The foundation of religion: despair

I think that what may happen is that the local church provides the social outlet for the community. It also provides the concept of family that many people don't have.

There is an isolation that many people feel. There is the isolation of distance from family and friends because perhaps work commitments mean that their family is spread all over the globe, and there is the emotional isolation that I think can result from this as well.

So church for many people is a way to socialize. Perhaps the only avenue open to socialize. In australia, church groups do not form the major outlet for socializing. I think sporting groups and associations do. Many asutralians belong to golf clubs, football clubs, tennis clubs etc and their children belong to those clubs too.

So, perhaps the popularity of religion in the US does have something to do with a sense of alienation and a desire to belong or fit in. I dunno. But I suggest they join a sporting club instead. ;)

My immediate reaction is that there's a strong strain of silliness running through it.

If this made sense, then surely the former eastern bloc countries would have been ripe for the same sort of thing after Communism imploded in 1989. I'm not aware that anything of the sort has happened.

It is a movement built on the growing personal and economic despair of tens of millions of Americans, who watched helplessly as their communities were plunged into poverty by the flight of manufacturing jobs

It is irritating though that the same people are affilated to politicians who are responsible for these changes.

That doesn't make sense. You would not expect it in the communist bloc countries if they were seeing a material improvement in their conditions in response to the regime change. It's not strip malls per se that cause the problem: it's the downturn in the economic situation.

A xian road movie trailer. So to speak.

http://www.broadcaster.com/video/player.php?clip=6679

Truthfully this isn't any different then what drove the "New Order" just after or during the fall of the Roman Empire.

The New Order eventually brought us the Middle Ages or more commonly referred to as the Dark Ages.

beepbeep may be right. I remember several lectures in political science classes back in the 80's that were about the loss of social clubs in America. How many people join the Elks anymore and how will that effect democracy. Peer groups is the term the prof used. One could argue that perhaps the internet is changing that, creating new peer groups like this or DK.

or maybe we all need to join a football club to save America.

Sociologist of religion had predicted, in the mid-twentieth century, that the progress of secularism and the increase in pluralism in western society would lead to a decline in religiosity. They are still working on the details of why they were wrong about that, usually they use the word 'uncertainty', but I guess 'despair' is pretty close to that.

It's interesting the article puts religion in the context of other ideologies -- and it's certainly true that people have historically flocked to ideologies like fascism and communism in times of economic crisis, so if one considers religion to be just another ideology, it makes sense that people would be flocking to it now.

And there *has* been an increase of religiosity in the former Communist countries, particularly the ones that haven't adapted very well to the free market such as Russia, where economic troubles abound for the common people, despite the existence of a few billionaires tied to organized crime and the former Soviet leadership. Russia even took legal action in 2004 against the Jehovah's Witnesses, who were rapidly spreading throughout the country.

Communism didn't provide most people with a sense of community, although it did give them a sense of stability and predictability that they've missed now that it's gone.

Religion, while officially verboten, was always present in those countries as well.

No, what I would have predicted is that strong, autocratic leaders would gain prominence. And look: they have.

Despair might be too strong a word for most of these folks (although surely applicable to some). I think presently it's insecurity. As we continue our descent into the crapper, the insecurity will be replaced more and more with despair, which will certainly lead to some very unpleasant social movements. I'm not a follower of Trotsky, but I think his observation that desperation by the middle class produces fascism has a lot going for it.

For those interested in historical comparisons, there is Fritz Stern's classic study of Germany in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: "The Politics of Cultural Despair." Plenty of differences, but also some chilling similarities.

I'd surmise the real root of the despair isn't the collection of "bad things that happen" that ruin a rural American town, but the personal guilt that they get when the realize they were the cause of some of it.

Now, I'm not trying to forgive the fault of big corporations that move their factories to Mexico (oh the irony of the Mexicans who come to America, though employment in Mexico is harder that one can imagine).

But it IS the fault of those they elected that didn't take any action to stop it (no, you can't make it illegal, but you can increase incentives to stay). And it REALLY is the fault of them for giving in to the bottom dollar and going to that new walmart 2 miles outside of town and watching their town center decay and die with closing stores and boarded up houses.

