My thoughts on religion and society

Secular liberal democracy holds that it is possible for everyone to hold their own personal religious worldviews, without taking part in a distributed social attempt to generate intersubjectively agreed upon views of the world, and without needing to justify their worldviews to anyone else, while also acquiscing to the demands of liberal democracy to:

1. submit to the general laws of liberal democracy — designed to maintain including religious pluralism, religious freedom, and individual rights — as a higher power over their own moral beliefs ("your right to swing your fist ends at my face" being more important than their religious belief that they should, or must, "swing your fist into my face");
2. constantly justify decisions they make on the basis of things that are comprehensible to others, such as Enlightenment reason, scentific evidence, and liberal values, necessitating either exclusively, at least in the public sphere, acting on those values and reasons (basically asking them to prefer another value and epistemic system rather than their own must deeply held beliefs) or continually find parallel justifications for what they want to do due to religious reasons (which can work if religous belief and liberal-democratic-Enlightenment epistemology and values perfectly line up, but if they did, there'd be no point in religion, basically resulting in a lot of pseudoscientific rationalizations and obfuscation of true motivations);
3. recognize, in their public words and actions, something which they may not truly believe, namely that it is morally and philosophically justifiable to hold other religious beliefs, or non at all;

(which is funny, since liberal democracy holds the idea of the free market of ideas very dear, and yet it's become culturally unacceptible in most public discussions to criticize or call out religious beliefs)

in a society where a significant amount of religious people will feel culture diverges from their values and beliefs, and also overtly believe that religion should, actually, have more influence on public life.

This seems like a fundamentally unstable equilibrium to me — one that's destined to fall apart. To ask people that have real beliefs about what leads to the health or downfall of a society, what is good and bad for human beings, what leads to positive and whole moral development and what leads to moral degeneration, in the people around them, to try to pick and choose when to use that knowledge, based on standards they fundamentally cannot believe are as important as theirs, whether through political, social, or even cultural means, is just not sustainable.

If you have a deeply held belief that, for instance, your religion has the best view of morality, one that makes people wholesome and safe to be around, while without your religion moral rot and degeneration will set in — how can you live around, or in a society, of people with different beliefs than you?

More empathetically, if you truly believe in your heart of hearts that there's a heaven and a hell and that, for instance, gay and trans people are going to hell, and you give any care about them at all, you're going to want to prevent them from sinning in such a way that they can go to heaven instead of hell, by any means necessary.

Likewise if you think widespread cultural "immorality" will degrade and debase society as a whole, and thus make it more unstable, more prone to falling apart, and more likely to oppress you even if you only live around fellow believers — or even bring down god's wrath! — then you're going to want to do something about that, including legislation.

It seems inconsistent to me to say one can hold these beliefs without acting on them.

This social contract, where we validate belief but forbid its application, is inherently contradictory. We turn to believers and say, "Yes, it’s totally valid to be a Christian and believe in God. All of this is good and perhaps true, who knows? We support your right to these beliefs." But then we turn around and tell the very same people, "No, actually, those beliefs are totally valid, but you are not allowed to let them influence you when it comes to acting in the world." Such a position cannot last, because it inevitably leads to resentment and a push to change the culture so that one can act on those deeply held beliefs.

You might argue against this characterization of religion in secular liberal democratic society by pointing to liberatory or progressive theologies — but that actually only furthers my point: these, too, are religions that hold positive beliefs about society, politics, and culture, and do work to push them forward by various means. It only just so happens that that their beliefs align with your personal values. People adhering to these religions are still carrying out and enacting religious beliefs in society, while not operating on the same plane of discussion, justification, and values as those who lack religion.

That's survivable, perhaps — but the more important point is that we can't guarantee all religions will be like that. If we disallow religion because it is religion, instead of allowing the critique of religion and letting less literal, more progressive, liberatory, and non-evangelizing theologies to stand on their own two feet and rebut criticism directly, while other religions fail, then we're giving up a weapon with which to fight more dangerous religions and, in fact, perhaps help and preserve the ones with fewer epistemic and axiological flaws. I also think, as we'll see in my section on specific criticisms of religion, that the "nice" religions people like to point to may not be so exempt from these criticisms after all.

