9 ms·

The mad rush to as quickly abolish religious practices in mainstream U.S. culture without any form of societal replacement is puzzling to me. I am no fan of re

by phil21 2y ago

The mad rush to as quickly abolish religious practices in mainstream U.S. culture without any form of societal replacement is puzzling to me. I am no fan of religion having grown up in an exceedingly religious environment. But it was always completely obvious to me even as a child that the primary purpose of religion was to form local communities and have others with shared values to rely on. We seem to be doing it with more than just religion these days, but it’s the canary in the coal mine. Lack of investment in your community will very rapidly erode any sort of high trust society you once had within a single generation. Once it’s gone, it’s pretty much gone for good. I believe no one is talking about this aspect of WFH either. It’s taking away maybe the last “socially expected” regular commitment to your local community. Your daily life is not supposed to be lived in complete social comfort with planned interactions with a tiny group of people being your sole source of socialization. At times you should be feeling uncomfortable or obligated in some community or social setting or you are not growing as a human being. I don’t think the office is the best place at all for this, but for many folks I know it was their last social interaction of any sort outside of family. I’ve been unable to articulate these thoughts very well for decades now - since my late high school days I was already the crazy guy telling friends I was really worried how our hobbies and social interactions were so much less investment on average than our grandparents generation. On average having a bunch of Quake guild buddies is simply not the same as my grandpa who had a bunch of fishing buddies. It’s been on my mind for quite some time, and I think the data is starting to show those concerns were legitimate.

