Religion is a Bull Market
Dawkins Goes the Way of the Dodo
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It’s amazing to think how far we’ve come since the heyday of Richard Dawkins. Back then, something like this would have passed for an argument against religion:
Today, we call this “based”.
A lot has changed in the past 20 years. Back then, the forces of secularism were riding high. 9/11 was fresh in our minds. The “Four Horsemen” of New Atheism were demolishing religion. Liberalism was firmly in control. But today, liberalism is on much less secure footing. The West has sustained a shocking loss against tribal Islamists in Afghanistan. It is now teetering on the brink of war with an outright theocracy. And the only parts of its population—including immigrants—that are growing, are the religious. Dawkins must be a deeply discouraged man. Secularism is retreating and religion is coming back.
Or is it?
Keith Woods recently wrote an article Secularism is Here to Stay where he advances the thesis that Dawkins need not worry—secularization continues apace and it is not going anywhere soon. His case runs something like this:
While traditionalist sects are above replacement fertility, secularization is pushing down religious adherence faster than higher birth rates are pushing it up. The heritability of religion is lower than often claimed, suggesting that birth rates alone will not be enough to turn the tide back toward a religious world. He addresses the “supply-side” or “rational-choice” model of religion, according to which, amid a buffet of religious options, the laity can dictate to religions more than vice versa, therefore religions will become more customer-friendly, therefore they will revive. This is rejected because religious pluralism reduces religiosity. Finally, paganism is dismissed as an alternative due to its fragmentation and low numbers, though more because it is often practiced for political reasons that seem at odds with genuine spiritual commitment.
Keith supports his case with a number of empirical studies. And on a short- to medium-term timeline, he is right. Secularization is here to stay… for now. But religiosity will turn around. Slowly at first, then all at once. And we have both structural and anecdotal reasons to think so.
Keith addresses Ed Dutton’s work in his books The Past is a Future Country and Woke Eugenics. The first argues that religiosity will revive due to its positive effect on fertility, and the second argues that this is part of a eugenic process which cyclically purges mutations in the wake of relaxed selection pressures. Against Dutton’s thesis, Keith points out that the genetic heritability of religiosity is probably around 0.3, not enough to turn things around soon.
Religion has a lot more to do with genetics than most would ever consider, but it’s not large enough to think the religious segments of the population will overtake the non-religious any time soon, even with greater birthrates, and especially if secularisation is having a greater effect than ever on the 72% of the equation that is environmental.1
A heritability of 0.3 may not seem strong enough to produce trait persistence, but if the trait is adaptive, this is more than enough. Heliconius butterflies exhibit a wide variety of wing colouration patterns, which have a heritability of about 0.3. In certain environments, the butterflies with specific colour patterns that signal toxicity have a survival advantage, and wherever selection pressure is high, these colour morphs have become fixed in the local species. It’s not hard to see how religiosity, with its effect on fertility, provides a similar evolutionary advantage, especially in high-selection environments.
It’s also worth pointing out that Dutton’s thesis is argued more on a long-term scale of centuries than decades. However, Keith does restrict his thesis to the short-term—not “any time soon”. But Keith’s thesis does not address Dutton’s claim that selection pressures are being revived as a result of this very secularization. We are re-entering an environment of harsh Darwinian selection due to modernity itself, and as these pressures come back, selection for high-fertility, religious worldviews accelerates. And for this reason alone, we would expect that religion will become a bull market. But how exactly is modernity reinstating selection pressures?
The End of Mass Society
We have shown elsewhere that our communities have been growing smaller for some time now. This is not really surprising, because they couldn’t get much bigger than the “Global Village” that liberalism envisioned at the turn of the 21st century. In recent years, nationalism has reasserted itself, making gains that were unthinkable in the 1990s, some of which gains Keith himself has been involved with. Globalism is on the back foot.
