Against homo religious

Below some comments emerged reflecting differences in the understanding of religious identity and change. After writing on this blog for 17 years I am tempted to just scream “READ WHAT I’VE WRITTEN!”, but that really doesn’t suffice. So I’ll outline very quickly my general stance, which illuminates my sense of how and why the Roman Empire Christianized 1,600 years ago.

Many modern and intellectual understandings of religion focus on individual preferences and dispositions. In the 1980s Rodney Stark outlined a “supply-side” theory of religion in his book, A Theory of Religion. Stark explicitly utilizes a rational choice framework. In this model, a religious denomination provides a bundle of goods and services. Consumers choose from these various religious “products” in the “marketplace.”

A broader survey of this way of thinking about religion is provided in A Marketplace of Gods. Clearly, there is some insight to be gained from this methodology and framework. Over the past few thousand years of history, we see broad convergent trends in terms of the goods and services provided by the major world/higher/universalistic religions. For example, the common trend of promising a more pleasant afterlife as a reward for meritorious behavior and sincere belief.

Most people have common needs and fears. It is no surprise that similar “brands” will converge upon the same solution. Perhaps what we might today term “product-market fit.”

But, in the 30+ years since A Theory of Religion was published we can test some of its predictions, and to be frank, many haven’t panned out. For example, Stark makes much of the reality that the Communism dampened the availability of religious options in the Eastern Bloc. One of the predictions then is that the fall Communism would have unleashed a wave of conversion to Western religions, just as Eastern Bloc consumers initially flocked to Western consumer goods. In particular, American Protestant sects compete extensively.

Though there has been some proliferation of various Protestant sects, on the whole, the transformation of the religious landscape in Eastern Europe has not fulfilled the predictions of a rational choice theory of religion. In some cases, a mild level of government fiat may be implicated, but this is not the case in places such as the Czech Republic. On the whole, places that were relatively secular before Communism (e.g., Czech Republic) remain secular, while those nations that were more religious before (e.g., Romania) defaulted back to their “traditional” religions. Russia is an interesting case where religious belief and practice is relatively anemic, but Eastern Orthodox Christianity has returned to the center of the culture and state.

Even in the United States of America Stark’s thesis has not totally held up. Because of our vibrant marketplace, his model suggested that the United States of America was resistant to secularization. In the 2000s he even coauthored papers arguing that evidence of secularization was overblown. I think at this point we can admit that the trend toward secularization is quite real. In American Grace Robert D. Putnam reports that secularization was driven in part by the liberal segment of the American public associating organized religion with conservative politics, and opting out. Predictably, this has hit liberal denominations harder than conservative ones, but even conservative denominations have been impacted by erosion.

So what’s going on? The simple answer is that it’s complicated. I think a rational choice theory of religion works well at certain boundary conditions. The United States of America in the 20th-century, Stark’s laboratory from which his model emerged, is one of the best situations for it to play out. South Korea after World War 2 is another good situation. Parts of Africa as well. These are all cultural contexts where there isn’t much friction in religious switching. Opting out of the religion one is born into in the United States is a big deal, but it’s not a deal-breaker in terms of life choices. Religion is a private and personal matter by and large, not a communal one.

This is obviously not the case in much of the world, where religious identity and broader identity is inextricably connected. To change religion may result in the loss of most friends and family.

But to understand religion we need to go further back and deeper. Though the post is termed “against homo religious,” that’s really a stand against rational choice theory, which comes out of economics. The reality is I think most people are naturally religious on some level. As outlined in books such as In Gods We Trust, there are many natural human intuitions which converge upon the fact that most people come to the conclusion there are unseen forces in the universe. Powers. This raw mental furniture is easily rearranged and presented in the form that we call “religion.”