That personal guilt of rural America, knowing they destroyed that small town life to save a buck, I think is a major part of this. They turn to religion because of the culture they used to have, its all they have left. The small town life is gone, the local music culture is gone replaced by bland soft-rock country music with the local stations owned by clear-channel, the small farmer is gone, bought out by freeways or mega-corporation farms that turn the lands near livestock into manure depots that stink for miles while all the money goes to holding companies in NYC or Chicago.

For the other rural America, the one that's disappearing into the sprawl-and-crawl of suburb-driven cities, they don't lose their money so much (though many have sold their farms to developers anyways), but they do lose their unique identity in exchange for these outsiders moving in with their Giant food stores, their TGIFridays bars, their Starbucks coffee (disclaimer, I'm drinking one now ;-) ), and effectively turn their just-like-every-other rural American small town into the just-like-every-other suburban American sprawl.

There's nothing left for them but religion, so it then becomes easy for the influential to manipulate that. Its not just despair, its the personal guilt that they know their short-term buck-saving greed was a major cause of it, because THAT is despair you can't just reason away.

Cameron :

Is it really the middle class that's at this point yet?

Like the Romans, the middle class may be getting smaller as some are lay-offed into poverty and others are taxed out of joining that upper bracket, but the middle class that remains is still very easily satiated by iPods, HDTV, free roads and big cars.

In fact, one could probably put a good argument forth that the material satiation of the middle class is responsible for its political apathy, which in turn leads to only extreme groups (such as America has them) voting in the primaries and giving us the worst-of-both-worlds candidates we're stuck voting for.

What kevinC is referring to is the idea of "social capital" mostly famously discussed in Robert Putnam's "Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital."

Anyone else find is scary that the things that drive people to religion are the same things that drive them to join gangs and organizations like the KKK?

Look at the people that make up both gangs and the KKK. People with little or no education, little or no money, desperate for a sense of community or family. I've also noticed a tendency in gangs, and the KKK, of seeking a scapegoat, someone else to blame their problems on, rather than working to get out of their miserable situation.

I see many of the same things in the religious people I meet.

That doesn't make sense. You would not expect it in the communist bloc countries if they were seeing a material improvement in their conditions in response to the regime change.

I suggest that you need to learn a bit more about what happened in a number of eastern bloc countries after 1989.

But if you don't like that as an example, there are a considerable number of other cases where countries suffered economic dislocation/job loss at least as serious as the US. Look at a number of European countries following WWII for another "group" example.

However, to my knowledge, none have also suffered the explosive rise in visibility/influence of the sort of right-wing "religiosity" being discussed. I don't see that the article provide any rationale for the underlying question - "Why in the US?"

I think that rather than running around trying to come up with a bunch of "maybe" explanations, it would be more fruitful to study this from a Symbolic Interactionist perspective. Religion is a social object, and it creates roles through which people perceive reality and their place in the world. So, the question is how does this particular social object create a reaction against perceived efforts to diminish it? Reason has attacked the basis of religion as God itself is in little physical evidence; and yet religion has provided a basis for creating fluid solidarity in societies for so many thousands of years that people are unwilling to enter into a religion-less anomie.

I have a friend who holds to belief in God only because he had a rotten childhood and wanted to have something that he could rely on. He doesn't live as though he were guided by religion, yet he is unwilling to let go merely because he is afraid that this will leave him with nothing. Even as I was explaining to him how a humanistic viewpoint can give him what he needs emotionally, he so distrusts everyone but me that he is unwilling to take the leap from God-belief to an unknown "something else." He takes the creationist viewpoint only because of this, and something blocks him from being able to take the perspective that science only looks at what we can discover through naturalistic methodology.

Now, this is an anecdotal study of one person; and because of the fact that he is not using church as a social support system but using its beliefs as a personal support system illustrates an example of how the social object works.

I have asked Joel Charon for references to studies that treat religion and creationism as social objects and study the phenomena from an SI perspective; but haven't received a response as of yet. (Perhaps because I was rather drunk when I e-mailed my request to him, it was not a clear enough question for him to respond.)

