Now I don’t want to be reductive and say that’s all that’s going on. Undeniably the numbers of formal atheists and agnostics are increasing. Further we have to pay attention to the fact these are aggregate statistics. Someone may very well feel like they have to call themselves baptist at one point in their life and maybe 10 years later feel like they aren’t and then 10 more years later say they are. People are entering and exiting these categories over time, although that’s not as well studied. They are thus “foamy” in a certain way.

As for the need, I think that’s fairly easy to establish. There were pretty severe social costs in the United States and even Canada for breaking from the dominant religion of a community. There’s simply not anymore. For one you have the internet allowing groups to no longer be tied as much to physical location. So you might live in some small Utah town but intellectually socialize via Facebook or some forum with people from around the world holding views quite unlike your community’s. More significantly though the generational change shows the shift and it’s peer groups that tend to determine behavior the most. Those peer groups are significantly affected by media in a way that has led to fairly fast shifts socially the past 30 years.

Great work. Thanks for sharing.

I think one of the best insights into how the more moral, rational and less zealous forms of secular new “religious” movements may go is found in the recent conversation between Bret Weinstein & Sam Harris. The dynamics are interesting. I suspect Weinstein’s approach may, in the long term, win over some of Harris’ more moderate hyper-rationalists. Or at least I hope so. Harris’ hubris and utopian rationalism really puts me off. On the other hand, Weinstein is in touch with questions or factual vs. practical reality (what he calls metaphorical truth). I think coming to terms with this is critical for educated approaches to quasi-religious engineering. Most social media groups are just so controlled by base proclivities it is hard for them to stumble into the right adaptive mixtures. They miss out on how to stabilize their “altruist” core and get swamped by migration and freeloader effects.

Infamia were those deemed unfit for citizenship. Only Roman citizens could have a say in government and social affairs, so effectively slaves and infamia had no legal leverage. Entertainers and open homosexuals were usually considered infamia.

For me, the U.S. has been steadily (not necessarily unitedly) eliminating slavery, the definition of women as having little or no socio-political influence or power, and who qualifies as being considered effectively a citizen (black Americans under Jim Crow, legal marriage as exclusively for heterosexual citizens). I do think that these Roman cultural elements survived through Christianity in the Constantinian tradition, and therefore the elimination of these elements both socially and politically impacted religions of the Constantinian tradition directly and indirectly.

I can appreciate that from the Constantinian point of view, they would necessarily see themselves as under attack and interpret members falling away as not turning away from the Constantinian tradition to a more generic Christianity or religosity but as
victims who were lead astray by seemingly atheistic social and political forces.

Based on my lineage, my own experience, and perhaps my own bias, I see this turning away from the Constantinian tradition as leading my parents to consider the Book of Mormon and the restored gospel as claimed by the LDS church. After all, Joseph Smith was unable to emphatically join up with those churches of the Constantinian tradition in his day, leading him down a Christian but almost wholly different path.

My sense is that we’re seeing rapid evolution in how religion functions socially. As Northern Virginia hints, if we look at behavior rather than belief, then we have the rise of quasi-religions. While quasi-religions are somewhat understandably controversial since they don’t really hold to theistic beliefs, they’re not new. One can point to idealogical movements such as forms of Marxism as quasi-religious going back to the 19th century. What’s interesting today is that rather than just a few major movements with a degree of centralization we now have lots of movements. While I might be wrong, my guess is that much as Marxism did from the late 19th century through the 80’s, these new quasi-religious movements are in competition with religion. (Although Marxism also sometimes merged with religion as we saw in some liberation theology movements in Latin America)

I think Clark’s statement about the idea that being part of the community (or finding your own sub-community) now doesn’t necessitate church attendance is much closer to the truth. The rise of the internet has allowed people to find like-minded sub-communities, not just online, but also in their own cities and neighborhoods. If one’s church attendance was only really ever about having a community, and not the theology or spiritual uplift, why not find another secular sub-community that fits one best?

Even those who had been converted to Catholicism in Scotland and Ireland became more generic Christians as they migrated to North America. I’ll admit this may be a biased view from my study of my own ancestors, who migrated to Canada from Scotland then into the newly-formed western American territories like Washington/Oregon. If they were Catholic when they left Scotland, they qualified as more generic Christians by the time my parents came into the picture.

What I see is not a de-Christianization in North America, but a de-Romanization. Cultural aspects of ancient Rome, such as infamia and virtus, found their way to North America via religions with cultural DNA from ancient Rome. Humans in North America have been slowly, persistently divesting their culture of these ancient Roman cultural elements, and religions with ancestral ties to ancient Rome found themselves necessarily in the way. Those in the LDS church who also found themselves mysteriously invested in infamia and virtus were also impacted.