By
DANIEL C. DENNETT
April
26, 2015 11:19 p.m. ET
Religion
has been waning in influence for several centuries, especially in Europe and
North America. There have been a few brief and local revivals, but in recent
years the pace of decline has accelerated.
THE
RESILIENCE OF RELIGION
• The search for meaning is eternal,
writes Emilie M. Townes
Today
one of the largest categories of religious affiliation in the world—with more
than a billion people—is no religion at all, the “Nones.” One out of six
Americans is already a None; by 2050, the figure will be one out of four,
according to a new Pew Research Center study. Churches are being closed by the
hundreds, deconsecrated and rehabilitated as housing, offices, restaurants and
the like, or just abandoned.
If
this trend continues, religion largely will evaporate, at least in the West.
Pockets of intense religious activity may continue, made up of people who will
be more sharply differentiated from most of society in attitudes and customs, a
likely source of growing tension and conflict.
Could
anything turn this decline around? Yes, unfortunately. A global plague, a world
war fought over water or oil, the collapse of the Internet (and thereby almost
all electronic communication) or some as-yet unimagined catastrophe could throw
the remaining population into misery and fear, the soil in which religion
flourishes best.
Behind
the decline
With
hardly any significant exceptions, religion recedes whenever human security and
well-being rises, a fact that has recently been shown in numerous studies, but
was suspected by John Calvin in the 16th century. He noted that the more
prosperous and comfortable his Genevans became, the less dependent they were on
church. Presumably, those who deplore the decline of religion in the world
today would not welcome the sort of devastation and despair that could give
religion its second wind.
There
is no other plausible scenario that could halt the slide, for a fairly obvious
reason: the recent rapid growth of mutual knowledge, thanks to the global
spread of electronic and digital communication.
Any
institution—just like a person or an organism—depends on a modicum of privacy
in which to conduct its business and control its activities without too much
interference and too many prying eyes. Religious institutions, since their
founding millennia ago, have managed to keep secrets and to control what their
flocks knew about the world, about other religions and about the inner workings
of their own religion with relative ease. Today it is next to impossible.
What
is particularly corrosive to religion isn’t just the newly available
information that can be unearthed by the curious, but the ambient knowledge
that is shared by the general populace.
Laughter is particularly subversive. A Mormon watching the
episode of “South Park” that lampoons the Church of Latter-day Saints doesn’t
just see some outsiders poking fun at her religion. She learns that vast
numbers of people find her religion comical, preposterous, ludicrous, as
confirmed by the writers’ decision to belittle it and the networks’ decision to
broadcast it. This may heighten her loyalty, but it also may shake her
confidence, and as soon as she even entertains the hypothesis that belief in
God might be a life-enhancing illusion, not a rock-solid truth, she is on the
slippery slope.
The late computer scientist John McCarthy, a founder of
artificial intelligence, once said, “When I see a slippery slope, my instinct
is to build a terrace.” That’s what theologians have been doing for hundreds of
years, shoring up whatever they think they can salvage from the rain of
information eroding their ancient peaks of doctrine. In some denominations the
clergy are obliged to swear to uphold the “inerrant truth” of every sentence in
the Bible, but this is becoming more of an embarrassment than a shield against
doubt.
Hardly anybody today believes in—or would want to believe
in—the wrathful, Old Testament Jehovah, for instance. A God who commands our
love is a nasty piece of work by today’s perspectives, and has been replaced,
over the centuries, by ever-less-anthropomorphic (but more “loving,” more
“forgiving”) addressees of our prayers. (Isn’t it curious how the obsolete term
“God-fearing” is still used in some quarters as a commendation?) God has no
ears, but may “listen” to our prayers, and “works in mysterious ways,” which is
a face-saving way of acknowledging that He doesn’t answer them at all.
Do you remember the impressive and rigorous Benson Study? It
was conducted by a Harvard Medical School team that labored for years. It was
finally published in 2006, and it concluded that intercessionary prayer for the
recovery of heart-surgery patients not only didn’t work; in some conditions it
showed a small but measurable increase in post-surgical complications.
Media bias
This was dutifully reported by the media, and promptly
forgotten by most. But if the study had found any positive result, you can be
sure it would have been on the cover of all the newsmagazines and featured in
television specials. This pro-religion bias in the media is crumbling, however,
and once it dissolves, the exposure of all the antique falsehoods of religious
doctrine will oblige the theologians to build yet another terrace, lower down
the slope. They are running out of rocks.
Religious leaders of all faiths are struggling to find ways
of keeping their institutions going, and one of the themes emerging from the
surveys they conduct is that creed should be de-emphasized and loyalty and
community should be fostered.
If we are lucky—if human health and security continue to
rise and spread around the globe—churches might evolve into humanist
communities and social clubs, dedicated to good works, with distinctive
ceremonies and disappearing doctrine, except for a scattering of reclusive
sects marked by something like institutional paranoia.
If we are unlucky and calamity strikes, our anxiety and
misery will provide plenty of fuel for revivals and inventions of religions we
have happily learned to live without.
Prof. Dennett is co-director of the Center for Cognitive
Studies at Tufts University and co-author, with Linda LaScola, of “Caught in
the Pulpit: Leaving Belief Behind.” He can be reached at reports@wsj.com.
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