Joe,

No, I don't think we're quite there yet (and I have no intention of being here when it hits). As you note, what's left of the middle class has been engaged in an orgy of consumerism; I would like to add that much of that has been financed by re-mortgaging homes, easy credit, and other means of dubious financial wisdom. Despair is a bit further down the road, say, when other countries decide they don't want to pick up our debt any more. That's when I see the Trotsky idea - it may not be Mussolini fascism, but it could easily be Rushdoony theocracy.

It may also be instructive to look at Germany after WWI. They were just chock full'o'despair. And there are many, many aspects of Hitler's rise to power which are best understood as the genesis of a new religion, a cult of personality centered around the personal magnetism and charisma of Hitler.

I think the "religion as an alternative to despair" explanation works even better with Islam in the Middle East (but modified by the addition of powerlessness and the subtraction of things like soulless exurbs and the loss of manufacturing jobs).

Those two paragraphs you cited are a perfect synapses as to why I have come to call the republican party the EBP, Emotional Blackmail Party. It's one of the most underhanded tricks in the book, and the one guaranteed to produce the greatest guilt trip.

I disagree somewhat diametrically. I think that "fearful smugness" is a better description of the state of a large chunk of rightwing Christians. It's always assumed that they're poor and uneducated, but a lot of them have good educations (often in applied fields) and are quite well off. They've built these very pleasant lives for themselves, but they live in fear of the outside world: drugs and perverts and Negros and Mexicans and foreigners and terrorists and diseases.

John B:

Sociologist of religion had predicted, in the mid-twentieth century, that the progress of secularism and the increase in pluralism in western society would lead to a decline in religiosity. They are still working on the details of why they were wrong about that, usually they use the word 'uncertainty', but I guess 'despair' is pretty close to that.

Religion has declined over most of Western Europe and large parts of the US as well. I'm almost certain that there are fewer churchgoers where I live in SF Bay Area than there were 50 years ago. If you want to look at "western society" as a whole, then all that needs to be explained is the outlier of middle America--the place that gets all the media attention, as if it represented some standard of American culture.

I would argue that large parts of the Christian-dominated US aren't particularly secular or pluralistic. Granted, that statement borders on a tautology. But my own opinion about Christian-dominated America is that it represents a fortress mentality against all the changes that are making the US more multicultural and less religious in other places. I'm unaware, for instance, of any trend in which foreign born engineers are being converted in large numbers to evangelical Christianity (if there is one, I'd be interested in hearing about it). So what we're seeing is increasing religiosity specifically among those Americans who see pluralism and secularism as threats to their way of life.

So what we're seeing is increasing religiosity specifically among those Americans who see pluralism and secularism as threats to their way of life.

Well, here's where I might propose that while they see pluralism as a threat to their cultural identity, they are being TOLD that secularism is the root cause of that pluralism, and THAT's why their religion is getting involved in the politics where our constitution demands it doesn't belong.

Sociologist of religion had predicted, in the mid-twentieth century, that the progress of secularism and the increase in pluralism in western society would lead to a decline in religiosity. They are still working on the details of why they were wrong about that

They are right about this, except, as mentioned, in Middle America. Compare Europe in 1950 to Europe now (Russia probably excluded)...

It may also be instructive to look at Germany after WWI.
Oddly enough, there was an increase in religious fervor at around that time but not in Germany, it happened in the US. There seems to be a cycle to this, it too shall pass.

Also--with the fracturing and multiplication of media outlets (at the same time that the ownership of those outlets is being concentrated in an ever-shrinking number of hands), there's more of an opportunity than ever before for unscrupulous "culture warrior" types to make fat wads of cash by pandering to, playing upon and feeding into Middle America's isolationist religionist Know-Nothing sensibilities. (See Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly and my in-laws' favorite, "Oh noes! teh gay!" James Dobson.)

