The number of people around the world who claim allegiance to an organized religion is dropping. Valerie Tarico at AlterNet has an idea why:
Religions have spent eons honing defenses that keep outside information away from insiders. The innermost ring wall is a set of certainties and associated emotions like anxiety and disgust and righteous indignation that block curiosity. The outer wall is a set of behaviors aimed at insulating believers from contradictory evidence and from heretics who are potential transmitters of dangerous ideas. These behaviors range from memorizing sacred texts to wearing distinctive undergarments to killing infidels. Such defenses worked beautifully during humanity’s infancy. But they weren’t really designed for the current information age.
Tech-savvy mega-churches may have Twitter missionaries, and Calvinist cuties may make viral videos about how Jesus worship isn’t a religion, it’s a relationship, but that doesn’t change the facts: the free flow of information is really, really bad for the product they are selling.
Tarico identifies six kinds of Web content that, she believes, are aiding in the decline of orthodox religion:
1. Radically cool science videos and articles.
2. Curated collections of ridiculous beliefs.
3. The kinky, exploitative, oppressive, opportunistic and violent sides of religion.
4. Supportive communities for people coming out of religion.
5. Lifestyles of the fine and faithless.
6. Interspiritual okayness.
Click over to AlterNet for more on how these kinds of content could be contributing to a decline in religiosity. Then come back here and discuss:
Is the Internet killing organized religion?
Note that I’m not asking if the Internet will kill all spirituality, just the way we see spirituality co-opted and corralled by the major and minor organized religions. Can institutions from the Catholic Church to Scientology survive in an environment where open exchanges of information are encouraged and fun to engage in?
(If you have a suggestion for a QOTD/QOTW, feel free to email me. Responses to this QOTW sent by email will be ignored; please post your responses here.)
I think this is a very western view of religion; the assumptions in the article are very much in the Abrahamic mould, and religions that haven’t taken on the oppressiveness of that model are tending to do rather better.
In the specific context of Western religions, I think that we’re simply seeing the same fifty-year period that happens in science: nothing can change until the people whose careers and self-images are vested in the old way of doing things finally have the grace to stop being in charge.
As an ex-organised-religion type person, I’d be astonished if any of the factors listed above have any substantial influence on many people’s beliefs. As a religious person one has to be able to reconcile conflicting ‘claims’, ‘opinions’ and ‘beliefs’ about religious and secular matters, both within the ‘organised religion’ and between that and ‘the outside world’.
Sure, more information and more perspectives help, but to be honest print and film and TV and not-living-in-a-monastery/nunnery had already pretty much got that covered. If you’re in a religious system that denies the validity of TV, then that ban will be equally effective against online media.
So no, I don’t think it’s the spread of ideas or knowledge that helps get people out of a belief, especially when it wasn’t pure ideas and knowledge that got them into it. It may well have been a social or emotional motivation that got someone into a religion, especially at a susceptible time in their lives.
What gets people out of a religion may well be that it just ceases to work for them, and that the comfort or support or purpose that was so attractive is not sufficient to counteract the repulsion of the judgement or the hypocrisy or the authoritarianism or the disappointment of the experience of staying in the religion.
Take all the above with a pinch of salt as my opinion is based on my own experience (white, British, middle class, male, young-at-the-time, evangelical-charismatic christian) and that of my friends and co-religionists. I’d like to be able to say that the Web was a cure for ignorant religionism, but then I’d also like to think that the web was a cure for poverty and racism. In practise, people dig them into beliefs and ways of life in a much more complicated way than ‘web browsing’ :-)
The Internet Is Killing Everything is the new meme. Spread it. :)
I DO believe the internet is doing it’s darndest to get the information out there. And it’s obvious that there are some people paying attention and coming to their senses. But there will always be those people, LOTS of them, who simply don’t want to know. Don’t want to learn. They are content in what they believe, and will stick their fingers in their ears(hands over the eyes, in this case?) and say LA LA LA.
It may be harsh, but I don’t get how ANYone can be still be religious with the sheer amount of information out there now. It’s ignoring the obvious for the sake of comfort.
And, yes, I LOVE all the science being put out there. Videos, pictures, articles. But the thing is, I don’t think the right people are seeing them. On FB, I have “liked” a lot of science/nature/space, etc. pages. so I get a constant stream of awesome information. I don’t see my sport obsessed, god-believing, brother doing the same. I’ll share some of these videos, but no one ever comments. So sad.
Ahem. My religious mother and my religious brother like nature and science programs too. Why do so many atheists and freethinkers like to pretend such people don’t exist?
Because such people* can’t seem to be bothered to speak up for themselves. So, really, they have no one to blame but themselves.
*As long as we’re generalizing.
So you can generalize about “atheists and freethinkers” and we can’t generalize about religious people?
Touché.
