Stephen Prothero has a piece up, Hinduism’s caste problem, out in the open. Prothero points out that religionists often use logical constructs to play word games which reinforce their in-group. Caste is not a problem with Hinduism per se, but is a cultural problem. The treatment of women is not a problem with Islam per se, but a cultural problem. The history of European anti-semitism was not an issue of religious conflict per se, but a detail of history.

From a philosophical perspective religion is about a god, or a deep ground of being. But that’s really not what religion is as it is lived, as opposed to thought. From the perspective of many religious professionals religion is a set of rituals. Correct belief. Proper behavior. From the perspective of lay believers religion is about communal worship. It is about doing the right thing. Being seen to do the right thing. Religion is a massive overgrown bush of a thing, fundamentally entangled with the amorphous entity we refer to as ‘culture.’ Making a distinction between religion and culture is often a matter of obfuscation or evasion. Religion is culture. In some cases, culture is religion.

This problem manifests with the irreligious as well. Atheism is at the bare bones an opinion in relation to the god hypothesis. But the reality is that many American atheists assume that atheism naturally entails a particular social and political world view. Pro-environment, pro-abortion, pro-feminist, etc. Basically, atheism entails secular humanist liberalism. As a correlation this holds, but obviously there’s no logical inference. It is rather a cultural artifact.

There is identity, our embeddedness within a social community of norms, values and opinions, which we implicitly hold to be correlates with our grand philosophical presupposition. Of course most humans are too stupid to even spell ‘philosophical,’ their adherence to the Nicene creed or Tawhid is nominal, the equivalent of being a fan of Manchester United or the Pittsburgh Steelers. They know nothing about the day to day running of a sports franchise, there’s no substance to their fanaticism. And yet it is there  nonetheless.

These affinities and identities have material consequences. Too often identity and community gets stripped away from the equation, we pretend as if humans are idealized reason machines. When we ask humans the way the world is we make a pretense that they’re capable of being objective, of tearing themselves from the brambles. The reality is that we look through the bramble darkly.

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Novella’s Publication Provokes Culture War in Georgia:

The work, titled Saidumlo Siroba (Holy Crap), takes swipes at the Georgian Orthodox Church, Georgian patriotism and Georgian mothers. It has become a William Burroughs-style bizarro bestseller, generating more shock and outrage than literary acclaim.

…

After receiving threats conveyed by phone and on his Facebook page, Deisadze says he fled Georgia for his own safety. He has since returned.

The Georgian Orthodox Church, which avows no formal connection with the Orthodox activists who have attacked supporters of the book, has nevertheless called for the censorship of “indecency, licentiousness and Satanism….

One of the aspects of the Communist period in many societies subject to Soviet imperialism was the decline in the power of institutional religion. What has occurred since then? Cultures seem to be reverting to type. In societies where religion was a powerful public presence, such as Georgia, Poland and Russia, it has become so again. In societies where religion was less powerful, as among the Czechs and Hungarians, it remains a matter of private belief and preference. This may show the limits of coercion in modifying the ultimate arc of social evolution.

This truth is perhaps most well illustrated by fertility in East Asia. China’s one child policy is famous, but it is less well know that South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and Singapore have approached similar fertility rates without any top-down coercion.

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Larry Witham’s Marketplace of the Gods: How Economics Explains Religion is a manifestly ill-timed book. He states that “…around 2006 I began to notice a good deal of hoopla in the book market about economic explanations for just about everything-books that were best sellers.” Marketplace of the Gods was obviously written to capitalize on the prestige of economic explanations, but unfortunately it has come out after the bubble had burst on that market, so to speak. Within the past few years even many economists have come to admit that the power of their discipline’s logic can explain far less than they’d once thought. In fact, it seems a bit much for economics to explain everything when the core competency in financial domains are themselves being challenged. Even in 2008 in The Logic of Life Tim Harford was engaging in a rearguard attempt to prevent behavioral economists such as Dan Ariely from knocking the legs out from under the central thesis of his book. A more accurate subtitle for Marketplace of the Gods would have been “economic explanations of religion.” Not punchy or imperialistic, but true to the content of the text.

These explanations are rooted in a few assumptions derived from conventional economic methodology and applied to religion. Humans are rational, they settle upon strategies which can fulfill their preferences, and their world is characterized by scarcity and opportunity costs. Phenomena are best explained in a reductionist framework which takes a methodologically individualist stance. In other words, what’s in it for the individual, not society. Larry Witham documents the intellectual journeys of two giants in the field, Rodney Stark and Laurence Iannaccone. I have read Iannaccone’s papers, as well as most of Stark’s academically oriented books. There’s a lot of clear and crisp thinking there. Marketplace of the Gods reviews the long history of woolly theorizing about religion which explained everything and so nothing, and served as the ideal seedbed for the invasion of the subject by those wielding sharper tools.