The problem with the hope that liberal denominations of various religions will win out is also that it runs contrary to sociological reality: it has been proven that the stricter religions — the ones that have more to say, that are more propositionally dense, that put more off-limits — are the ones that grow and maintain their membership better than more liberal ones, which lose members more easily. To from Andrew Mark Henry (an American religious scholor with a PHD in religious studies from Boston University)'s summary of the relevant literature:

Between 1990 and 2000, the membership of the liberal Protestant denomination, the Presbyterian Church USA, declined 11.6%. Meanwhile […] the Presbyterian Church of America […] grew from 360,000 members to about 375,000 members. […] The more lenient United Church of Christ declined from 2.1 million members in 1955 to less than a million in 2013. During that same period, the Church of Latter-day Saints skyrocketed. The growth is even more dramatic when we consider some of the stricter denominations. The population of Amish for example, doubled over the past 20 years and is expected to double again by the 2030s.

These figures seem to support the so-called Strict Church Theory. The idea that strict religious groups, the groups that require more demanding beliefs and practices from their members, and the groups where members face greater social consequences for leaving, are able to thrive when compared to more lenient religious groups.

Why is this? The economist Laurence Iannaccone tried to explain this phenomenon using economic terms, that strict religious groups demand higher costs from potential members, which therefore screens out potential free-riders […]

[…] why wouldn't rational actors making rational choices try to maximize benefits while avoiding costs? Well, paradoxically, the same restrictions that a religious group might impose on a member results in tangible benefits for those members. Costly signals screens out free-riders, which increases average rates of participation from its members. […]

For example, studies have found that highly committed religious groups excel in resource sharing between members. The anthropologist Richard Sosis takes kibbutzes in Israel as an example. […] The behavior ecologist Montserrat Soler found that members of the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé who reported high levels of religious commitment were more generous in resource sharing and reported receiving more support from their community than those who were less engaged. The scholar Dimitris Xygalatas has demonstrated that painful public rituals such as scarification or dragging carts with hooks in the skin promotes pro-social behavior, social cohesion, and cooperation in religious groups in India. […]

Costly membership can also reap social benefits […] All of which can result in better mental health outcomes. […] Connor Wood […] has argued that these costly signals promote […] in turn promotes better mental health, like reduced depression and rates of suicide.

Sure enough, recent polling from Pew Research shows that Gen Z is actively becoming more religious than the previous generation, right in line with these predictions.

And, of course, they are also the ones that are going to actually motivate strong, lifelong action in a way that progressive religions won't:

Numerous studies have examined the association between religion and civic engagement, and there is widespread agreement in the literature that religious Americans are more civically and socially engaged than their less religious peers across a range of outcomes (Lam, 2002, Park and Smith, 2000, Putnam and Campbell, 2010, Wilson and Musick, 1997, Wilson and Musick, 1998).

Many of the benefits of religion to its adherants and their communities may be broadly pro-social too — there is an equally large literature demonstrating that. But that doesn't mean that it's actually good for culture or society in the long run, or many marginalized or countercultural groups that must live alongside that religion. It's perfectly possible for even the worst cult to do a ton of charity and volunteering, and share material goods, social support, and community among each other. So it's important not to confuse "broadly pro-social" with perfectly fine, and get lost while ignoring the broader point: religion effects society, good or bad — it is not just a personal belief or identity.

So in fact, it seems more likely that the stricter religions will win out over time precisely because they demand more and thus inspire more fervent devotion. Yet at the same time, they are often the most repressive and dangerous to their own members, and have the most potential to be corrosive to a wider society that doesn't share their beliefs if they're not isolationist like the Amish. As even Henry says,

Now, it's important for me to say here that these theories, the Strict Church Theory and the Costly Signaling Theory, are morally neutral. They're trying to explain empirical data, the fact that strict religious communities seem to thrive in the sense of greater population growth and greater social cohesion, and more lenient religious groups seem to struggle. These theories say nothing about the ethics of strict religious communities. They say nothing about the use of authoritarian leadership, coercion, or force, nor do these theories try to demonstrate any negative effects of costly membership.