Filligree 2y ago
> The mad rush to as quickly abolish religious practices in mainstream U.S. culture without any form of societal replacement is puzzling to me. > I am no fan of religion having grown up in an exceedingly religious environment. But it was always completely obvious to me even as a child that the primary purpose of religion was to form local communities and have others with shared values to rely on. It is a problem, but… religion isn’t true. How do you square that with any sort of culture that values reality?
- benreesman 2y ago
  It seems in 2024 that one simply chooses their religion. Arbitrary GDP growth in a finite environment isn’t true either, it’s just another convenient fiction. More recently the AI doom/effective altruist community has just made some hypothetical AI thing into a god. Even rational things like environmentalism and social progressivism have taken on many of the trappings of a religion. It might be time to start judging which faith-based organizing principles produce the best outcomes.
- simianparrot 2y ago
  Religion is literally false but metaphorically true. Our brain filters existence through metaphors. I’m not religious but my metaphors of understanding reality are built on a culture that was for thousands of years until the state got separated from church within my lifetime here in Norway. And it hasn’t made things better.
- the_snooze 2y ago
  >How do you square that with any sort of culture that values reality? Empiricism doesn't help you with the questions of "who are my people?" or "what matters?" You can make a legitimate case for some of religion's claims being empirically unsound, it doesn't take away from the fact that religion is very effective at giving a lot of people meaning and community, orthogonal to those specific claims.
  - Barrin92 2y ago
    It's arguably only effective if you genuinely believe the truth claims of the faith. There is this sort of strange very online revival of "trad" beliefs but you can literally tell that the people are trying to gaslight themselves into believing something they don't. Sort of a split-brain religion at best. Nietzsche's aphorism about God being dead was correct, as was his prediction about the future. Religion wouldn't immediately die out but it would take increasingly pathological forms, it's arguably why religion has taken such a political turn as the capital 'f' Faith portion is just gone.
    - 2y ago
ryandrake 2y ago
It seems to me that a lot of the "community" hole left by religion declining is being quickly filled in by politics, which itself is taking on quasi-religious attributes.
- pnut 2y ago
  Maybe it always was one and the same.. separation of church and state in Western culture was a hard won, radical political innovation not very long ago. And Christians today are a highly motivated special interest group in the States, openly attempting to lock their social agenda into law. See also sharia law.
  - mensetmanusman 2y ago
    Separation of C/S at the time was about not instituting a state religion and protecting religious practice from the strong arm of the state (the only corporation we allow violence from).
AlwaysRock 2y ago
> he primary purpose of religion was to form local communities and have others with shared values to rely on I just don't think that is true for or to many, likely most, religious people. Community is an aspect but at its core it's a religion. You can't be a part of the community without believing, or at least pretending to believe, in the religion.
- Wytwwww 2y ago
  You can't because the only people remaining (or the overwhelming majority) in those communities are people who are actually religious and take the whole thing pretty seriously. In the past (of course it depended on the exact time and place) occasionally going to church even if many treated it mostly as a formality was the default for most people. Even if you didn't, chances are that you couldn't ignore it entirely because you still had some links to the community surrounding it through family members, various organizations, events etc.
- TylerE 2y ago
  What you’re describing is basically Unitarianism.
- pantalaimon 2y ago
  Religion is a meta-organism that uses minds as it’s substrate. Just like ordinary organisms, it undergoes mutations and evolution - its characteristics are seldomly 'designed'. Without community to keep it alive, it will die out. So religions that include practices to tie communities together are at an evolutionary advantage.
trimethylpurine 2y ago
Facebook makes money by advertising someone else's products, while religious organizations make money by advertising their own. Is the devil somewhere in those details? Could the disingenuousness of advertising be interfering with the desired authenticity of personal relationships?
Animats 2y ago
> The mad rush to as quickly abolish religious practices in mainstream U.S. culture without any form of societal replacement is puzzling to me. In the US, it's been a slow process over 35 years, since 1991.[1] England and Wales are much further along - believers are below 50%. But Islam is on the way up in the UK, at 6%. The high-intensity religions, the ones that require religious activity once a day or more, seem to be thriving. [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/how-u-s-religious-composition-has-changed-in-recent-decades/ https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/how-u-s-reli...
- TylerE 2y ago
  The rise of Islam in UK is due to immigration from Islamic countries, not natives converting.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  I'd say longer than that. I'd say religious participation in the USA has been declining since at least the 1970s.
  - Animats 2y ago
    See the chart in the article linked. The line is reasonably flat from 1972 to 1991, and then starts to climb linearly.
nineplay 2y ago
I understand what you mean, I grew up in a church with a youth group and group friends which I valued. However I also grew up with constant anxiety about sin and hell. It still gets back to me when my insomnia is bad. So churches and church membership aren't necessarily a net-positive. I too wish there was some sort of community my family could belong to. But I'm not taking my kids to church anytime soon.
- scruple 2y ago
  > I also grew up with constant anxiety about sin and hell. Erik Butler has a fantastic book on this overall subject called "The Devil and His Advocates" that you might be interested in.
- mensetmanusman 2y ago
  Not all religious societies are like that. Doing it properly looks more like exercise towards a higher good than fear of failure.
  - nineplay 2y ago
    I think it's unavoidable in Christianity. Even if one's immediate religious society doesn't believe in hell, it is trivially easy to find other societies which do, and other societies that believe that everyone is damned except for people who've accepted the 'right' concept in the 'right' way. I can't tell you how relieved I was when I realized I could become an Atheist and mostly put the matter out of my mind. Quick edit: I'm aware there are a lot of theological and historical publications nature of hell and whether or not it is misunderstood. I knew that at the age of 12. It doesn't matter. No minister or theologian or historian can _prove_ that there is no hell and that I won't end up there. God, Messiah, Heaven, Hell - we are into the area of the unknowable. We don't have training and testing data.
