors, that religion is eventually going to go extinct in these places. As to the model, I’ll let one of the researchers speak for himself:
“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 use of the linguistic comparison isn’t a coincidence; it was for studying languages that the model was originally conceived, and for that purpose it seems to work very well.
I think up to a point the researchers and right and religious affiliation will continue to decline in these places- but that they are absolutely not going to go extinct. What’s going to happen is that people who are religious for relatively shallow reasons are going to decline, and what’s left is going to be a relatively hard core of the faithful. Not hard core as in “extremist”, but as in having put a lot of intellectual effort into their belief structure; I honestly believe a lot of “will actually blow you up for your faith” radicals aren’t really all that faithful, because they’ve used their beliefs essentially as a way to justify and gratify their need for absolutism or glory or for the world to fundamentally agree with them in a way that can’t be argued with. Wanting to have God on your side as you lash out at authority or something else you want to lash out at isn’t really quite the same thing.
It’s relatively easy for nonbelievers to believe that faith really is just like language or many other social ingroup/outgroup dynamics because, for perhaps a majority even, it really is just that shallow. People tend to be raised in a particular religion, and whether they retain it or not as they reach adulthood and lose childhood credulity depends on a host of reasons; they may retain it because they seriously examine the religion’s structure and tenets and incorporate it into a fully adult and robust belief system, or they may because it keeps them in a good social group, or because rebelling brings harsh social punishments, or because of sheer inertia, or because it’s filling some need or another that isn’t actually “compliance with God’s will”. These are the people losing their religion in the studied countries- they really do respond like speakers of a language do, out of pure social utility.
Given that in America especially religiosity is still much more socially dominant than atheism or agnosticism, most American atheists have the experience of having been raised within a religion, reaching adulthood, and then critically examining the belief structure they’d acquired/been given, and rejecting it, with this being a negative social experience on the whole*. This gives them a self-image of the only critical thinkers in a sea of people not wanting to put the effort into really thinking about their own beliefs or too cowardly to rock the boat, but it’s not terribly reflective of reality as it so much as their odds of encountering the lazy believer versus the other kind. In my experience such people are also the most likely to re-convert- if they themselves haven’t put that much effort into forming their new worldview, a believer who really HAS can rock their world. Also in my experience, both flavors of active thinkers- believers and atheists- tend to sort by temperament rather than by the actual convincingness of either point of view, though of course I would think that.
I suspect the researchers involved are making the standard assumption of the not-particularly-challenged nonbeliever, which is that social utility is the only explanation for religiosity and it will indeed die out as their model predicts. I think that they are wrong on this, and that slice of the faithful population for which religion is filling a powerful intellectual and philosophical need will not only remain, but be strengthened by the loss of their more feckless coreligionists.
In any event, we will see.
*Not your author so much. Unitarians make a point of letting children come to their own conclusions. The results tend to be interestingly mixed. As for the social experience, it’s given me some bumps but none worse than those experienced by the serious believer- BUT I was emphatically not raised in one of those areas of the US where there is extreme social pressure to be a certain flavor of Christian, which absolutely do exist.
March 23rd, 2011 at 8:03 pm
Thank you. I have to admit, you nailed it with your points on actual faithful believers. You do surprise me sometimes. I shouldn’t underestimate you
I grew up the wrong flavor of Christian in a Baptist town. And then rejected that flavor after spending a lot of time seeking answers from leaders in that particular church that just didn’t seem to match up with what they had always told me was God’s word. They didn’t have them. Some honestly tried, but most conversations ended with the answer of ‘because that’s how we do it’ or ‘silly girl, you just don’t understand.’ You know, because believing in a God that died on a cross and rose again in three days but really can’t get past that piano is a logical belief system. *eye roll* To complicate matters more, this was one of those flavors of Christianity that believes they are the only ones getting to heaven and all the other flavors have it wrong. Seriously, I remember a time that my aunt actually said, “If those God can forgive those Baptists this *legalistic, not Biblically supported banned thing* they could go to heaven.” She had somehow gotten into an ecumenical Bible study and learned that there were honest believers in other denominations. Shocking! So coming from a long history of that flavor of Christian, they weren’t exactly accepting of me rejecting their flavor.
So I searched. And my search wasn’t limited to other flavors of Christianity either.
I did wind up deciding that Christianity was my faith. It was just the various flavors that were screwing it all up. It was many years later before I found an actual church that was the right fit and wasn’t woefully conflicted in their belief system.
But back to your point. I think you are absolutely correct that it will be the people that are involved in a religion for reasons other than a well-thought personal connection to their faith that will wander off to the next shiny thing. Those that remain will be stronger. The thing that would really shock the researchers is that some espoused atheists are such because it’s the cool/rebellious thing to do. Some of those may actually become religious as that becomes the shiny/rebellious thing.
March 23rd, 2011 at 8:40 pm
The thing that would really shock the researchers is that some espoused atheists are such because it’s the cool/rebellious thing to do. Some of those may actually become religious as that becomes the shiny/rebellious thing.
Such a good point I really wish I’d thought to make it myself. Suffice to say I think you’re absolutely right and I’ve actually seen this happen already.
Another thing about Unitarians is they make it damn near impossible to have a proper teenage rebellion against them.
“Clarissa- oh, I’m sorry, Amanita Raventear- we find your new faith so interesting. Would you be so good as to bring some eye of goat and sinner’s blood to the next pot luck and maybe give a small talk on the Backward Hand?”
March 24th, 2011 at 6:07 am
Shame on the Unitarians for denying the rebellious right of passage to their adolescents.
I suppose a proper rebellion would be to dive into legalism then. Yikes!
March 24th, 2011 at 9:08 am
Toffler-grade true believers will always be around.
Some of them even become very militant atheists … the kind that make you say “stop being on my side”.
March 24th, 2011 at 7:50 pm
As an aside, anyone named Weiner who names their son Richard is fully and completely a SOB of the highest order. “Here, tease my kid for me, it’s too much work!”
Jim
March 25th, 2011 at 7:40 am
I think it is also worthwhile to consider the difference between the true believer and the organized social structure of a religion. Faith has very little to do with participating in a ritual every Sunday. Until recently I was in a demographic (in the UK, in liberal academia) where faith can be a social liability, and being who I am, I tended then and now to keep my mouth shut. Religion, like politics, isn’t discussed at the dinner table. That my belief is largely private, however, doesn’t lessen its strength. In fact, during that time my faith was strengthened. Which, I am sure, would be worrying for all the pyschologists out there.
I think your point that the authors of the study may not have recognized that religion isn’t solely/always a shallow excuse to get together for coffee is a critical one. If that was the case, the early Christian martyrs would be awfully hard to explain. Here is a group of well educated, well connected people methodically going into a situation where their death, and only their death is certain. There was no political or social power gain, at least not for several centuries. Even if one argues that it is simply because they believe in a coming apocalypse and it is some form of suicide, you still have to explain the strength of that impulse. That, parenthetically, brings up another issue, namely, that the secular West (especially in academia, press and politics), accustomed to shallow religion and politics, really doesn’t get the concept of religious war and of people willing to die for a cause…but I won’t natter on.
March 27th, 2011 at 8:37 am
SLIGHTLY sideways on topic, to Jennifer- Peculiar has a college housemate who was raised and homeschooled as a hippie kid on a dirt road town in northern NM, and now is a Dallas lawyer who wears a tie every day and is starting his own firm. Even more amusingly, he insisted that his mother make him suits at least as far back as high school.
Peculiar himself is an Orthodox convert and a wilderness guide, which relative to us is about as rebellious as becoming a Pagan from a Unitarian.