It's a self-perpetuating cycle: disillusioned unemployed white Christianist (my father-in-law) feels that he's found someone in the media who "understands" his problem and "speaks to" people like him. He tunes in, likes what he hears, becomes a regular listener/watcher. What he hears reinforces his existing prejudices and inculcates him with new ones. Now it's not just secular humanist abortionists who ruin the country; it's illegal immigrants, public school teachers, gay-married Hollywood types and the rest of the usual suspects.

(I recently finished reading Karen Armstrong's "The Battle For God: A History of Fundamentalism." Remarkable book--it gave a clear and understandable account of why fundamentalism, in all three monotheistic traditions, has proved increasingly popular in the last few centuries. Essentially, it fills the need of those "left behind" in contemporary society to mentally reconcile non-rational religious tradition (mythos) with rational, scientific modernity (logos). Excellent read.)

But my own opinion about Christian-dominated America is that it represents a fortress mentality against all the changes that are making the US more multicultural and less religious in other places.

This makes more sense to me than the other explanations do. It accounts for this phenomenon's thirty-some year existence, through good times & bad.

Sociologist of religion had predicted, in the mid-twentieth century, that the progress of secularism and the increase in pluralism in western society would lead to a decline in religiosity. They are still working on the details of why they were wrong about that,

They weren't wrong. Religiosity has most definitely declined and is continuing to decline. There is some evidence that the decline is accelerating. It's been happening faster in Europe than in the U.S., but it's happening here too.

I have found (particularly when I lived in Middle America) that there is a strong religious movement among those who've "made it" economically, for two reasons: (1) These are people who feel fortunate and want to know how to give back to the community. (2) Success reinforces the worldview of the successful. I behaved well, God rewarded me, and I want to have that feeling confirmed (see Weber's "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism").

see, this is the problem with blurring the line between church and state - this is not a religious phenomenon. It's explicitly political

Three years ago, in the 2002 elections, Christian conservatives swept Georgia, the last Democratic bastion in the South... The new Republican senator, Saxby Chambliss, and the new governor, Sonny Perdue, both conservatives and Christian, won not on "moral values" but on an exurban platform. The mastermind behind the coup was Ralph Reed, once of the Christian Coalition, who had been reborn as Georgia's Republican chairman. Reed remains a fundamentalist, the same man who once tested employees' commitment to "Christian values" by asking them if they supported the death penalty for adultery, but he was too canny to talk like that in public. The term "Christian," he'd learned, is a "divider," not a "unifier," so he had left overt faith behind. He backed candidates who ran under the mantra of the exurbs: "Shorter commutes. More time with family. Lower mortgages."

The adultery question was, of course, coming from a man who worked closely for many, many years with Newt Gingrich

This troika of exurban ambition worked on multiple levels. Just as Nixon used marijuana and heroin in the 1960s as code for hippies and blacks, Reed devised a platform that conflated ordinary personal goals with fundamentalist values. "Shorter commutes" is a ploy that any old-time ward heeler would recognize. It means: let's move the good jobs out of the city. Atlanta, like Colorado Springs, has an urban core that Christian conservatives would just as soon see wither. "More time with family," of course, extends that promise of exurban jobs but also speaks in code to the fundamentalist preoccupation with "family"--that is, with defining it, with excluding not just gay couples but any combination not organized around "biblical" principles of "male headship."As for "lower mortgages," they are lower in exurbs because cities subsidize them. The city pays the taxes that build the sewers and the roads for the exurbs. The city provides the organization that makes it possible. Exurbs are parasites. And what else does "lower mortgages" mean? More land. More space between you and your neighbors. And this, too, is necessary for Christian conservatism, which depends on the absence of conflict as one of its main selling points. For all its talk of community, it is wary of community's main asset: the conflict, and the resulting cultural innovation, born of proximity. But such cultural innovation is death to today's Christian conservatism, which tosses a gauzy veil of tradition over the big-box consumerism of its megachurches.As contemporary fundamentalism has become an exurban movement, it has reframed the question of theodicy--if God is good, then why does He allow suffering?--as a matter of geography. Some places are simply more blessed than others.