One might object that this critique doesn't apply to the growing number of "cultural" believers — those who participate in the rituals and traditions of a religion for a sense of community and historical connection, but who remain agnostic about or outright reject its metaphysical claims.

However, this position still suffers from the same problems as more liberal religious belief compared to stricter religious belief. We are not going to get everyone becoming a merely cultural believer; precisely the opposite: those who remain religious at all will increasingly become less cultural believers and more explicit believers.

The deeper problem is not just that cultural religiosity won't save us because it won't take over, though — the deeper problem is that it can't. It is still acting as if the foundational propositions were true, because it is still operating within a framework created by centuries of literal belief. It doesn't matter that cultural believers don't consciously believe in the metaphysical claims of the religion they "culturally" act out. What matters is that they've taken something the only possible solid foundation of which was those metaphysical claims, cut out that foundation, and continued on. The foundation is still contained within their beliefs in negative: a gaping negative space that has definite shape and presence by its very absence.

For example, the actions and values of a "cultural Christian" person are still downstream of a culture that was shaped for millennia by people who genuinely believed Jesus was the son of God who rose from the dead. Why else would they choose the Bible as a source of moral wisdom over the Dao De Ching or the Analects of Confucius? The only reason to privilege that specific text is the cultural inertia created by past belief. The only possible justification for their adherence to one specific set of traditions and ethics over all others lies in the metaphysical claims they've supposedly discarded. They are, in essence, inhabited by the ghost of the belief system they no longer consciously hold.

More than that, the way they act out their cultural beliefs is still essentialy the ways that those who truly believe the propositions act out their beliefs; as such, they're still unconsciously carrying out the agenda of the religious meme they think they're free from — their conscious denial doesn't matter in the face of their subconscious commitments and actions. Their participation, however well-intentioned, continues to legitimize the underlying propositions and the culture built upon them, making it harder to critique the system as a whole.

The other half of the psychological benefit of religion is, as Max Weber discusses, the re-enchantment of the world. But what is re-enchantment but the reification of things, the sacralization of things — that is, treating them as above us, as things to respect and serve above all else? What this amounts to is fundamentally the intentional self-limiting and harm of what we're capable of, what we can do, what we can understand, and what we can know, which shuts off a world of possibility and change and improvement that we could have access to.

Furthermore, a lot of the psychological meaning, purpose, and sense of community that people get from religion is based on religious history: feeling connected to and adhering to a long, unchanging intellectual and cultural tradition. This means you cannot heavily revise, revamp, revisit, throw out, and add core themes to this religious structure, because then you would lose that sense of long, close historical connection. You are always tied down to those often very flawed ideas, ideas which have not been able to take full advantage of the centuries of dialectical development that philosophy and science have had. You are still separated from and unable to fully integrate all of the critiques of science and philosophy, because that would obliterate what you hold so dear.

The problem with that is not only the cognitive dissonance this produces, but you're still essentially keeping the memetic retrovius that is the old, outdated beliefs alive in the current DNA of your religion, like a memetic retrovirus. Which means that it can always come back as fundamentalism, which is always a stronger strain anyway.

Another fundamental issue lies in the goal of religious practice. If, as is often stated, the primary purpose of adopting a belief system is to find meaning, happiness, and group cohesion, then one is optimizing for psychological comfort, not for truth or liberation.

This pursuit of comfort often leads to a form of non-liberatory, even cult-like, counterculture — if it even leads to counterculture at all. When the goal is to feel good and belong, the result is rarely a worldview that challenges one's own deepest assumptions or the subtle tyrannies of one's own community. Instead, it creates an echo chamber that may stand in opposition to the outside world but enforces its own internal dogmas just as fiercely, precisely because its primary function is to maintain the psychological well-being of its members, not to relentlessly pursue a more accurate or empowering understanding of reality.