    - mistrial9 2y ago
      this is really odd to read, since almost all of the Protestant-related theology in the US West seems to have dropped evil and hell almost entirely. At a graduate theology seminar on the History of Religion in America, Professor Robert McDermott asked the group "How many of you believe in 'evil' ?" and only half the class raised their hands (about a dozen).
throw7 2y ago
There was a post recently about dunbar's number and it seemed straightforward to me, while reading it, that what it's really revealing is what it takes to scale above dunbar's number and that what we call "religion" is exactly that "binding" and "reification". "Religion" in this case is not just about religion either, but also nations. The U.S. has our gods, such as Washington & Hamilton, and places of worship such as the "temples" in D.C., but we've also censored leaders like Jackson & Lee, and torn down slave-owning statues. We're living through a deconstruction of history and rebuilding an inverted digital world. I don't think it's been productive. It actually almost feels like an end to history to me.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
idunnoman1222 2y ago
Maybe go fishing?
mensetmanusman 2y ago
Knowing that the US will never, in my lifetime, be high trust like it is in Japan at the moment means we have to focus on the seeds for helping push it towards that after we die.
gryfft 2y ago
> it was always completely obvious to me even as a child that the primary purpose of religion was to form local communities and have others with shared values to rely on. In the religious community I grew up in, the idea that the purpose of the church was "community" was loudly vilified. There was an active purism regarding sincerity of belief and the centricity faith should have in one's life. Of course, one can see how cult-like devotion and suppression of dissent are conducive to social cohesion, but as a young adult, I only wanted to get away from an environment that stymied my mind and spirit, and that feeling writ large has shuttered churches, I think.
watwut 2y ago
> But it was always completely obvious to me even as a child that the primary purpose of religion was to form local communities and have others with shared values to rely on. That is an atheist point of view. I grew up in religious environment too and people really believed in god. Some were hypocrites and some values stand in a real life way (commitment to not lie makes for the worst business), but the basic believe that god exist was really real. And when you play the part just for social reasons, then I think you are just a hypocrite. Which would be good reason for people to leave - so that they dont have to pretend.
vundercind 2y ago
> I believe no one is talking about this aspect of WFH either. It’s taking away maybe the last “socially expected” regular commitment to your local community. I don’t get this part. The only time I had a job in my local community was high school. Most of the adults (which was 95+% of the employees) commuted 20-60 minutes to get to it, though, so even that wasn’t my local community. You’d never run into your coworkers at the park or the store because they went to totally different parks and stores. Same’s held for my career as an adult. Coworkers are rarely people you’ll see anywhere other than work unless you go way out of your way to make it happen.
- vundercind 2y ago
  My edit window’s gone, but thinking more on this: it seems to me that remote work makes it easier to be in one’s local community. Less time lost to commute, more time to do local stuff. Can work from the local coffee shop, library, or coworking space, all of which are likely to have a far higher proportion of locals in them than an office park halfway across the city would. Can have lunch out at a sandwich joint near your house, instead of one so far away that you’d rarely or never go to it if you didn’t have to commute to an distant office.
cntrmmbrpsswrd 2y ago
I see the way US cities are designed, with sprawling suburbs and lack of shared spaces as a key contributor. Where I'm at the parks are filled with people throughout the day. The density of the city also means people tend to know their neighbors and watch out for each other much more that I've seen in the burbs.
pjc50 2y ago
This is all a very valid set of concerns; not quite a new one, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone (2000), but definitely a Thing. > The mad rush to as quickly abolish religious practices in mainstream U.S. culture without any form of societal replacement is puzzling to me. People need to acknowledge how much the downside of this kind of closeness was conformism, enforced by shunning (or worse) the noncompliant. A lot of religious communities have coped incredibly badly with the sexual revolution of the 20th century; if the only foray of your church into politics is against abortion or LGBT freedom, it's not really surprising that young people and women are going to run in the opposite direction as soon as they get a chance - often facilitated by the Internet. While simultaneously responding to actual abuse with coverups and complicity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_sexual_abuse_cases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_sexual_abuse_c...
- anon291 2y ago
  The sexual revolution is intrinsically linked to the lack of community. The sexual revolution is not actually about free sex. People have been having weird sex for centuries; with or without their partners knowing. What is novel about the sexual revolution is that it dismissed any needs for norms. Over the past two decades we've seen non-religious attempts to reinstate those norms (consent, kink, safe words, etc). However, what's unpalatable to religious people is not the sex per se, but the lack of norms. And we need norms to function as a community with a common culture. Throwing those out does not actually help. You mention the sexual abuse by the Catholic church, but that was caused by the sexual revolution. At the time, the psychological community encouraged moving pedophiles around. The church was -- at the time -- attempting to modernize, and part of the modernization was listening to 'science', including psychologists. Psychologists at the time insisted these things could be cured and criminalization would not help. The church is not the only organization to have been affected by this, but it is one of the few prominent examples of institutions being held accountable for it. The same ideology caused the German foster care scandals [1] [2]. [1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/07/26/the-german-experiment-that-placed-foster-children-with-pedophiles https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/07/26/the-german-exp... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmut_Kentler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmut_Kentler
intended 2y ago
There isnt a rush to abolish religious practices. There is a rush from many to just leave it. I read the article, it has one major fatal flaw - people don't WANT those old communities, especially religious communities he describes. People are seeking community, and finding it, elsewhere.

