I had mixed feelings about this article on the
collapse of organized religion in Canada. Attendance is dropping rapidly, and budgets are drying up and churches are actually being closed and sold off. Protestants are hurting the worst, since residents aren't going to church anymore, and they can't attract immigrants. Catholic churches are doing a bit better, since more immigrants are Catholic, but even they're not sticking, since by the second generation the kids are attending church just as avidly, or not, as the general population.
There's no clear reason why this is happening. There haven't been terrible church scandals in Canada (unlike in the US, and there are still plenty of Catholics here anyway, despite absolute proof that the Church concealed and protected a vast, organized ring of pedophiles), no new religious laws were passed, no famous celebrities or academics came out against religion, etc. The article engages in some speculation, but it's all off the cuff and not backed up by survey data. The leading theory? Women just got fed up:
Women -- the traditional mainstays of institutional religion -- in huge numbers abruptly rejected the church's patriarchal exemplar of them as chaste, submissive "angels in the house" with all of the social and moral responsibility for community and family but none of the authority.
Unable to find acceptable religious role models or religious ideals that were not painful or oppressive, they reconstructed their identities as secular and sexual beings. As they progressed into university graduate and professional schools and entered the work force, their horizons broadened and they discovered ways of serving that were more valuable than doing dishes and running church picnics. Birth control gave them the deliberate choice to be sexual, to move out of enslavement to fertility, to delay and limit the size of families. Pope Paul VI's 1968 encyclical, Humanae Vitae (On The Regulation of Birth), shocked even loyal Canadian Catholics by upholding the church's ban on contraception.
Callum Brown, a Scottish church sociologist, describes what took place in the churches in the 1960s and 70s -- especially in Western Europe and Canada -- as a "hemorrhaging of young women."
It's an established fact that church goers today and throughout US history have been predominantly female, so this Canadian explanation is probable on that front; if women stopped going to church in the US, they'd collapse here too. That fact makes one sideshow of US religiosity all the more ironic; the issue of the "Promise Keepers," evangelical, culturally conservative men who frequently spend their time
blaming women for the fact that men don't go to church.
Relish the ignorance, sexism, and selfishness of that logic. It's women who are keeping the US churches from folding up like cheap lawn furniture, mostly due to their demonstrably misguided belief that dragging the kids to church will inculcate them with good morals. The amusing part is that while women are suffering through another unpleasant chore their role as primary caregiver forces them into, their husbands are off watching football or playing golf, and occasionally writing
sanctimonious, whiny books that blame wives and mothers for the fact that their husbands refuse to yawn through a droning lecture about something they don't even believe in anymore. (And why should they, when their wives will do it for them?)
To digress, as I am wont, I expect to see a parallel scenario unfold around US higher education in the next few years (it's probably doing so already, though I've not read specifically about it). Women now greatly outnumber men in US colleges. So far, the discourse I've seen about this has been pretty rational; young men aren't interested in all that studying and learning and hard work, there are still a fair number of jobs with decent wages open to men without college degrees, etc. Plus, women, like minority males, have historically needed to greatly outperform white men to be taken seriously on their job application. Hence education is more important and more valuable to them.
The female advantage in higher education is changing society, and once the female demographic advantage really starts to kick in over the next decade or two, the traditional male/female wage disparity begins to draw narrower, and colleges (naturally) refocus their courses to appeal to the majority of the customers, I guarantee we'll see eruptions of books (written by white males, of course) complaining about how colleges are no longer male-friendly, and how they should change their curriculum to better engage men. (Perhaps arm wrestling and belching contests could be incorporated into final exams?) Oddly, none of the men involved thought there was any problem with the structure of colleges during the first several centuries when they were exclusively male, or during the 1920s, 30s, 40s, 50, 60s, or 70s, when they were still almost entirely male. Yet now that women substantially outnumber men, male reformers will pop up like the proverbial mushrooms. What a coincidence?
Incidentally, my just completed three semesters at a local university backs up this trend. My professors were about equally divided between men and women, with slightly more men, especially among the older profs, but the students were overwhelmingly female. The day students, 18-22 y/o undergrads, were about 75% female. The ratio was a bit more even amongst the adult (30-70 y/o) students who mostly took night classes, but I was in the gender minority in every class but one (ironically, it was in that one that I met the IG), and was in a very small minority most of the time. One class, admittedly a Women's Studies course, featured me, one other guy who missed at least half the classes, and about twenty-five females. (Tragically, as was almost always the case, the age range was profoundly un-Goldilocks-esque, and all the women were either 20 or 50.)