Their leaders made a strategic decision to concentrate in low-education economically-depressed states with low costs of living so they could have a grossly disproportionate influence on national politics, and they've leveraged their disproportionate influence (particularly with the White House and the press whose pet administration they're propping up with bloc voting) into the perception that they are what a Christian is.

They're lying. More from the bloodthirsty righteous patriarchs in Mr. Reed's office:

"The wackos get their information through the Christian right, Christian radio, mail, the internet and telephone trees," Scanlon wrote in the memo, which was read into the public record at a hearing of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee. "Simply put, we want to bring out the wackos to vote against something and make sure the rest of the public lets the whole thing slip past them."

It's a scam. Please don't concede religion to these people. They don't believe in it.

But ...
Despair
is a mortal sin, in ANY form of christianity.
Uh?

Marx had it right:

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

If you wonder at the resistance of the proles to the replacement of God with Darwin, well, just imagine how well an opiate addict would react to the suggestion that he really ought to switch to herb tea.

PZ: I'd like to commend Michael Ruse's book "The Evolution-Creation Struggle" (Harvard Univ. Press, 2005) to you and anyone else listening.

True, much religiousity is driven by despair with present conditions and a rejection, even hatred, of this present world. End Timers exploit this hatred (which is really often self-hatred) to build up their coffers, and (as a consequence) this chunk of believers tends to withdraw from the world, or at least from any commitment to making the world a better place.

What makes Ruse's book relevant to this concern is that he identifies a tipping point which is theological in origin. End Timers are pre-millenialists: convinced of the imminent destruction of the present order, they see no point in working to preserve the Earth for future generations. On the other hand, Ruse (and I think Numbers holds similar views) sees the 'progressivist' streak in evolutionary thought as not merely consonant with, but growing out of a different eschatology, post-millenialism.

Of course, one can have a sort of 'progressivist' take on evolution (a la Julian Huxley) while being a throughgoing religious skeptic, but I think Ruse would say that this possibility is shaped and informed to some extent by theology. Comments?....SH

Scott (my favorite theist commenter)--Armstrong touches on some similar themes in her book, too, when discussing pre- and post-millenialism. She describes post-millenial thinking as the idea that Christians need to make the world a good enough place for Jesus to want to come back. Not, obviously, my line of thought, but much better than the "fuck it all up so Jesus can save our asses" line of Bush & Co.

The Ruse book sounds interesting; I'll see if I can pick it up. (Small hope for my tiny-fundie-town library's actually offering it.)

I played around with the GSS a while ago looking at criminality and fundamentalism. The data looked like it supported the theory that people become fundamentalist because they feel vulnerable in threatening environments:
http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2007/01/criminal_because_of_god_or_…

Religiosity declines with increasing wealth and education. Some sociologists argue that the key factor that determines the degree of religiosity of a society or culture is security. The more secure people feel about their socioeconomic condition, the less religious they are likely to be. This explains not only the striking differences in religiosity between the developing and developed nations (the former being much more religious than the latter), but also the anomalously high degree of religiosity in the United States, as compared with the other wealthy democracies. The welfare state is much less developed in the U.S. than in other nations, Americans are expected to rely much more on themselves and their families for their social and economic security than are the citizens of other nations, and in consequence Americans tend to be more religious. I think that is probably just part of the explanation, but it certainly seems plausible to me.

The article presents a unique recipe: one part liberal hysteria, three parts pop pseudo-psychology, and a dash of lack of contact with reality.

I've long felt that the "pro-life" movement's motivation comes from sublimated social/economic insecurity, for which the fetus serves as a perfect blank screen onto which to project feelings of vulnerability to mysterious and dangerous outside forces. (Entwinement with sexual implications & misogyny also attracts some people to this cause, of course.)

Jason wrote:
Religiosity has most definitely declined and is continuing to decline. There is some evidence that the decline is accelerating. It's been happening faster in Europe than in the U.S., but it's happening here too.

Do you have any data that supports that view? Because most everything I've seen shows very little change in the last thirty years in the US.