Of course there’s always exceptions. I know some die hard thumpers who love nature and learning all about it. We’re talking guys who think the Earth is only 10,000 years old types. Not so sure about the science part, though, but I’m pretty most anyone would say science is great. At least until it contrasts with a long held belief.
Plus, it matters what kind of things they(general, not your family) are viewing. Are we talking about simple animal documentaries, or the more in-depth evolution type stuff? Earth being around for 5 billion(?) years or so? What baffles me is when they view all this stuff, and then go on to say something clueless like “God is such a wonderful creator!”. *facepalm*
Then we have the space part, which is really key, because of the notion that the Earth was made just for us. Let’s just ignore the countless stars, planets, galaxies, etc. out there. Billions of lights years and beyond away. It’s simply unfathomable, amazing, and totally grounding. And there’s no room for any of the thousands of gods that have existed throughout time.
Most of my family is Catholic. They are good people who I have never once asked WHY they believe what they do. I’m making crazy assumptions about it when I say that we were all indoctrinated when young, and it’s hella hard to walk away from that, so it’s a comfort over challenge thing. It took me many years to do it.
But this stuff DOES matter because these people vote. These people are heads of large churches full of people who listen to and respect them. These people are CEOs of large corporations. Their views are behind all sorts of decisions being made that affect millions of people.
So I damn well hope the internet gets more people thinking, questioning, and maybe even, dare I say it, evolving.
*Obviously, Tonio, this wasn’t all aimed at you. I just got to ranting and couldn’t stop!*
Hey, no worries.
You gave me a more civil answer than I expected.
Of course, Catholics and religious people in general aren’t the only type of people who do things without asking why they do so. But that’s a subject for another day.
Short answer: yes
Long answer, not really.
Most people still believe in the internet as a sort of virtual reality buffered from their own existence, this is going away, but as long as people still believe that they are, to a certain point, anonymous on the internet, this has led to the rise of conversations about religion that were not possible before.
Its easier to feel that you are not alone at not believing.
But ultimately, its claims to truth that are unsupported by observable reality what is fueling this in the first place.
If your religion is a cult, then yeah, the above stuff will threaten it. But actually, a lot of religions are a good guide to living your life, be kind to others, be truthful, seek the truth in others- so it will not affect that type of faith! Not at all an expert in religions but as long as you don’t pay any attention whatsoever to the blokes who run them, the central tenets are good guidelines and, y’know, help people at vulnerable times in their lives to cope with the absolute shitstorms life sometimes throws at you. If you do have a religious faith, it doesn’t mean it has to be a blind, unthinking faith – I think a proper type of faith actually requires you to question authority, not accept things on face value, hold powerful people to account, look after others who need help and are vulnerable. These are not bad priorities.
I sometimes think you write about religion from an American’s perspective, Maryann but American religions are bonkers and just seem to be money making rackets designed to prey on poor and vulnerable people.
Wait a second… there are organized religions that aren’t money making rackets? And aren’t bonkers to boot?
If we can pick which aspects of a religion to follow — if we can interpret what a religion means to us personally, embracing what seems good to us and chucking the rest — then it seems to me that our true moral compass, the sense of right and wrong by which we judge religion, lies not within religion but within ourselves. We get to decide whether bits like Leviticus 20:13 are bullshit, and whether other bits like Mark 12:31 still make good sense. We get to choose whether to be religious like Javert, or religious like Valjean (or whether to emulate either of them without being religious at all). We are the makers of meaning and purpose in our lives.
I’m an atheist, but at the end of the day I suppose I care less about whether someone has faith than about how that faith (or secular philosophy) manifests itself in someone’s actions and dealings with others. I guess I’m not really disagreeing with your comment, just coming at it from a different angle.
This isn’t something that’s limited to American organized religions, in my experience.
If you can pick and choose, if you can interpret for yourself, then I don’t think that the term “organised religion” applies to you. At least, it’s not organising you!
If by “you” you mean me, as I said, I’m an atheist.
But even people within organized religions have different interpretations of their faith and how to put it into practice. Torquemada and Martin Luther King both read the same Bible. Catholics who disagree with the Pope about gay marriage are still Catholics. Peace-loving Muslims and al-Qaeda sympathizers both claim to be living by the Q’uran. And so on.
My point is that we all pick and choose, even when we think we don’t.
I seem to recall a certain guy from a small mining town named Eisleben who made quite a stir over something called Indulgences. This was, indeed, quite a long time ago, and many things have changed, but, as they say, plus ça change, plus la même chose.
Chong: I know that dude!
Cheech: You mean you actually know this guy she’s talking about?
Chong: Of course I do. I played with that cat at the Filmore.
Cheech: Wait a second. Martin Luther is not a musician.
Chong: I’m hip, man. That cat didn’t know anything…
Who needs a Lebowski when you’ve got Cheech and Chong?