But it goes much further than nationalism. Not only have nations like America become aware of their own interests—embodied in Trump’s “America First” slogan—but nations like America have become aware that they are really more than one nation. What liberals have called the “post-truth” era is really a grudging admission that the epistemic longhouse has fractured. No longer does the mainstream media have a chokehold on opinion formation. Liberals, conservatives, the radical right, ethnic minorities, and others no longer share foundational assumptions about the world. Increasingly, they no longer even share a common vocabulary, as attested by the growth of meme culture in the online space. Ironically, postmodernity itself is dissolving the cardinal element in modern liberalism—universalism.
This is the epistemic divorce, and it is only just beginning. As time goes on, our epistemic and moral horizons will continue to narrow. Local concerns will take precedent over national, and certainly global. People will believe mainstream narratives less and less, and will rely more on personal relationships to evaluate truth, deferring to a narrower and narrower consensus. And this intensive localism is an important driver for a return to religiosity. Keith recognizes this:
But what about the data presented for this [“free market in religion”] model? One issue is that supply-siders rest on an implicit assumption that the US is uniformly “diverse”, while actually reporting high religiosity in areas that are locally homogeneous. While religious diversity is high in the US overall, this doesn’t have a lot of bearing on the experience of a Mormon growing up in a homogeneous community in Utah. And the more you remove people from these local pockets of religious homogeneity, the more religion seems to decline.2
He makes a good point—diversity pushes down religiosity. In a mass society spanning a whole continent, this is a valid objection to religious revival, especially under the “free-market” or “supply-side” model of religion. The Middle Ages exhibited a great deal of cultural (if not racial) heterogeneity, but also a great deal of religiosity. The reason why is that while heterogeneity pushes religiosity down, what counts as “heterogeneous” is determined by the horizon of care, the limit of what passes within our notice. And the Middle Ages was a highly localized world. Our horizon of care is nowhere near as local today, but long-term trends are pushing it in that direction, so we would expect the effect of racial diversity on religiosity to be blunted over time, and at some point, localism will become the decisive factor, and start pushing religiosity up.
Mass society is devolving, both due to technological factors, and also because faith in liberal hegemony is eroding in large parts of the population. This is bad news for the “free market” in religion, and good news for a religious revival.
But the move toward localism is good for religiosity for other reasons too. More localism not only limits the buffet of options, but it also usually means a lower material standard of living.
Mortality Salience
We live in a liberal world of progressivism, and that world furnishes us with all our background assumptions. The fact that something happened is usually enough to convince us that it’s here to stay. This is especially so for material standard of living, which is so paradigmatic of progress that it’s enough to convince most people that not only is there material progress, but also moral progress. And when zoomed out far enough, material standard of living seems to increase uniformly over human history. But when you take a closer look at history, we see definite ups and downs in standard of living.
There is a very good reason why poor people tend to be more religious. It’s not because they’re less intelligent—religious people tend to score about the same on general intelligence.3 Poor people are more religious because they have higher mortality, and mortality salience—the presence of death all around—is a driver of religiosity. In other words, there are no atheists in foxholes.
When death looms, people double down on their explicit beliefs—atheists become more stridently atheist, and the religious cling more tightly to their religion. But when reminded of death, all people become more implicitly religious—e.g. people who deny the existence of a soul tend to think in terms of post-death psychological states, and even admitted atheists refused to sign a contract pledging their souls to the researcher. This is what social scientists call implicit theism; as we’ve said countless times, our conscious life is pushed like a jellyfish around by the deep oceanic undercurrents of habit, routine, and instinct.4
Mortality salience also increases the desire for children in women.5 This increased desire, along with the increase in religiosity driven by mortality salience, produces a compounding effect where, perhaps counterintuitively, women with lower living standards have markedly higher fertility than those living in relative ease. The better off you are, the fewer children you have.
In recent years, living standards in many Western countries have declined notably. Due mainly to COVID and the war in Ukraine, the UN’s Human Development Index found a decline for the first time in over three decades in 90% of the world’s countries, including much of the West.6 Inflation and housing costs, driven mainly by mass immigration, have worsened this problem, making many of the most basic necessities unaffordable for low-income families.
