Substack cometh, and lo it is good. (Pricing)

Who believes in the evil eye?

A friend pointed me to a new Pew survey, Many Americans Not Dogmatic About Religion. It shows the general finding that though Americans are a religious people, they’re moderately ecumenical in their practices and beliefs. I was concerned in particular though with the resurgence of supernatural beliefs with the decline of institutional religious orthodoxy.
The back story to this is that many psychologists posit that humans have an innate predisposition toward supernatural beliefs because of the cognitive biases we’re hardwired with. For example, it isn’t a coincidence that almost all human societies seem to have the idea of what we would term ghosts, or that systematic astrology arose independent several times. Naive intuitions about mind-body duality or inferences one might make from the repetitive action of the stars against the cosmos are evoked by our common hardwire.
Organized “higher religion” changed this somewhat, channeling and leveraging some intuitions (the afterlife, gods, etc.), but marginalizing others (ghosts, demigods, etc.). In particular, there has always been a tension between the relatively narrow set of beliefs acceptable to religious professionals and the elites, and the more general and diverse array of superstitions in circulation among the populace. Religious “reform” movements often aim at extirpating folk religion whose general outlines seem culturally universal; e.g., relics, veneration of local saints and demigods, and traditional fertility festivals. This was evident in both the Protestant and Catholic Reformation, and also among Muslim and Hindu fundamentalists, who attempt to strip out what they perceive to be exogenous accretions to the “true religion.”
With the decline in institutional religion in the West one would predict folk beliefs to reemerge, as the control of mass belief by the elites is no longer enforced by the state or higher institutions. The Pew survey seem to point a bit to this, there is a general trade-off in religious orthodoxy and attendance and belief in supernatural concepts which are outside the purview of Western Christianity. Below the fold I’ve shown the pairwise absolute and relative differences between categories in terms of their acceptance of various non-orthodox supernatural concepts.

ReincarnationYogaSpiritual energyAstrologyEvil Eye
Male – Female-7-8-3-7-3
(Male – Female)/Female-25%-30%-11%-25%-17%
White – Black-1314-7-18
(White – Black)/Black-38%5%20%-24%-62%
(18-29) – (65+)81914128
[(18-29) – (65+)]/65+44%158%82%67%80%
College – HS-63-8-12-11
(College – HS)/(HS)-21%14%-29%-40%-50%
Repub – Dem-13-16-13-17-7
(Repub – Dem)/Dem-43%-52%-43%-55%-37%
Conserv – Liberal-15-24-17-140
(Conserv – Liberal)/Liberal-45%-62%-49%-47%0%

Here’s the original table:
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