And, being counterculture even in a non-liberatory way is hard. If you're seeking psychological wellbeing, not truth, then the path of least resistance, even if it's a local maxima, is to go along with whatever dominant strain in society will offer you that. The possibility of achieving some global maximum of fulfilled enlightened joyful liberatory religion — if it even exists, although I personally find the "happy martyr" archetype psychologically unlikely — is remote for the vast majority of believers. Conformist believers will always vastly outnumber the non-conformist ones.

The first problem with religion a very simple one, based on the principle of parsimony. The fundamental existential position that the human subject finds itself in is the position of having to make sense of the sound and fury of its experiences, which by themselves signify nothing. We need to come to an understanding of the correlations, shapes, and patterns that enter our awareness so that we can obtain the patterns that we find desirable and avoid the ones that we don't. Our minds already do a lot of this for us — presenting a world already structured by the Kantian transcendental categories, by space and time and objects — but above that, we still have to come to an understanding of what all of this means for us, what the causal relationships are between things, if we can effect them and how.

Every further assumption or proposition that we make in the attempt to make sense of this world carries with it a risk: the risk of the proposition being wrong and thus hurting our ability to navigate the world, either through the opportunity cost of not having more effective beliefs or through the outright harm of causing us to act ineffectively or harmfully.

To minimize this risk, we should practice a form of empiricism: we should only add the simplest possible set of propositions that uniquely and meaningfully guide our actions toward our experiential reality; which are based in observed patterns in experiential reality — the more repeated the pattern the better; which are effective when we do let them guide our actions, by accurately predicting the results of any causal interventions we might attempt; which, if true, would make the experiences we see more probably; and which also relatively uniquely predict our specific experiences, since a proposition that can explain everything explains nothing when it comes to trying to predict the future, since it can only be applied after the fact.

Religious propositions, for the most part, are adding very many propositions to your description of your experiential reality, all of which effect your life, actions, and understanding of meaning and significance massively, bringing huge possible harm and opportunity cost. At the same time, religious propositions pretty much universally fail to be better than alternatives — or simply holding no opinion at all — when weighed against the criteria for an effective proposition.

Thus, taking them on brings with it a massive risk for you. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:19,

If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.

In other words, if you've dedicated the only life you know for sure you have to something which is false — missed out on so much time you could have spent otherwise; so many other opportunities you could've taken; people you could have met and loved; hobbies you could have tried; changes you could've made for yourself and the world — then you've lost everything if it isn't true. For another example, think of the opportunity cost of believing in the healing power of prayer over, or even in addition to doctors. Even if you also believe in doctors, believing in the healing power of prayer could delay a doctor's visit, which leads to your cancer being detected a month too late, and leads to a hard fight with it or even death.

It is crucial to note that this risk is not symmetrical, contrary to what a simplified version of Pascal's Wager might suggest. One cannot simply say, "But what if you're wrong and there is a hell?": the burden of proof for adding a proposition to one's worldview lies with the one making the positive claim, because our starting point must be our direct experience of the world. A proposition only becomes worth considering if it is necessary to explain a pattern within that experience. The risk of adopting an unnecessary proposition (like the existence of God or an afterlife) is real and has tangible consequences in this life. The risk of not adopting a proposition for which there is no experiential evidence is purely hypothetical. To treat all baseless propositions as carrying equal weight would be to fall victim to "Pascal's Mugging" — an endless paralysis where one must entertain every outlandish claim for fear of some infinitesimal but infinite consequence. Our epistemology must be grounded in the reality we can observe and interact with, not in an infinite sea of unfalsifiable possibilities.