But the supply side model of individuals consuming goods and services from competing religious firms, to translate religious phenomena into economic language, can not explain everything. The author acknowledges this in the text, but falls into traps whereby the theory which he has encountered allows for superficial inferences which are plainly false if one was aware of a richer set of data. Consider this passage:

In traditions that invest more intensely in human religious capital the rentention rate is highest. For example, Hindu, Catholic, and Jewish groups lose the least number of adherents over their lifetimes. In America today, 90 percent of Hindus were reared in that tradition, and the same goes for 89 percent of today’s Catholics and 85 percent of today’s Jews….

This sounds plausible enough, but the explanation that Hindus and Catholics have high retention because they “invest more intensely in human religious capital” is probably wrong. Hindus and Catholics have huge immigrant communities, and come from societies where religious switching is rare or taboo. The majority of American Hindus are immigrants, so they are not integrated into the American marketplace of gods. The Religious Landscape Survey which Witham references makes it obvious that American Hindus are not even particularly religious. Witham assumes they invest more intensely in human religious capital probably because of the 90 percent figure, but theory is misleading him because of the incompleteness of his data base. Similarly, Catholics have been the biggest contributors in the past decade to the irreligious segment of Americans. The last finding is relatively recent, and so may not have been available when Marketplace of the Gods was being written, but it shows the lack of robusticity of the set of inferences which one can generate from these models. New data easily overturns novel inferences on a regular basis.

Obviously there’s some real insight that can come out of the intersection of economics and religion. And Marketplace of the Gods serves as a decent precis of the literature, and its bibliography is well worth perusing. But if you know anything about religion it will be rather clear that the current theoretical contributions of economics in explaining most of the variation in the phenomenon is limited. Religion is a big topic, and a true “explanation” necessarily has to encompass evolution, psychology, history, and, economics.

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The post is titled the Chinese Muslims, not the Muslims of China. One may make a semantic distinction here in that the latter connotes the residence of a Muslim community within Chinese society, while the former indicates members of Chinese society who happen to be Muslim. Such black and white dichotomies are naturally artificial, but to a large extent the Uyghurs of Xinjiang fall into the category of a group of Muslims (of Turkish language) who happen to fall within the boundaries of the modern Chinese state (thanks to that inheritance of the Chinese state of the full expanse of the Manchu Empire of the 18th century). On the other hand, the Hui people are arguably more a Chinese people who happen to be Muslim.

For more on the topic, please see my blog post at the Islam in China website. It was submitted a while back, but it only went up recently.

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In the comments below a question was asked in regards to “fundamentalist” vs. agnostic Jews. I put the quotations around fundamentalist because the term means different things in different religions. As for the idea of an agnostic Jew, remember that Jews are a nation (ethnicity) as well as a religion, and that religious belief has traditionally been less explicitly emphasized than religious practice.

It wasn’t too hard to find some answers in the GSS. I used the somewhat crude “BIBLE” variable again. Remember that BIBLE asks if the respondent believes that the Bible is the literal and inerrant Word of God, the inspired Word of God, or a book of fables. I reclassified these as Fundamentalist, Moderate, and Liberal, respectively. There are two variables I used in the first chart, JEW and RELIG. The former looks just as Jews, and breaks down by Orthodox, Conservative and Reform. The latter I combined with BIBLE to bracket out Fundamentalists, Moderates and Liberals of each religious group. The vocabulary test scores are from WORDSUM. Remember that they correlate 0.71 with adult IQ. Because the sample size for Jews was so small I included 95% intervals so you can modulate confidence appropriately. I limited the sample to whites.

Jewish readers can correct me if I’m wrong, but I am to understand that the gap between Conservative and Reform is actually not very large in terms of belief and practice today, as it may have been in earlier decades. In fact the two movements emerge as much from cultural differences between earlier German Jewish immigrants and the later Eastern European migration. And Orthodoxy and a Protestant understanding of “fundamentalism” do not necessarily overlap. It is notable that for the other groups the Fundamentalist segment had smaller vocabularies. This probably aligns with our intuition. But I was curious, is the pattern among Protestants a regional effect? It isn’t. When I controlled for region the same pattern exists. So rather than plotting that chart, I decided to look at the combination of educational attainment and Fundamentalist orientation for white Protestants only (the sample sizes here are large).

To some extent the pattern is as you’d expect. Those with less education have smaller vocabularies. But notice the step-wise pattern. Fundamentalists with a greater level of education than religious liberals do not necessarily have much larger vocabularies. That’s interesting to know.