Polls from the last three years show that about 90% of the US population believe in God, and many people believe in miracles (89%), the devil (68%), hell (69%), ghosts (51%), astrology (31%) and reincarnation (27%). Interestingly, of the 84% who believe the soul survives death, only 1% think they are going to hell. There's no doubt that religion makes one optimistic. More worrying, to my mind, is that people are becoming accustomed to religion in government. For example, 76% think the Ten Commandments should be on courthouse walls. All this seems hard to square with a decline in religion.

tomh,

The American Religious Identification Survey found that the number of American adults who do not subscribe to any religious identification more than doubled between 1990 and 2001, from 14.3 million to 29.4 million. As a percentage of the population, they increased from 8% to over 14%.

The General Social Survey conducted by the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center found similar results. See the tables at the end of this document for details:
http://www-news.uchicago.edu/releases/04/040720.protestant.pdf
The birth cohort data strongly suggests that the trend of declining religiosity is accelerating. Younger people are much less likely to have been raised in a religion than older people, and are much more likely to claim no religious affiliation than older people.

G.Tingey: Despair
is a mortal sin, in ANY form of christianity.

Two points, one where you're kinda right, the other where its irrelevant.

Despair is a sin in some dogmas/doctrines, but not in all of them. In the modern Episcopal/Anglican church, its ignored as such - its a sign you need help, but not something you should be punished for merely for its own sake.

The irrelevance? If in despair, they "turn to the church", they're forgiven and "helped" and are doing the supposed "right" thing.

Thus, the curse of looking at it that way. If the way out of despair is the church, then the dogma of the particular church, with all of associated irrationality, contributes to the problem at hand as described in many of the comments here. By pinning the blame on "demons" or human scapegoats like "liberals" and "gays" and "immigrants", they ignore the root causes of their despair and happily go on voting for republicans that destroy their local economy all under the delusion that it's what God wants.

When really, its just what the local conservative party and their big business allies want.

Religiosity has most definitely declined and is continuing to decline. There is some evidence that the decline is accelerating. It's been happening faster in Europe than in the U.S., but it's happening here too.
Do you have any data that supports that view? Because most everything I've seen shows very little change in the last thirty years in the US.

See here, too:

http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_prac2.htm

A sample:

81% of American adults identify themselves with a specific religion:
76.5% (159 million) of Americans identify themselves as Christian. This is a major slide from 86.2% in 1990. Identification with Christianity has suffered a loss of 9.7 percentage points in 11 years -- about 0.9 percentage points per year. This decline is identical to that observed in Canada between 1981 and 2001. If this trend continues, then by about the year 2042, non-Christians will outnumber the Christians in the U.S.

So Christianity is declining almost 1% a year in America.

The illusion of ever-increasing nos. of Christians is, I think, largely due to moderate Christians leaving the religion and fundies being a disproportionate number of the ones remaining.

To be fair, religions do provide just such a social outlet. I am an atheist and unlikely to change but I am jealous (only a little) of the large face to face community that I miss out on by not being affiliated with a church. I have many small communities based around family, friends, and common interests, but the large support network that many churches provide are not a part of my life.
I think that the internet and sites like this one, do provide a piece of that community in a very real sense (even for a lurker like myself). It is reassuring to know that my ideas are shared by many. My hope, and I'm working towards it in a number of real ways, is that the face to face secular community will continue to grow as well.

I retract my herb tea analogy for a better one: trying to replace religion with scientific naturalism (Darwin included) is like trying to replace opiates with universal acid.

Personally, I am in favor of some kind of methadone -- that is, something that binds to the religion receptors but is relatively harmless.

The majority of people really desperately want to fit in. When the major option towards this goal is church led acceptance or activity, the majority will always choose that.

I was brought up to believe that one didn't have to think about everything as everyone else did. That it was ok to question and to be skeptical, and that "fitting in" was for sheep and other ruminants.

We humans probably have a packlike mentality. We like the structures of hierarchy we create in our modern worlds because they mirror the hierarchies of our common ancestors and we like to know where we fit in that hierarchy and in that pack or flock. It provides an emotional and psychological comfort to us. Just my thoughts on the subject.