We also have reason to think this trend will not only continue, but accelerate. In March, a group of Indian nationals crashed a ship into a Baltimore bridge, which blocked most shipping to the Port of Baltimore for 11 weeks.7 Just last week, a New Zealand navy vessel hit a reef and sank, under the watchful eye of its lesbian commander, seen here doing important diversity work.
These incidents have been occurring with increasing frequency and are part of a broader trend that has been called the “competency crisis”.
The armed forces, major corporations, and medical schools now prioritize diversity over the ability to perform tasks that are critical to people’s survival. Major institutions that are supposed to safeguard the critical functions of our civilization are more interested in elevating transwomen of color than the ability of the organizations to properly execute their functions. Selecting brain surgeons by the obscurity of their sexual preferences instead of their success rate would have sounded like a comedy sketch 10 years ago, but no one is laughing now.8
The competency crisis is not simply the result of a lapse in judgement that could be remedied by miraculous nationalist-driven regime change. It is the result of long-term dysgenic trends which are part of a natural cycle:
There is abundant evidence that we were selecting for intelligence up until the Industrial Revolution as intelligence predicted the ability to accrue resources and thus to ensure that your offspring had a better chance of survival in an ecology that was at or over carrying capacity. […] We are now selecting against intelligence and have been since about 1900. There is a weak negative association between intelligence and fertility in many Western samples and it has been found that numerous proxies for intelligence indicate a decline.9
Not only is wokeness promoting the inferior to positions of influence, but more of those inferior are being produced due to increased mutational load. This will reinstate selection pressures—the competency crisis—which will surround people with death, which has the effect of promoting religiosity. The future is a third world country, and that means that secularism will be selected against.
A Liberal–Christian Alliance
As liberalism comes apart, it will seek to stabilize itself, and one of the oldest tools of imperial administration is state religion. At the moment that religion is wokeness, but wokeness is simply too counteradaptive. It must and will be abandoned, otherwise the regime will become too derelict and will be replaced by a circulation of elites. Whether there is a circulation or no, any successor to the current order is likely to involve some sort of state religion. Keith expresses doubt that Christianity could have a decisive political impact:
Christian moral teaching has less influence than ever on society. Politics in European countries where a majority still identify as Christian is mostly free of Christian influence, with the Church’s moral teachings absent from policy debates or election campaigns.10
While it’s true that we no longer recite the Lord’s Prayer in school, Christian moral teaching is alive and well today. As explained in Tom Holland’s 2019 book Dominion, Christian teachings fit very comfortably within a modern progressive moral framework.
Modern progressive movements have renewed this sacred history, though it is no longer God but “humanity” – or its self-appointed representatives – that speaks for the powerless. In many ways, the West today is more fiercely self-righteous than it was when it was professedly Christian. The social justice warriors who denounce Western civilisation and demand that its sins be confessed and repented would not exist without the moral inheritance of Christianity. As Tom Holland writes, “Had it been otherwise, then no one would ever have got woke.”11
As illiberal movements continue to exert pressure on the system, the system will make compromises. And as the competency crisis continues, this pressure is liable to worsen to where the system is willing to put aside its irreligion for pragmatic purposes and seek for support. This support will naturally come from the most morally compatible allies. Already the institutional structure of the Catholic church, if not the laity, is captured by ideological fellow travellers of Western elites. The alliance is a natural and rational one on both sides, and all the more because of the common moral foundation. This was the genius of the original Christian religion, and the cause of its success—that it was able to appeal to a failing empire and to offer its universalism as a centripetal force in a world coming apart.
As Keith points out, “the low levels of religion reported before the 1990s [in Soviet bloc countries] were not the result of modernisation, but the numbers being artificially depressed by the actions of the state.”12 This is still more true in the West today. Religion is being suppressed culturally and legally, but what happens when this is no longer the case? If we are right to think it won’t be the case forever, we should expect religiosity to increase as downward pressure on it is relieved.
Which Religion?