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So it’s Elena Kagan. She’ll probably be nominated confirmed. Pointer to my earlier post why it doesn’t matter that there’s no Protestant on the court in substantive terms.

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I listened today to an interview with Stephen Prothero, which outlined the argument in his book God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World-and Why Their Differences Matter. Prothero is a professor in the Department of Religion at Boston University, and he certainly brings some heft to this argument. Not having read the book, but listening to his talking points in interview and discussion, he seems to have a problem as an empirical matter with the contention regularly made in interfaith circles that all religions fundamentally point to the same truth. The metaphor that Houston Smith used whereby religions are separate paths to the same mountain top is referred to repeatedly. Prothero suggests that this universalistic model denies the deep reality of sectarian difference in belief, practice and outlook, and tends to be favored by those of liberal bent at ease with multiculturalism. He also notes that the foundation of common unity can be traced back to the perennial philosophy. This philosophy lay at the heart of the Traditionalist School, of which Smith was arguably a member, as was Julius Evola. So the tendency that Prothero is putting into focus is not necessarily associated with liberalism, though in the American context it is because of the Right’s capture by low church anti-elitist elements.

An illustration of the problems which crop up when those of distinctive religions attempt to find common ground is that that commonality is often generated through an exclusion of an out group. Jews, Muslims and Christians all worship the God of Abraham. But of course Buddhists find the God of Abraham irrelevant to the central questions of religion. Prothero also observes that liberal universalism tends to put a premium on elite mysticism, a mode of religiosity which is notable for transcendence of sectarian distinctions. But the much more common mode of religious life is that of plain believers who take distinctive beliefs and practices rather seriously. Pragmatically this sort of consideration is critical when assessing whether a Sunni vs. Shia distinction will have any importance. At the level of Sufi mystics these distinctions may melt away, but the rest of humanity is still something one must consider if one is a more prosaic sort who does not expect to actively gain salvation before death.

And it is at the level of the rest of humanity that I think Prothero’s own methodological orientation may cause problems in interpreting the world as it is. From what I can tell he operates out of the framework of Religious Studies (which coincidentally in the United States was shaped by Mircea Eliade, who was strongly influenced by Traditionalism). Too often it seems to me that scholars out of this tradition operate as if religion is a concrete entity, distinct and unique, as opposed to being an emergent property of normal aspects of culture and cognition. It is scientists who start from a naturalistic perspective who I think can take a final step back, and see religion as but a piece of the painting. Prothero is correct obviously that adherents of different religions view themselves as distinct, as following different truths. Fundamentalist Christians are liable to dismiss Allah as an Arab pagan divinity, or even a demon, despite the widely held belief by many that Allah is simply a different name for the God of the Christians. But what if you don’t believe that gods exist except in the minds of believers? Then whether as a practical fact Allah and the Christian God Allah or Lord Buddha are distinct beings rests in large part on whether humans conceptualize them differently. It turns out that in general they do not. In other words religious believers tend to conceive of their supernatural agents very similarly, whose traits are rather interchangeable, with the main difference being semantic. The book Theological Incorrectness cites a wide range of literature in this area, with a particular reference to the religious landscape of Sri Lanka.

The disjunction between assertions and sincere beliefs of deep difference, and the reality that cognitively there’s little gap at all, shouldn’t be too surprising. Promiscuity of belief has been relatively normal for much of human history, as was evident in the pre-Christian Roman Empire, or is evident in Japan or China. The exclusive tribal aspect of Islam and Christianity combined with their universal ambitions are somewhat atypical, though this suite of characters has been highly successful in propagating itself. Additionally, religion is more than simply belief, it is about communal rituals and belonging, and the daily regularity of banal practices and customs. Prothero is correct that acknowledging the deep differences are important, but I believe to a great extent he is wrong as to what those differences are. That Buddhism emphasizes suffering while Christianity emphasizes sin is not particularly significant unless you’re a Buddhist or a Christian, and even then most Christians have no idea what soteriology means for example. Beliefs are shallow markers to group affiliations, not deeply held axioms which serve as starting lines for chains of inference. Religious elites construct many distinctive aspects of their brand, but it is the functional components which are essential in furthering community and human flourishing.

I think the Shia-Sunni split which Stephen Prothero gives as an example of the need to understand the depths of difference is a good case of how beliefs may be secondary. The division here began originally as a political dispute, whereby the partisans of Ali and his family dissented from the decisions of the Muslim majority in the succession to the position of Caliph. Over the centuries these partisans evolved into the Shia faction, while those who were not Shia or other assorted sectarians become Sunni. Some distinctions of practice and belief did arise across this divide, but in general those distinctions evolved after the original political division (because the Shia party was decentralized they have preserved more of the theological diversity of early Islam than the Sunnis).