What confuses me, is why people think this is a problem? I guess if I were worried about cultural trends, especially if I were a sexist and thought it was important that men continued to hold most of the positions of power in US society, I'd be concerned. But on a personal level; what heterosexual college-going male is going to object to being surrounded by young women? I was in school to finish my degree and learn things, and maybe date a bit, once Malaya and me split before the January 2007 semester. The fact that a typical class was about 14 women to 3 men was not a bad thing, in my view. I'd have had to ride out an apocalypse trapped in a Victoria's Secret during a bra and pantie sale to improve much on those odds.
Returning, at last, to the increasingly irreligious nature of Canadians... I'm not sure. Despite the fact that I think less religion is generally a good thing on a personal and societal level, the article left me feeling somewhat melancholy, though far short of infinite sadness. I'd exult in the shuttering of most American churches, especially any with televangelist connections, since those people should be
wearing cardboard signs and selling pencils from a cup. But I don't know if the Canadian ones are guilty of such gross crimes against decency and justice, not to mention the bottoms of altar boys.
Neither do I know much about Canadian culture and the practice of religion north of the border, so I can't comment with any authority. I can comment on religious belief in general, and religion in the United States, and I will... but not today.
To tease, I've recently read best sellers by three of the four prominent male atheist writers (Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett) and I'll be opinioning on them when I post reviews in the days or weeks to come. All three books were excellent (I'm only halfway through Dawkins') and refreshingly, they all approached the subject from different perspectives. They were not redundant or repetitious, even reading them back to back to back, and even after I'd viewed numerous speeches by all three authors.
Hitchens' is the most witty and the easiest/quickest read, and definitely the most sarcastic and imbued with the most directly combative attitude. Hitchens approaches the issue as a social commentator and a historian, and takes great pleasure in puncturing sacred cows and assaulting the sensibilities of the faithful. He's a good enough writer, establishing a sense of narrative and theme throughout his book, that it's quite readable anyway. Even, I suspect, if you disagree with him on various of his propositions.
Harris book is like a very good research paper, with hundreds of (optional) endnotes and references. His tone is calm, scholarly, and dispassionate, and that makes his central argument, that the persistence of religious belief is likely to create a nuclear holocaust, all the more striking. As he points out, cultures and countries possessed of (or by) opposing religious beliefs have clashed all through history, and when one, or both, sides in a conflict believes that dying in the battle will only hasten their ultimate heavenly reward, their possession of nuclear weapons is an incalculably dangerous proposition. The book is much more than that, of course. A great deal of it concerns philosophy and the function of the human brain, fields Harris is learned in. (He has a philosophy degree and is working on his PhD in neuroscience.) He's also a practitioner of various forms of meditation and the transcendental, and it's fascinating to read his views on those sorts of experiences, since he approaches them from a scientific, brain-function perspective.
Dawkins is a brilliant biologist and evolutionary scientist, and his book is incredibly broad-based. He brings a great deal of learning and authority in history, culture, science, philosophy, morality, and more, and aims them all at the practice of religion and the mind set and beliefs of the faithful. It's a devastating critique, and I'm only halfway through the book, so far.
I've not read anything by Dennett yet, but I've been watching some of his speeches lately, and he's an interesting case. He's the least compelling speaker of the four; he's an old university professor, and at times he lectures like... an old university professor. He's given to droning and occasionally mutters, and in some of the presentations his mike is situated so that he sounds like a gargling Darth Vader when he inhales. He's also got a habit of far too often asserting that something is "interesting" and/or "important." And he's right, but this tick makes the listener feel like they're being ordered to pay attention, and that the thinking has already been done for them. (I'm trying to learn from his example. I edited the first sentence of this post since I am aware that I far too often make the same claim about articles I blog about. It's repetitious, and pointless, since I clearly wouldn't be linking to and writing about if I didn't think they were worth reading.)
Dennett might not be the greatest presenter, but he's got some brilliant and fascinating (interesting?) ideas. He's a philosopher and a scientist, and I like his speculations on the persistence and spread of religion, and his comparisons of it to a
meme. Or a virus.