Sorry, Tonio, but I came across this and thought it apt: http://www.cracked.com/photoplasty_518_12-drunk-texts-recovered-from-famous-moments-in-history_p12/
Heh. No worries, LaSargenta.
due to the democratizing nature of the internet, the more “revelatory from on high” religions are in trouble, as they are heavily dependent on a single source of information and rulings and expects everyone to toe the party line.
But the more diffusive “discovery” forms of religions would benefit, not only by allowing the sharing of information but can also facilitate the advance of discourse.
You know, i think there is something to what you are saying, but it also seems to me that if you don’t have some sort of core guidelines and people keeping those guidelines as the standard, (precisely the sort of revelatory from on high sorts) then you don’t really have much of a religion do you?
Sure, you can believe in god in your own way, but maybe thats whats killing religion and fueling the latest wave of fundamentalism isn’t it?
I’d answer this question but right now I’m too busy sorting through all the religious e-mails my Christian friends and relatives keep forwarding to me…
But seriously, folks!
People turn to religion for many reasons and not all of those religions are likely to be canceled out by the Internet.
If anything, I suspect a lot of religious people are using the Internet to spread their own messages the same way similar folks in times past used the radio, the TV and the printing press.
And one can’t help but notice that Islam doesn’t seem to be going away any time soon…Except in the dreams of certain freethinkers…
Because the extremists are the noisiest, always. And the moderate enable the extreme, even without overt support.
Touché again.
I feel like organized religion in the West can either be dying or taking over. It really can’t be both.
I think this might be a bit simplistic.
Even if the Internet is killing off religion, the strain of religion which is most resistant to the internet is that which developed as a reaction against modernity; fundamentalism.
Also, the United States has some very serious issues with anti-democratic governing systems. The upshot is that there are two political parties which have managed to gerrymander many regions to ensure that a large number of elections simply aren’t competitive between two viewpoints. This has resulted in the religious right having a disproportionate amount of influence in US government.
While I don’t think the theocrats are going to be able to take over, I think they can do an awful lot of damage by enacting their beliefs piecemeal. The current Republican disgust for science and LGBT and reproductive rights is a good sign of that. There may come a day where the religious right doesn’t have the demographic clout, or the disproportionate power that they do now. I just think there’s a lot that can happen until then.
Over on the Trouble with the Curve thread, someone just posted this comment:
And since I see that sort of comment on the Web all the time, I don’t think of the Internet as a haven for rational thought or tolerance of opposing beliefs.
But that’s a glib response to a fairly large and complex question. I spend a lot of time with religious people. I am one. But what I’ve noticed is that more and more religious people are becoming extremists, while the people who believe in open-mindedness and are willing to question their own beliefs are moving away from religion altogether. The extremists tend to be opposed to the Internet. They won’t let their children log on to a computer, because there might be something there that will corrupt them. And they won’t allow books about dinosaurs–even fictional cartoon dinosaurs–in their houses, because those stories might contradict the Biblical account of Creation. So I don’t think the Internet is going to kill off religion, at least not in this generation. I think (based, admittedly, on personal experience and anecdotal evidence) that we’re going to end up with a more divided society, and we’ll see a growing population of religious believers who are aggressively anti-science, or who embrace pseudo-science because it supports their beliefs.
I’m optimistic enough, though, to wonder if all this extremism is temporary. It seems to be based on fear and anger, because people feel their way of life is under attack. Anger can fade over time, so maybe, gradually, we’ll start to see fewer culture clashes–and less of the wider political divisiveness that we’ve seen in the U.S. over the past decade or so.
Maybe that’s wishful thinking, but if it happens, then I hope–selfishly, as an observant Jew–that we also see a few more religious people who are open to science and skeptical about their own beliefs. I hope we see people who are not only tolerant but welcoming of opposing viewpoints, and glad to spend time talking with people who disagree with them, even on the Internet.
In the US, the extremists (ie, creationists) are getting themselves elected to state school boards and advocating for creationism to be taught as science and lean toward a heavy pro-religion/anti-science bias.
In Louisiana, for example, they have a law that says a science teacher can teach creationism if he/she wishes do so. Creationists in other states are pushing for similar legislation. What’s happened is that political opportunists have hijacked Christianity and claim that Christians are being oppressed because they can’t teach their religious beliefs.
The religious right in America has entrenched itself into the Republican party and they are firmly at the root of decision making in the US. They’re implementing policies that promote their ideas like creationism in schools.
If the internet is making a dent in organized religion, I think it is only doing so regionally and not across all of America as a whole. It’s creating a greater divide that’s creating extremism. If you love Jesus, apparently, you can’t believe in evolution, global warming, or pretty much science as a whole.
I think as long as people have media that confirms their biases, the internet will only serve to reinforce those beliefs.