by phil21 2y ago

Filligree 2y ago

> The mad rush to as quickly abolish religious practices in mainstream U.S. culture without any form of societal replacement is puzzling to me. > I am no fan of religion having grown up in an exceedingly religious environment. But it was always completely obvious to me even as a child that the primary purpose of religion was to form local communities and have others with shared values to rely on. It is a problem, but… religion isn’t true. How do you square that with any sort of culture that values reality?

benreesman 2y ago
It seems in 2024 that one simply chooses their religion. Arbitrary GDP growth in a finite environment isn’t true either, it’s just another convenient fiction. More recently the AI doom/effective altruist community has just made some hypothetical AI thing into a god. Even rational things like environmentalism and social progressivism have taken on many of the trappings of a religion. It might be time to start judging which faith-based organizing principles produce the best outcomes.
simianparrot 2y ago
Religion is literally false but metaphorically true. Our brain filters existence through metaphors. I’m not religious but my metaphors of understanding reality are built on a culture that was for thousands of years until the state got separated from church within my lifetime here in Norway. And it hasn’t made things better.
the_snooze 2y ago
>How do you square that with any sort of culture that values reality? Empiricism doesn't help you with the questions of "who are my people?" or "what matters?" You can make a legitimate case for some of religion's claims being empirically unsound, it doesn't take away from the fact that religion is very effective at giving a lot of people meaning and community, orthogonal to those specific claims.
- Barrin92 2y ago
  It's arguably only effective if you genuinely believe the truth claims of the faith. There is this sort of strange very online revival of "trad" beliefs but you can literally tell that the people are trying to gaslight themselves into believing something they don't. Sort of a split-brain religion at best. Nietzsche's aphorism about God being dead was correct, as was his prediction about the future. Religion wouldn't immediately die out but it would take increasingly pathological forms, it's arguably why religion has taken such a political turn as the capital 'f' Faith portion is just gone.
  - 2y ago

ryandrake 2y ago

It seems to me that a lot of the "community" hole left by religion declining is being quickly filled in by politics, which itself is taking on quasi-religious attributes.

pnut 2y ago
Maybe it always was one and the same.. separation of church and state in Western culture was a hard won, radical political innovation not very long ago. And Christians today are a highly motivated special interest group in the States, openly attempting to lock their social agenda into law. See also sharia law.
- mensetmanusman 2y ago
  Separation of C/S at the time was about not instituting a state religion and protecting religious practice from the strong arm of the state (the only corporation we allow violence from).

AlwaysRock 2y ago

> he primary purpose of religion was to form local communities and have others with shared values to rely on I just don't think that is true for or to many, likely most, religious people. Community is an aspect but at its core it's a religion. You can't be a part of the community without believing, or at least pretending to believe, in the religion.

Wytwwww 2y ago
You can't because the only people remaining (or the overwhelming majority) in those communities are people who are actually religious and take the whole thing pretty seriously. In the past (of course it depended on the exact time and place) occasionally going to church even if many treated it mostly as a formality was the default for most people. Even if you didn't, chances are that you couldn't ignore it entirely because you still had some links to the community surrounding it through family members, various organizations, events etc.
TylerE 2y ago
What you’re describing is basically Unitarianism.
pantalaimon 2y ago
Religion is a meta-organism that uses minds as it’s substrate. Just like ordinary organisms, it undergoes mutations and evolution - its characteristics are seldomly 'designed'. Without community to keep it alive, it will die out. So religions that include practices to tie communities together are at an evolutionary advantage.

trimethylpurine 2y ago

Facebook makes money by advertising someone else's products, while religious organizations make money by advertising their own. Is the devil somewhere in those details? Could the disingenuousness of advertising be interfering with the desired authenticity of personal relationships?