On a deep level Huston Smith was right. Human psychology is universal, so human intuitions about supernatural aspects of the world exhibit deep commonality and intelligibility. But it really doesn’t matter, human tribalism is also a universal, and it co-opts these religious intuitions into its service. The fact that both tribes don tattoos does not elicit in them an appreciation of the universality of these sorts of markers, the importance of belonging. Rather, the markers often separate those who are your brothers, and those who you wish to kill. In other words, what you believe may matter less than what you believe about what you believe.

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Muslim Group Says It Is Warning, Not Threatening, ‘South Park’ Creators. Here’s a screen shot from the cached version of the site (it was hacked after the threat):

The website is run by a dozen crazy people. No word on crazy Buddhists objecting to the fact that Buddha was depicted as a cocaine snorting junkie in the episode. It’s a two part episode, so watch the finale tonight.

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My post on the religious make up of the Supreme Court is getting a bit of traffic spike due to current events. Specifically, John Paul Stevens, the high court’s lone Protestant, is set to retire, and two out of the three front runners are Jewish. Let’s assume that the future nominee is not Protestant (Elena Kagan, who is Jewish, is arguably the first choice). Statistically this is curious because ~50% of the the American population is Protestant. Assuming that a a Supreme Court justice is randomly drawn from the population you have a 0.20% probability that this would occur in a sequence of nine draws. Of course if Kagan is the nominee and confirmed all of the justices will be graduates of Ivy League universities, so there’s nothing random about the selection process.

Some of the commenters on the first post observed that the pipeline is probably going to shape the demographics of the high court. That is, elite law schools may simply have fewer Protestants than Jews or Catholics. I don’t know about that, but let’s look at Harvard University’s total demographic balance. I don’t see Catholic or Protestant breakdowns, but ethnic breakdown is public:

69% white
16% Asian
8% black
7% Hispanic

Hillel estimates that ~25% of Harvard’s undergraduate student body is Jewish. This means that no more than 44% of student body are white Christians (lower than the national average interestingly). Let’s use the American Religious Identification Survey to estimate Protestant/Catholic numbers according to proportions by each ethnic group. I get 47% Protestant and 17% Catholic at Harvard. This is probably an overestimate for both since I suspect that the irreligious would be a higher proportion within the Harvard student body than the general population, but the ratio between proportions may be more accurate. There are major caveats here, as I think the Catholic numbers are probably somewhat higher because of regional biases and such.

Why there are two, and possibly soon three, Jews on the high court doesn’t require much thinking to understand. There are a lot of Jews at elite academic institutions which produce future justices. With the filters we know of two or three Jews seems entirely reasonable, even expected. But I doubt there’s an enormous dearth of Protestants coming out of elite law schools. Rather, if there is a reason that we see so many Catholics, I think has to do with what some commenters were pointing out in regards to George W. Bush wanting to make sure he nominated people who had the “right” attitudes on abortion and the like. There of course plenty of Protestants with conservative attitudes, but they’re evangelical Christians who are underrepresented at elite institutions.

Which brings me to the point of this post, and the reason for the title: the exact numbers of Protestants, Catholics and Jews is pretty much irrelevant today in the United States. That is because Americans who are Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, and even irreligious, have a fundamentally Protestant understand of how one “does” religion. To understand how and why I say American Catholics and Jews have a Protestant understanding of religion I recommend In Search of an American Catholicism: A History of Religion and Culture in Tension and American Judaism: A History. In Catholicism and American Freedom: A History John T. McGreevy outlines the realignment in the 1950s of Jews with elite east coast Protestants in the culture wars against traditional Catholicism, a reversal of the historical white ethnic coalitions within the Democratic party which emerged in the wake of the Civil War. In The Impossibility of Religious Freedom Winnifred Sullivan argues that American jurisprudence in the domain of church-state separation and accommodation is rooted in Protestant presuppositions. Finally, in The Cousins’ Wars: Religion, Politics, Civil Warfare, And The Triumph Of Anglo-America Kevin Phillips asserts that American Protestantism is fundamentally a dissenting faith which was aligned with the Whig party. I believe that this is most precisely the influence which frames how Americans of all faiths and no faiths understand religion.

And that is why it doesn’t matter if there’s a Protestant in name on the high court, Americans view religion through a lens which dissenting Protestants of the English speaking world pioneered in the 18th and 19th century. Recall that the Baptists of Virginia were aligned with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in their drive to disentangle the state from the church.