But it's not just a personal risk that you carry. These beliefs, as I discussed, affect how you want to change society, how you act towards the people around you, and how you want to change them. These risks affect other people, and it's almost impossible to tell a priori which beliefs will effect others and which wont. For instance, returning to our earlier example, if believing in the healing power of prayer might seem like a purely personal belief, but it isn't at all — if you truly, deeply, in your heart of hearts believe it, and you haven't been cowed by liberal secular society, guess what you're going to do? You're going to impress that belief on others, whether other members of your faith — and it is very often very difficult to leave a faith, so it isn't purely a personal choice on there part to be in that faith — or, especially, on your children. Similarly, if you believe in the power of your god to forgive and absolve you of wrongdoing, that might seem like merely a personal belief, which brings you great joy and comfort, but it in reality it makes you much less likely to seek restorative justice with the people you've actually wronged; and if you believe that your faith fundamentally transforms you into a morally better person, you become much less likely to seek practical transformative justice in the here and now — even if they might need to as individuals, apart from whether their faith tends to make people better as a whole (which, to be fair, to some degree it seems Christianity at least does, since it seems to promote prosocial behavior).

Even more importantly, seemingly personal beliefs have an effect not just on how you treat others interpersonally, but how you want to push society. As I've said before, if you have a particular picture of what moral degeneracy versus rectitude looks like that's tied into either behaving in the way your religion prefers or actually believing in your religion, you're going to want to actively foster a society that follows your religious dictates and perhaps even believes in your religion — perhaps by fighting for prayer and Bibles and the Ten Commandments in public schools, if you're a Christian — because the moral quality of your society as a whole deeply impacts you. If you think the moral quality of your society is decaying, that's a threat through cultural osmosis on your and your own children and community's rectitude; it's also a threat because it will bring more corruption, persecution, and so on to your society. Likewise, if you have a view of what a good or bad, a flourishing or failing, society looks like, that's informed by your religious beliefs — perhaps by tales of Sodom and Gomorrah — you can't just keep that to yourself, because, while you can separate yourself from society to a degree, what the wider society around you is doing effects you. These seemingly neutral, personal axiologial beliefs inform your actions and values, and they can't always be neatly translated into rational justifications other people can understand.

A concomitant problem with the epistemology of faith is that, once you decide to open yourself up to believing things on faith and intuition because they make you feel better in the moment, or on the basis of overactive pattern matching and associations, because going without an explanation for something, or accepting that it is coincidence, is psychologically difficult for humans, it becomes difficult to have strong cognitive defenses against other outlandish claims. Thus, while you could start with perfectly harmless personal beliefs, unless you engage in special pleading and cognitive dissonance — as historical Protestant Christianity did with regards to claimed present day miracles — you'll very easily and naturally get sucked into more and more outlandish beliefs, without any attention to how effective or harmful they are, to you or others.

Of course, defenders of a more open-minded epistemic approach have argued that one could merely raise one's epistemic standards when confronted with potentially more harmful beliefs, and lower them with less harmful ones. This seems reasonable at first, but when you look closer, it just pushes the problem further down the chain of justification: after all, to determine whether something does, did, or has the potential to harm, and to whom — yourself, others, both? — you need a solid, rigerous epistemology in order to ascertain that. If you're already willing to compromise your epistemology, and you've built those cognitive habits, you won't be as good at telling what is a potentially harmful belief worthy of higher scrutiny, and what is a less harmful belief.

This becomes apparent when we look at the correlations between religious belief and conspiracy belief. For example, one study from Australia found that, "among believers, the importance attached to their religious worldview was directly associated with higher belief in conspiracy theories and this link was partly mediated by higher anti-intellectualism […] Among non-believers, there was no direct association between the importance of non-religious worldview and belief in conspiracy theories." Similarly, another study, on religious fundamentalism in relation to COVID-19 pandemic showed that "people with higher (vs. lower) levels of religious fundamentalism were more likely to have delusions and, consequently, showed stronger conspiracy beliefs associated with religious content about COVID-19. The results of our study can be used in practice. Psychological work on rational thinking could be used to prevent the development of conspiratorial beliefs in highly religious people as these religion-related conspiracy beliefs may contribute to disregard of epidemiological recommendations to prevent the spread of COVID-19."

Note: For a longer and more detailed philosophical treatment of the ideas of the preceding two sections, namely that religious belief is an epistemic failing which can count as a moral one because it can almost always effects others, and which spreads bad epistemic habitus, see William K. Clifford's "The Ethics of Belief."