The reason for this is straightforward: across the vast majority of human history being overactive in detecting “agents” was a good thing. The vulgar form of Pascal’s Wager is that you should believe because you never know. This is actually a good explanation for why agency detection is hair-trigger: false positives are much cheaper than false negatives. An argument against Pascal’s Wager is that there actually is a cost in believing and participating in religion, such as in time. One might make the case that in a modern environment hyperactive agency detection is maladaptive, as we don’t live in a world with many dangerous strangers. Ultimately, it’s a matter of cost vs. benefit, and I’ll stay out of that argument for the present. But when the first histories were written the gods were already there. When ‘uncontacted’ peoples are discovered by anthropologists, they have their various gods, demons, and ideas about the afterlife. No people anthropologists meet are scientific materialists. This is not a coincidence. We are a demon-haunted species.

These intuitions develop into stories about the creatures in the darkness, or gods in the mountains above, and these stories become part of a group’s cultural script. From the perspective of modern people, these will seem like superstitions, or, if we are being charitable, “animism.” But these intuitions always there.

Extremism in the form of Salafism and some variants of Calvinist Christianity (or, arguably, Western secular Buddhism) militates against these intuitions. But the reality is that highly rationalized forms of religion tend to be an exterior garb, and the animist still persists within for most. That’s why Salafism is always fighting a battle against human nature.

For long-time readers, you are aware that I studied a fair amount of German history as an undergraduate. One of the primary source documents which I encountered consists of a literal inquisition in a rural area of Prussia which had been without a Lutheran minister for many years in the 18th-century. It turns out that these Protestant farmers had sacrificed a cow to ensure the fertility of next season’s crops (more precisely, they buried a cow to ensure a good harvest). When interrogated where these ideas had come from, they literally said “the air.” I think there are two things going on here.  First, animal sacrifices were a feature of pagan Baltic religion. The cow sacrifice may simply have reflected local folklore which persisted after Christianization. Second, these sorts of intuitions in regards to vitalism are rather culturally common, so their reemergence after a few decades of neglect from Lutheran authorities is not surprising.

This is not exclusive to his period. We now know that the heritage of the people of the Balkans, Britain, and Hungary, dates mostly to before their conquest and cultural assimilation by barbarian groups. But we also know that these regions had to be re-Christianized. This implies that nominally Christian peasants quickly lost their identity when the superstructure of the Roman Church was stripped away.

All this comes back to the question of why well-demarcated religious identities exist in the modern world. One hypothesis is that people need meaning in their lives, a greater purpose. These identities provide that. This seems plausible in a post-materialist society, but the vast majority of societies have never been post-materialist.

So what’s going on in the modern world, and how did we get here?

First, there was the transformation of religion into an ideology which can be turned toward coalescing a ruling elite. Religion already existed broadly in various other forms. In small-scale societies, it was primarily a matter of narratives about the world around us, possibly associated with particular taboos and rituals. As societies scaled up in size and complexity, gods emerged as totemic representations of the polity. Religion as a “team sport” is clearly present during the Bronze Age, with some rulers representing themselves as god-upon-earth.

After the Bronze Age, this transformation accelerated and perfected itself. Religions such as Christianity and Buddhism were portable due to their reliance on texts, had a non-hereditary professional class, and manifested themselves as expressions of a specific religious institution. Whereas the Bronze Age religions at the elite level were simply extensions of tribal or national patriotism, the post-Axial religions transcended nationality, and rooted themselves in a universal principle (e.g., a monotheistic God or Dharma). This was in keeping with the reality that post-Axial polities exhibited a scale and reach that was far greater than had existed in the Bronze Age.

Another feature of the post-Axial period is the rise of an intellectual leisured class. These individuals were generally detached from the workaday activities of the primary producers, farmers. The development of metaphysics and ethics resulted in the infusion of these modalities of thought into the new religions. These are also the people who developed fields such as theology and religious law. One of the major problems that occur in the modern era is to confuse these abstract and rationalized aspects of religion with religion qua religion. Though the vast majority of people of a given identity may give some credence to various theological or textual interpretations and views, these are not at the surface of their identities.