This is a good example, and the stuff I found most clever comes in the last fifteen minutes. It's all very philosophically analytical. What elements of religion and other memes are beneficial, or neutral, or bad, for their hosts (us)? Flipping the equation entirely, how are the carriers of mental viruses, like religions and other foundational belief systems (such as communism, democracy, libertarianism, etc) affected, sustained, controlled, and modified by those beliefs?
I've blogged in the past about human evolution, and pointed out that it's been stopped, or entirely subverted by culture. The weak no longer die without reproducing; the strong no longer have the most children. However, thanks to the highly prevalent custom of pair bonding, humans have seldom functioned like most other harem-based mammals, where the strongest males can sire a substantial percentage of the next generation. Furthermore, human strength and fitness is not exclusively based on physical size and strength, as it is in most animals. When we look at how natural selection works in the wild, it's usually fairly obvious what factors and traits are being favored. It may be very counter-intuitive; peacock tails, for instance, have no survival benefit, and in fact they are quite a survival detriment, but they are what peahens like and are thus a strong factor in sexual selection.
Humans and our courtship and breeding rituals are far more complicated than those of animals, and as Dennett discusses in this speech, the complications and higher levels of human culture can be entirely deleterious to our genetic fitness. Religious and nationalistic fervor are prime examples; how many prime, healthy young men have sacrificed their reproductive chances by willingly marching off to likely death in war, or certain death in suicide attacks, for their beliefs? Animals don't do that. An animal's highest priority is to reproduce, as frequently as possible. That's how natural selection works on them; the ones that are best at reproducing leave offspring with their genetics. How does that reality reflect, at all, on humans? Aside from occasional lusty conquerors like Attila the Hun, reputed to the father of thousands, it doesn't show up at all.
However, if you compare natural selection in the animal world to a meme like say, Catholicism, you get some contradictory evidence. Those who are most strongly infected by that particular meme not only don't reproduce much, they tend to aspire to positions in the church that will preclude their ever reproducing. The various branches of Christianity are almost universally condemning of polygamy (one prominent Utah-based sect aside) as well, which at first seems like a detriment to reproductive natural selection. A man with 5 wives can clearly pass on his genes more often than a man with one wife. On the other hand, there seem to be some pretty obvious reproductive benefits to individuals who belong to a religion, such as Catholicism, that enforces monogamy, provides ample options for pair-matching, strongly encourages couples to be fruitful and multiply, and makes it very difficult for them to divorce. This says nothing about abstract notions like truth, or reality, or happiness; it's just about surviving and reproducing, and by that measure, being a good Catholic is a pretty useful tool to achieve that end.
On a higher level, and this is where Dennett mostly focuses, let's lift our eyes up from our usual myopic, anthrocentric POV. After all, I, and most of you, are probably concentrating on the human element of this natural selection and reproductive fitness. But what about the religion, the mental virus, the meme? It's evolving and existing through time, it lives far longer than any human, and it survives by being transmitted from host to host, just like any other virus. Instead of considering how humans reproduce and live when under the influence of a given religion, perhaps the question should be how does the religion, the meme, replicate and evolve and persist through the ant-like lives of its billions of believers? After all, when it comes to the relative popularity of a world religion, the death or life of individual adherents is pretty much irrelevant.
What are the essential traits of a religion or belief system that make it last? Why do some flare brightly and fade away, or stabilize with only a few million followers, while others claim tens or hundreds of millions of adherents? It's pretty clear that vast ideas like religions, memes, exist and compete in a sort of world wide cultural natural selection. And the truth or "goodness" of those religions is almost irrelevant. What matters, for the survival of those memes, is what they drive their believers to do. All religions and belief systems evolve over time, adapting to new human needs, waxing and waning in popularity, mutating or schizming into new branches. They were all created at some point, codified to some degree, and from there they took on lives of their own. So to speak. Religions, and all other foundational memes, change with the times, or even cause the times to change.
It's a vast subject of research and investigation, and one that is still in its relative infancy. I think it's fascinating, and want to read some more about it, from people who have given it more thought and much more research than I have. I'm sure Dennett isn't the only one working on the topic, but I'll start with him and branch out from there.
Labels: atheism, christopher hitchens, daniel dennett, philosophy, psychology, religion, richard dawkins, sam harris
