I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about how we can protect church-state separation in areas dominated by one particular sect of believers.
As religion declines all around the world, the most determined faith groups are retreating into their own isolated enclaves where they try to live apart from everyone else. This isn’t inherently a problem if it’s truly voluntary, but when a particular sect is the majority in one place, they very often try to punish outsiders and dissenters and write their beliefs into law.
Two such cases are playing out in America right now. In one town, an orthodox sect is trying to dismantle the public school system and force taxpayers to pick up the tab, creating a legal nightmare that could take years to untangle. But progress is possible, as seen in another pair of towns where democracy has triumphed and formerly oppressed cult members are emerging from theocratic darkness into the light.
Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like member-only posts and a subscriber newsletter:
The idea of the Benedict Option is that Christians should (metaphorically or literally) retreat into the wilderness. They should pull back from a secular culture that they’ve failed to conquer, and isolate themselves in their own enclaves where they can live and raise their children as they see fit.
They frame this as keeping their morals and values intact. But the none-too-subtle implication is that they want to control everything their children see and hear. They want to ensure they don’t have to compete with pesky differing viewpoints. In that sense, it’s an admission that fundamentalist views can’t survive contact with diversity.
Obviously, the Benedict Option was proposed in a particular Christian context. Not everyone is taking their cues from this idea. But conservative religious communities of all kinds are independently following similar lines of thinking.
This somewhat reminds me of an article I read the other day that gave me a sort of hope for a future after I’m gone – the situation it described is slow-moving, but inevitable.
Israel has a large Orthodox population. They are essentially parasites on the non-Orthodox Jewish population. And they are massively out-breeding the non-Orthodox. They don’t do military service. They don’t do lucrative jobs in tech, banking or whatever. They mainly just sponge off the properly-educated majority… except if they continue the way they’re going, the properly educated majority will pretty soon be a minority. Orthodox families get BIG. Educated people tend to have smaller families. When Israel was established and for the decades since, they could support a parasitic minority… but it’s not sustainable. Sooner or later the educated ones will tire of supporting the non-contributors. They probably won’t rebel, as such – the Orthodox have huge influence, for reasons I can’t really fathom. What they likely will do, though, is leave. Young people growing up and getting good qualifications won’t want to pay high taxes to support a cohort in their country whose idea of contributing to national defence is “thoughts and prayers”. This is the fundamental (!) weakness in the Zionist project. A parasitic enclave such as that described in your article is feasible if the surrounding population can be persuaded or forced to support it. But to set up a whole country like that, it ends up parasitising itself… and that will kill it more effectively than any anti-Semite could possibly dream of achieving. Not today, possibly not this century… but it’s coming. As currently set up, Israel can’t possibly survive, not because of outside threats, but because of its own people.
I suspect that, before it reaches a breaking point, Israel will force the ultra-Orthodox to participate in society. They’re already trying to end their blanket exemption from the draft:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exemption_from_military_service_in_Israel
How did the orthodox communities survive economically pre-Israel? And I guess the US example maybe mooching off the public school system, but there is a local economy? The christian examples that are self-sustaining are the Mennonites and Hutterites afaik. But with these close knit communities its always a lot of pressure to stay in line or get shunned.
I genuinely believe that we should make it easier to set up enclaves, or separatist communities, or similar set-aside spaces, just so people with unusual needs/views/lifestyle preferences can live among others like themselves with minimal outside interference and thereby achieve a higher quality of life. And also maybe do something about the issue where poorer people tend to get locked out of such places, usually due to unfortunate practical issues rather than malice, where they already exist.
But, those places should not have children in them, unless they’re child-appropriate. (Cue endless explosive debates over what exactly is “child-appropriate”.) If they do have children in them, said children should not be “protected” from knowing what the rest of the world is like, or be deprived of basic life skills, or be prevented from leaving once they’re old enough… because this would greatly lower the quality of life for people don’t belong, which is (or should be) contrary to those places’ purpose. Instead, they should recruit adults who do belong in those environments in order to keep the community going.
Of course, real life throws a wrench in that. The groups which have *always* been most motivated and united in this sort of separatism or community control are religious extremists, who consider their members (especially the children) to be family and/or community property. Knowledge is corruption. Abuse is freedom. Escape is theft. And then there are communities which we know or suspect cannot possibly be made to work, at least not without massively leeching from their surrounding nation, or enslaving unwilling outsiders, if at all… yet there are also people who demand spaces for such things. It’s one thing if it’s a case of “more tax dollars in, less out” because that sort of thing is perfectly common and normal (to a point), but it’s quite another when Galt’s 182,619th Gulch quickly implodes like all the others, wasting lots of time and resources and ruining the lives of most of the people involved.
In other words, if you were to go about it in a sane and ethical way… these people still wouldn’t get what they truly want, and nor should they. It would result in the (superficial) *appearance* of unfairness, however, simply because there would be other groups who *do* get exactly what they want, because what they want is sufficiently sane and ethical.
I almost wonder if it’d be feasible to compromise: have separatist religious communities like you describe, but for, say, one week a year, the kids attend a class where they’re taught about the outside world and get to meet people who live differently. At the end of the class, they’re given the chance to leave their community if they want to, with support and education available so they can start new lives for themselves. Sort of a “ones who walk away from Omelas” deal.
I’m sure that would never work. Like you said, the people who’d most want to live in this kind of community would never agree to it. But it’s the only way I can think of to do it that even comes close to being ethical.
I went over and read your latest on OnlySky. One thing in common is that so many of these religious enclaves were either ignored or not known about outside their areas until they got the attention of popular culture media–Carolyn Jessop wrote a book about the FLDS that later became a tv movie and then came a series on off-brand channels about leaving the FLDS. The documentary Jesus Camp brought attention to one of the evangelical enclaves. Netflix movie Unorthodox, taken from the memoir of the same name, discusses one Orthodox woman’s leaving her life and faith in Brooklyn to flee to Berlin, Germany–and there are countless Youtube channels of former-Orthodox women talking about their escape. I have family who have lived in Williamsburg for over a century and they are very angry about the open discrimination and imposition of rules of a faith they don’t follow on their everyday lives.
Notice it’s always the women–life for women in these religious enclaves is always terrible.
Yep, it’s almost always the women who speak out. It’s no wonder young women are starting to be less religious than young men. They’ve always suffered a disproportionate share of religious oppression and mistreatment. Maybe, as a society, we’ve finally reached the point where they know they have options and they don’t have to accept it anymore.
And it’s not even as if men don’t suffer in these cults! Warren Jeffs was accused of sexually assaulting boys as well as girls, and the logic of polygamy required him to banish large numbers of young men from his society on flimsy pretexts.
I read a number of books about the LDS (Jessop has at least 2, and Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven for just some examples. When older men are awarded multiple young women, the young men become extraneous and are often abandoned to their own devices with little-to-no education and no understanding of non-LDS culture.
The Amish want to be separate, but many of them depend on tourist dollars for their quilts, woodwork, food, puppy mill dogs, etc. etc. The Amish communities in the mid-Atlantic area stretching from south-western New York state through Virginia and out to West Virginia are very familiar with the non-Amish and their culture. I would expect Amish kids on rumspringa (time to experience non-Amish culture before adult baptism when they’re expected to adhere to Amish requirements) have less of a culture shock than some of the other groups.