Most evangelical Protestants will tell you that Jesus gives their life meaning. That without their religious faith they would have no grounding, no morality, no purpose. These people are all sincere. But I believe they are mostly wrong. I assume that some apostates from evangelical Protestants become nihilistic Nietzscheans. But a far larger number I have encountered over the years have become very progressive secular(ish) people, whose morality and meaning shifts to a new group of peers and fellows. I put the modifier –ish because many of these people still maintain a vague sense of spirituality. A belief in supernatural powers and forces in the universe. Very few become rigorous scientific materialists. Additionally, though I am very careful about using the term ‘religion’ outside of its conventional context, I think John McWhorter is correct that some elements of white liberal political ideology today have a sacral and religious function.

Second, there was the spread of the ideological systems into something more deep-seated in the general population during and after the Reformation. I am convinced by scholars who make a technological argument that the Reformation was enabled by the decentralization of information distribution that occurred due to the printing press (they have their regressions in order!). Men such as John Wycliff clearly would have been Protestant firebrands if they had lived a few centuries later. As it is, intellectual disagreement and discord within the medieval Roman Catholic Church never tore it apart, even with outbursts such as the Hussite Rebellion (which was more a matter of nationality and localism than religious doctrine and practice).

One of the major phenomena of the early Reformation was the fact that rulers by acts of fiat shifted the religious identity of whole polities. Though this famously occurred with Henry the VIII, this also occurred in Prussia and Scandinavia. In other regions, such as much of southern Germany and Hungary, large Protestant populations remained under the rule of Catholic monarchs. But eventually, these populations were brought back into Catholicism. Diarmaid MacCulloch asserts in The Reformation that Protestantism never became dominant in a persistent fashion when the rule never converted. Obviously, other forces besides the monarch mattered. Henri IV converted to Catholicism because the Catholic grandees and people of Paris would not accept a Protestant monarch, while Mary Queen of Scots ruled over a Protestant nation administered by her Protestant nobles. But the 16th-century illustrates that denominational affiliation is somewhat malleable due to elite pressure in Western Europe, a region where exclusive confessional identities were arguably extremely well defined.

Something changed by the 17th-century. Protestants overthrew kings who were seen to be out of keeping with the religious tenor of the nation twice in England. In Germany, the rulers of Prussia converted to Calvinism but had to accept that their subjects would remain Lutheran. Similarly, when the rulers of Saxony became Roman Catholic in the late 17th-century, their subjects remained Protestant. Confessional identities were so strong due to the rise of mass culture that the elite could not simply coerce the populace.

The “final stage” of confessional identity, and coming back to the beginning of this post, is the United States of America. The American federal government was unique, and something of a first, in disavowing any sacral commitments. For historical polities this was exceptional. All the nascent European nation-states had official churches of some sort, while non-European polities patronized a variety of religious organizations. This connection between political order and religious order is primal. It pre-dates the Axial Age. The rupture entailed by the American federal Constitution was cause for much debate. Rather than relitigating that, note that in the wake of this precedent various American states began to disestablish their own denominations.

In the 19th-century the United States of America witnessed a period of religious ferment during the Second Great Awakening. Not only did it see the emergence of modern sects and denominations such as the Mormons, Disciples of Christ, and Seventh Day Adventists, but it also saw the transformation of the lowland South from a region of predominantly Anglican/Episcopalian religion to one of Baptist and Methodist sectarianism. This is Rodney Stark’s thesis at work, as the American democracy fostered competition of sect and catering to the needs and wishes of the masses. The same processes even operated upon American Catholicism and Judaism, which took upon at vaguely confessional “Protestant” cast in comparison to their original form.

Where does this leave us? American Roman Catholicism has a direct connection to the Western Roman Christianity of Gregory of Tours, but they are fundamentally different phenomena. As such, we should be cautious about extrapolating dynamics of conversion from the modern era back to the past, and vice versa. The conversion of post-Roman Europe to Christianity was primarily an elite mediated affair. The rulers converted, and after them the nobles, and then finally the people. Clearly, Roman Imperial Christianity was different. I do believe it is likely that it was closer to the American model than to the post-Roman model. One reason for this is that American Christian denominations all exist as sectarian churches in a pluralistic landscape. This is fundamentally different from the situation in most of Europe for the past 1,000 years. Even in contexts where there were large religious minorities (e.g., the recusants in England, Huguenots in France, Roman Catholics in the Netherlands), they were subject to official discrimination and subordination.