"Why in the US?"

Answer that, and you will have explained the outcomes of the 'Teacher' and 'Prisoner' experiments.

"plunged into poverty by the flight of manufacturing jobs"

Sounds like they shook out their little wings and flew to warmer climes, doesn't it.

If pointy-headed intellectuals can't, or won't, explain what happened to the economy, if the self-appointed know-it-alls resort to magical thinking, what's a slack-jaw, gap-tooth, working stiff supposed to think?

He thinks the world is irrational because the very people who berate and ridicule his ignorance tell him it has no rational explanation.

The article presents a unique recipe: one part liberal hysteria, three parts pop pseudo-psychology, and a dash of lack of contact with reality.

Thank you for that thoughtful, objective, and penetrating analysis *eyeroll*

So, what do you think the reason is?

This discussion reminds me of Durkheim's Division of Labour, it seems we may be talking about a version of his 'anomie' with our 'despair', 'uncertainty' and 'insecurity'. Anomie is the term he uses to describe the results of a 'deregulation of norms', the inability of people to find their place in society, leading to conflict, confusion and dissatisfaction (dealt with further in his book on suicide).

A few people have brought up the issue of solidarity, one the other elements in the Durkheimian view is the construction of meaning.

There have been some changes in the social form of religions in America. I don't know if these would apply to Europe. But the changes have to do with religions providing meaning and normative structures people can choose to access.

I'm thinking of the Buffet-style spirituality, and the utilitarian approach to religious ritual, that are commented on so frequently by sociologists and historians of religion in America (see Berger, 1979 The Heretical Imperative). The movement of religion into the private sphere, and the recognition of pluralism, has leeched the taken-for-granted character from particular religious traditions. People must choose to be religious, to remain faithful in the face of competing religious institutions and secular lifestyle options. They decide for themselves what elements of religion are appropriate for their lifes.

Anecdotally, I have seen growth in the number of people who self-identify as 'spiritual', denying any specific institutional affiliation. Asked if they are religious they will reject the label. These people usually maintain belief in some form of God, and claim to practice elements of a number of world religions (usually some combination of Protestant Christianity and Missionary Buddhism (Tibetan usually, atm)). I don't know if these people are part of some adaptation of religious content to modern ideals (individualism, consumerism) or just evidence of a stage in the 'Decline of Religion'.

Additionally, I have noticed people who have rejected religion who return to religious institutions purely for critical moments of social transition, to access meaningful 'rites of passage' (baptisms, marriages, funerals). These people use the institution as a kind of social service, and don't participate in private worship, generally. (Although, their parents might, and there does seem to be some issue of pressure to conform to social expectation involved.)

Anyway, these are examples of groups who I'm not sure count as 'religious', who still depend on elements of religions for personal or social construction of meaning.

Greg wrote, "If pointy-headed intellectuals can't, or won't, explain what happened to the economy, if the self-appointed know-it-alls resort to magical thinking, what's a slack-jaw, gap-tooth, working stiff supposed to think?

He thinks the world is irrational because the very people who berate and ridicule his ignorance tell him it has no rational explanation."

And when the pointy-headed intellectuals point out that Keynesian economic theories clearly explain, and predicted, that the result of the de-regulation in the 1980's would lead to an amplification of the swings of the business cycle. Which means that companies which need to find lower cost materials and labor in order to survive the dips in the business cycle will move their production to cheaper locations.

Of course, if you believe Keynesian economics are wrong..., well, it's going to be hard to convince you that it's predictions are accurate.

BTW, I'm not advocating protectionism, just pointing out to Greg that there is a rational, easily understandable explaination for the problems we have today. At this point, fixing the problems is a lot harder than simply using government regulatory and spending power to even out the business cycle. Balancing out our business cycle is a necessary first step. It's only after we manage to dampen the oscillations that we will be able to retain jobs created in this country.

Why in the US?

The PR industry.

That's my wild-ass guess for the day, anyway: yes, general human misery gives these superstitions the raw fuel on which they feed, but an essential part of the puzzle in the US is the long-term influence of advertising and the PR industry.