Animats 2y ago

> The mad rush to as quickly abolish religious practices in mainstream U.S. culture without any form of societal replacement is puzzling to me. In the US, it's been a slow process over 35 years, since 1991.[1] England and Wales are much further along - believers are below 50%. But Islam is on the way up in the UK, at 6%. The high-intensity religions, the ones that require religious activity once a day or more, seem to be thriving. [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/how-u-s-religious-composition-has-changed-in-recent-decades/ https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/how-u-s-reli...

TylerE 2y ago
The rise of Islam in UK is due to immigration from Islamic countries, not natives converting.
SoftTalker 2y ago
I'd say longer than that. I'd say religious participation in the USA has been declining since at least the 1970s.
- Animats 2y ago
  See the chart in the article linked. The line is reasonably flat from 1972 to 1991, and then starts to climb linearly.

nineplay 2y ago

I understand what you mean, I grew up in a church with a youth group and group friends which I valued. However I also grew up with constant anxiety about sin and hell. It still gets back to me when my insomnia is bad. So churches and church membership aren't necessarily a net-positive. I too wish there was some sort of community my family could belong to. But I'm not taking my kids to church anytime soon.

scruple 2y ago
> I also grew up with constant anxiety about sin and hell. Erik Butler has a fantastic book on this overall subject called "The Devil and His Advocates" that you might be interested in.
mensetmanusman 2y ago
Not all religious societies are like that. Doing it properly looks more like exercise towards a higher good than fear of failure.
- nineplay 2y ago
  I think it's unavoidable in Christianity. Even if one's immediate religious society doesn't believe in hell, it is trivially easy to find other societies which do, and other societies that believe that everyone is damned except for people who've accepted the 'right' concept in the 'right' way. I can't tell you how relieved I was when I realized I could become an Atheist and mostly put the matter out of my mind. Quick edit: I'm aware there are a lot of theological and historical publications nature of hell and whether or not it is misunderstood. I knew that at the age of 12. It doesn't matter. No minister or theologian or historian can _prove_ that there is no hell and that I won't end up there. God, Messiah, Heaven, Hell - we are into the area of the unknowable. We don't have training and testing data.
  - mistrial9 2y ago
    this is really odd to read, since almost all of the Protestant-related theology in the US West seems to have dropped evil and hell almost entirely. At a graduate theology seminar on the History of Religion in America, Professor Robert McDermott asked the group "How many of you believe in 'evil' ?" and only half the class raised their hands (about a dozen).

throw7 2y ago

There was a post recently about dunbar's number and it seemed straightforward to me, while reading it, that what it's really revealing is what it takes to scale above dunbar's number and that what we call "religion" is exactly that "binding" and "reification". "Religion" in this case is not just about religion either, but also nations. The U.S. has our gods, such as Washington & Hamilton, and places of worship such as the "temples" in D.C., but we've also censored leaders like Jackson & Lee, and torn down slave-owning statues. We're living through a deconstruction of history and rebuilding an inverted digital world. I don't think it's been productive. It actually almost feels like an end to history to me.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

idunnoman1222 2y ago

Maybe go fishing?

mensetmanusman 2y ago

Knowing that the US will never, in my lifetime, be high trust like it is in Japan at the moment means we have to focus on the seeds for helping push it towards that after we die.

gryfft 2y ago

> it was always completely obvious to me even as a child that the primary purpose of religion was to form local communities and have others with shared values to rely on. In the religious community I grew up in, the idea that the purpose of the church was "community" was loudly vilified. There was an active purism regarding sincerity of belief and the centricity faith should have in one's life. Of course, one can see how cult-like devotion and suppression of dissent are conducive to social cohesion, but as a young adult, I only wanted to get away from an environment that stymied my mind and spirit, and that feeling writ large has shuttered churches, I think.