Though Christian commentators record extensive persecutions, I am of the view that likely these were more spotty than we might think. First, Christians were not that numerous before 200 AD. Second, the best and most numerous commentators seem to date to after the persecution of Diocletian. The pluralistic and diverse Roman Empire, with large and cosmopolitan cities, likely did provide for an excellent opportunity for the spread of Christianity. Unlike the magisterial Christianity after Constantine, and in particular, in the post-Roman states, this Christianity was driven by bottom-up dynamics. Christians were a community, but not an endogamous one. Christians and non-Christians married, and presumably, this permeability between the two categories was one of the reasons that the religion spread. Unlike becoming a Jew, to become Christian did not mean that one necessarily changed one’s ethnicity (this changed in Northern Europe; pagan Baltic peoples termed Christianity the “German religion,” where the Germans earlier had termed it the “Roman religion”).

A major point of disagreement was whether the spread of Christianity signaled exhaustion of the old religions. My point here is different in a subtle detail: I think the old religious forms were going to be marginalized at some point by something that was more in keeping with an imperial cultural order. Christianity clearly fit the bill, but I do not think it is implausible there may have been other candidates. Philip Jenkins points out that the Parthian Empire flirted with Eastern Christianity before the rise of the Sassanians saw the emergence of Zoroastrianism as the dominant religious-ethos of Persia (the Sassanians were descended from Zoroastrian priests).

As we proceed into the 21st-century, and information technology becomes even more powerful, I do wonder what it will mean for religious diversity and irreligion. One of Rodney Stark’s observations is that the increase in Hinduism and “New Religious Movements” (NRMs) in the late 1960s was probably due to releasing various cultural and legal constraints (e.g., Hindu gurus were able to immigrate to the USA much more easily after the 1965 immigration reform). The second wave of secularization in the USA seems to be occurring disproportionately among liberal Christians, who were marginally attached to institutional religion as it was. As irreligion and atheism become less taboo, the fraction of the religious is decreasing to committed believers. But most of the irreligious (Religious “nones”) remain adherents in some form or another to various beliefs that are common to religion (e.g., the afterlife, God, etc.).

In the supply-side model, the spread of information technology means that almost everyone can read about every religious idea. This means that there will be a substantial number, at least in absolute terms, of religious switching in the near future. The internet is also spreading taboo ideas, such as atheism, in places like the Islamic world. A large number of atheists have always existed in Muslim majority countries, but the social sanction is strong enough that they were relatively isolated from each other. The internet is bringing people together to create an alternative subculture.

On the other hand, religion is also a horizontal identity. In developing nations such as India, it looks like modernization and the spreading of literacy have resulted in stronger and more cohesive confessionalization. The beliefs of Hindus are quite varied and becoming more varied, but the self-identity as Hindus has become more standardized and rigorous.

Because religion means different things in different contexts, and because it is a bundle of different phenomena, a one-size-fits-all “theory of religion” usually fails. Christians were a substantial minority of Romans by 310 AD because of the social cohesion of the sect, and its forward-thinking set of beliefs, practices, and institutions. After Constantine began patronizing the religion large swaths of the aristocracy and ruling class began to convert. The Christianization of other societies took very different paths. In Ireland, the main sponsors of the religion seem to have been regional warlords. But in most of Northern Europe, they were kings and aspiring kings. Whereas early Roman Christians of the “primitive Church” were by definition counter-cultural, early medieval German Christians were bending to the will of the temporal powers above.

Case-based-analysis is not satisfying. But in this case, it’s all that we have to make good predictions and retrospective analysis.