This means that on the coarse level you can’t tell much about a person when you find out they are Protestant or Catholic. Their views range across the full arc of American public opinion, and their conception of what their religious tradition entails is going to be strongly inflected by their politics. Social justice Protestants and Catholics arguably share much more with each other than with their more conservative or traditionalist co-religionists.

I’ll make this concrete and quantitative. The General Social Survey has a range of questions it asks. I looked at four of them which are “hot button”, constrained the time period from 1990-2008, and examined a range of religious groups and how they shook out. I combined some categories, so for Protestants the Evangelical includes Fundamentalists and Mainline includes Liberals (these two categories are for Protestants only). For Methodists, Presbyterians and Lutherans I threw all of the various sub-denominations into the same pot. I do know that there’s a lot of division between conservatives and liberals by sub-denomination in these groups, but I wanted a general sense of denominational diversity at a coarser scale.

The variables are:

ABANY- “Please tell me whether or not you think it should be possible for a pregnant woman to obtain a legal abortion if the woman wants it for any reason?”

HOMOSEX – “What about sexual relations between two adults of the same sex?” [Always wrong to not wrong at all]

PRAYER – “The United States Supreme Court has ruled that no state or local government may require the reading of the Lor’s Prayer or Bible verses in public schools. What are your views on this – do you approve or disapprove of the court ruling?”

SPKATH – “There are always some people whose ideas are considered bad or dangerous by other people. For instance, somebody who is against churches and religion….if such a person wanted to make a speech in your (city/town/community) against churches and religion, should he be allowed to speak, or not?”

Below all the proportions are for the more liberal response. Some of them, such HOMOSEX, have a wide range of potential responses and I simply picked out the most extreme liberal one (in that case, that homosexual sex is not wrong at all).

Here are the raw percentages:

The variables are strongly correlated with each other, as is evident in this correlation matrix:

I took each variable and simply averaged them out into a “Social issues index.” The higher the index, the more liberal.

There are two big take aways from this chart:

1) The group “Protestant” has a huge range of views contingent on denomination or theological conservatism

2) The group “Catholic” is solidly in the middle of the distribution between very liberal groups (Jews) and very conservative ones (Evangelicals)

As a point of fact it is obviously not correct to say that all Catholics are moderates. Rather, the class “Catholic” includes many different viewpoints, from those presumably as conservative as Evangelicals to as liberal as Jews. Similarly, though Jews are very liberal, the small orthodox minority is often very conservative (Eric Cantor, who is minority whip in the House is an example of this). And, unless one is a member of Opus Dei, a Hasidic Jew or Theonomist, arguably the vast majority of Catholics, Jews and Protestants in the United States share common presuppositions about the outer bounds of what is religion in a pluralistic society.

Addendum: Just so readers know, I’m really not the type too concerned about the race, religion or sex of Supreme Court nominees personally. As a straight atheist brown libertarianish man with a “Muslim name” I’ve never gotten into the habit of wishing for  mentors, colleagues or friends were people who I could “identify with,” because frankly I’m a very special person with a unique perspective and experience which is unlikely to be replicated. This doesn’t change the structure of my argument above, but I thought I would head off any bidding war as to the relevance of diversity X or Y in the comments under the preconception that the person writing the post here actually cares about such things. My main concern is intelligence, curiosity, and frankly in the case of something with political importance, ideological affinity. That’s it. The rest are accidents. Though broader American society disagrees with my own viewpoint on this issue.

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I am reading that a scholar affiliated with an evangelical theological seminary has had to resign his position because of a full-throated (see here) defense of evolutionary theory. In particular, this scholar seems to have asserted that evangelical Christianity is on the way to becoming a marginalized “cult” if it keeps rejecting scientific consensus in regards to evolutionary theory. Cult, from what I know, has a very strong connotation in the evangelical subculture.

Obviously I don’t have relevant opinions about whether evangelicals should, or should not, accept evolution from the perspective of an evangelical Christian. But, we can look at the type of person who accepts and rejections evolution in American society. The General Social Survey has a vocabulary test which it gives to people, and the scores range from 0 out of 10 correct, to 10 out of 10 correct. Over the history of the GSS a little under 25% of the survey respondents scored on the interval 0 to 4. 13% scored on the interval 9 to 10. Let’s label the first “Not Smart” and the second “Smart.” Below are the proportion who accept evolution for the various GSS variables which speak to this issue (I’ve given the GSS labels, you can look up the specific question at the GSS browser under “selected” at the top left).

I don’t know if rejecting scientific consensus will turn evangelical Christianity into a cult, but it will drive a particular self-selection….

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