Many who argue the de-secularization thesis point to mass immigration to the West as a theologizing force. However, this is rather unlikely. As we have shown elsewhere [1] [2], third world populations are particularly susceptible to liberalism and its fertility-suppressing effects. They are unlikely to impose widespread religiosity on the host population, and in fact, as long as liberalism lasts, it is likely to impose itself on them abroad. Religion will atrophy abroad,13 and revive at home. But, supposing that liberalism does not graft a state religion on to itself, just which religion is likely to revive?
This is a vexed question, and it would be foolish to think that there is an obvious answer. As the example of the Amish shows us, it does not take a large initial population to grow exponentially if the religion is especially adaptive. And in a harsh Darwinian environment like the next century promises, it’s less a matter of who is already established, and more a matter of who fits the ecological niche, as was the case in late Rome. So rather than betting on a horse, let us say a few things about what the winner would look like.
The first thing to say is that there may not be a single winner. Depending on how far society devolves into localism, it is entirely possible that different religions will hold sway in different places. This was the case in the age of feudalism, when Christian practices varied wildly between different folk, often barely resembling the later, more consolidated forms we see in the early modern era.
As a result, religion is likely to organize itself along tribal lines. This is already the case among every religion apart from Islam, where Jews organize under Orthodox Judaism; Greeks, Russians, Serbians, and Bulgarians under Eastern Orthodox; Mexicans, Colombians, Brazilians, Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese under Catholicism; Germanic descended peoples under various forms of Protestantism; Anglos under Anglicanism and even Freemasonry. Creed has always been a proxy for blood:
Epistemic “communities of belief” have always been fake and inorganic, uniting what should be discrete. Because they aim at truth, the community they create can only ever be humanity as a whole. This is obviously not workable, and organic (i.e. ethnic, racial) communities re-assert themselves, usually by balkanizing along epistemic lines at first. “I am an Anglican” becomes a proxy for “I am an Englishman”; “I am a royalist” becomes a proxy for “I am of Frankish and not Gallic stock”.14
As a corollary of this, we should expect religions to become explicitly politicized. In an environment of harsh selection, any dominant religion will serve the biological interests of the faithful. This was seen in the Protestant Reformation, where each religion served as a rallying point around a particular king, as exemplified in the phrase cuius regio, euis religio [“whose realm, his religion”]. Far from being an irreligious aberration, this is in fact a return to European tradition.
Contrary, too, to the course of events in the West, the religious element in the East tended to get the better of the military and political. Military and civil aristocracies disappear, annihilated or crushed into insignificance between the kings and the sacerdotal order; and the ultimate result at which we arrive is, a monarch enjoying great power, but circumscribed by the privileges of a caste of priests. With these differences, however, that in the East aristocracies became religious, in the West civil or political, the proposition that a historical era of aristocracies succeeded a historical era of heroic kings may be considered as true, if not of all mankind, at all events of all branches of the Indo-European family of nations.15
What are likely to succeed above all are odd little fundamentalist sects, not unlike Anabaptists in the 16th century, who wield tremendous local power, and whose sights are rather less universalist in scope. As all power becomes local, they will start popping up everywhere, a religio for every regio. Likely the ones that come to dominate will be those that make a theological virtue out of fertility, not simply as one command among others, but being built into the very structure of the religion itself, as inseparable from the belief system as Christ is from Christianity.
These are all conjectures, so take them for what they’re worth. But outside of the unlikely renaissance of liberalism in all its youth and strength, religion is a bull market. By the end of the 22nd century, secularism will be a memory.
Keith Woods, Secularism is Here to Stay.
Ibid.
Dutton, Woke Eugenics, pp. 149–150.
Keith Woods, Secularism is Here to Stay.
Keith Woods, Secularism is Here to Stay.
At least, until third world societies have passed through the evolutionary selection event of liberalization that we have.
f.c., Creed is a Proxy for Blood.
Henry Sumner Maine, Ancient Law, p. 9.
I do firmly believe that liberalistic and leftist beliefs are self selective out of the genepool - and I imagine that once many leftists have passed on and left fewer children relative to the right, which has many religious associations, that those who are militantly atheistic will be lesser in proportion
Do you think Germanic heathenism is one of the long-term winners? I hope so. My cards—and my descendants’—are all in on that.