Advertising is ubiquitous in the US, is increasingly so, has been for a long time. The methods of advertising in the US have also evolved a great deal over the last few decades, more and more toward essentially anti-rational methods of persuasion. Advertising less and less says 'Buy brand X because we can demonstrate it works better', and more and more says 'Buy Brand X... oh... and here's some swelling patriotic music and a lovely young thing wearing not a great deal of clothing and holding up the box to the camera...'

'Arguments', even where anything that vaguely resembles the same is present, when presented in advertising, whether in support of a political candidate, product, or service, are frequently shamelessly poorly constructed in terms of logic and evidence, and are probably less meant to be taken as persuasive on their own as they are to give a ready excuse for the given course of action... the course of action, again, driven by appeals to emotion, propped up with swelling music, lovely visuals, pulse-pounding effects. The car is a disaster to drive, overpriced, dreadfully inefficient, and, overall, a relatively dreadful investment... but here's video of it driven by profession drivers, drawing designs in the desert, dancing with the dust devils stirred up by passing jets... So, you do want one, right?

So the average American citizen lives in a sea of symbols, irrational argumentation, appeals to anything but their reason. Their lives are saturated by this, slogans and logos everywhere they look...

Religion and lesser superstitions, in this milieu, succeed because the population is now quite used to methods of persuasion that are so shamelessly anti-rational. They don't blink when the arguments given make exactly no sense, because there are disembodied voiceovers on the box in front of them making arguments just as poor, twenty times an hour, twenty-four hours a day.

AJ, that's the most insightful thing I've heard all day. No offense to anyone else's explanations, but what you said made a lot of sense and I hadn't heard it before. And it ties together a few things that had been dangling in my mind (no cobwebs-in-the-head jokes, please).

Nice strawman, Flex.

A diorama.. Daddy Strawman, Mommy Strawwoman, Baby Strawperson nestled in a straw crib, with barely older Strawbrother, a Strawcousin, a couple of Strawneighbours, some stray goats and a gentle ox looking on hungrily.

However, just because you have scribbled "Greg" on the name tag doesn't mean that you have challenged anything Greg actually said.

Strawman? Maybe you should point out to me how I mis-represented your posistion?

I, in fact, ignored your position.

If I parse your original comment correctly, and remove the deliberatly insulting language, your comment appears to say that:

A) The economists either don't know what has happened to the economy, or if they do know they are keeping it a secret.
B) That economists, and maybe academics in general, as well as other people in important industrial and government positions are resorting to magical thinking.
C) That there are people who lack education who are being deliberatly insulted by those who have education.
D) And that the economists are telling those with less knowledge of economics that our economics difficulties can't be explained.

My response only addressed points A and D. That economists do have a fairly good model of the economy, and that the model did predict the possibility of the economy being in the slump it's in.

If I wanted to address your deliberatly incinerary position, I would have asked to you present evidence for your claims that academics have pointy-heads and that working stiffs are gap-toothed. Thereby challenging what Greg actually said.

Scott Belyea: On the contrary, when the USSR imploded, the standard of living for many people fell (despite the increase in political and other freedoms) and superstitions of all sorts are apparently rampant. (For at least the former, today's ZMagazine website has some interesting analysis.)

QueenoftheHarpies: As far as I know, the KKK is a religious organization, albeit one of an extreme sort.

PaulC: Sociologists of religion have also noticed that one large source of the increase in more conservative forms of religion is simply differential birthrates (coupled with the observation that the best predictor of one's religious affiliation is one's parent's affiliation).

julia: I suspect that a lot of the leaders are "inverse Marxists" in the sense I mentioned on another thread, but I also suspect the rank and file are sincere. This would be why the "inverse Marxism" (in both senses) works (to enrich the already wealthy, that is).

Sociologist of religion had predicted, in the mid-twentieth century, that the progress of secularism and the increase in pluralism in western society would lead to a decline in religiosity. They are still working on the details of why they were wrong about that

They are right about this, except, as mentioned, in Middle America. Compare Europe in 1950 to Europe now (Russia probably excluded)...