watwut 2y ago

> But it was always completely obvious to me even as a child that the primary purpose of religion was to form local communities and have others with shared values to rely on. That is an atheist point of view. I grew up in religious environment too and people really believed in god. Some were hypocrites and some values stand in a real life way (commitment to not lie makes for the worst business), but the basic believe that god exist was really real. And when you play the part just for social reasons, then I think you are just a hypocrite. Which would be good reason for people to leave - so that they dont have to pretend.

vundercind 2y ago

> I believe no one is talking about this aspect of WFH either. It’s taking away maybe the last “socially expected” regular commitment to your local community. I don’t get this part. The only time I had a job in my local community was high school. Most of the adults (which was 95+% of the employees) commuted 20-60 minutes to get to it, though, so even that wasn’t my local community. You’d never run into your coworkers at the park or the store because they went to totally different parks and stores. Same’s held for my career as an adult. Coworkers are rarely people you’ll see anywhere other than work unless you go way out of your way to make it happen.

vundercind 2y ago
My edit window’s gone, but thinking more on this: it seems to me that remote work makes it easier to be in one’s local community. Less time lost to commute, more time to do local stuff. Can work from the local coffee shop, library, or coworking space, all of which are likely to have a far higher proportion of locals in them than an office park halfway across the city would. Can have lunch out at a sandwich joint near your house, instead of one so far away that you’d rarely or never go to it if you didn’t have to commute to an distant office.

cntrmmbrpsswrd 2y ago

I see the way US cities are designed, with sprawling suburbs and lack of shared spaces as a key contributor. Where I'm at the parks are filled with people throughout the day. The density of the city also means people tend to know their neighbors and watch out for each other much more that I've seen in the burbs.

pjc50 2y ago

This is all a very valid set of concerns; not quite a new one, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone (2000), but definitely a Thing. > The mad rush to as quickly abolish religious practices in mainstream U.S. culture without any form of societal replacement is puzzling to me. People need to acknowledge how much the downside of this kind of closeness was conformism, enforced by shunning (or worse) the noncompliant. A lot of religious communities have coped incredibly badly with the sexual revolution of the 20th century; if the only foray of your church into politics is against abortion or LGBT freedom, it's not really surprising that young people and women are going to run in the opposite direction as soon as they get a chance - often facilitated by the Internet. While simultaneously responding to actual abuse with coverups and complicity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_sexual_abuse_cases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_sexual_abuse_c...

anon291 2y ago
The sexual revolution is intrinsically linked to the lack of community. The sexual revolution is not actually about free sex. People have been having weird sex for centuries; with or without their partners knowing. What is novel about the sexual revolution is that it dismissed any needs for norms. Over the past two decades we've seen non-religious attempts to reinstate those norms (consent, kink, safe words, etc). However, what's unpalatable to religious people is not the sex per se, but the lack of norms. And we need norms to function as a community with a common culture. Throwing those out does not actually help. You mention the sexual abuse by the Catholic church, but that was caused by the sexual revolution. At the time, the psychological community encouraged moving pedophiles around. The church was -- at the time -- attempting to modernize, and part of the modernization was listening to 'science', including psychologists. Psychologists at the time insisted these things could be cured and criminalization would not help. The church is not the only organization to have been affected by this, but it is one of the few prominent examples of institutions being held accountable for it. The same ideology caused the German foster care scandals [1] [2]. [1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/07/26/the-german-experiment-that-placed-foster-children-with-pedophiles https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/07/26/the-german-exp... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmut_Kentler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmut_Kentler

intended 2y ago

There isnt a rush to abolish religious practices. There is a rush from many to just leave it. I read the article, it has one major fatal flaw - people don't WANT those old communities, especially religious communities he describes. People are seeking community, and finding it, elsewhere.