Here’s a point I’ve often seen made before, this time by Mike the Mad Biologist and Shakespeare’s Sister: religion provides an important social outlet in small town America. It is the social network, the source of community activities, and an essential part of the people’s identities. It’s more than just an institution, it’s the glue that holds the fabric of these little towns together. It’s their scrap of culture.
I hope no is too surprised when I say that I agree 100%. Church is a big deal; some of these towns have big signs as you drive in, listing the churches available. Typically, one of the first major community buildings that were assembled in the history of these places was the church, which would have a central location, and even today may be preserved as an architectural landmark.
I don’t know where Mike and Shakes live, but I’m smack in the middle of it. Here’s a map of our little town, pop. 5000, with most of the churches marked; there are a couple missing (like the Jehovah’s Witnesses hall on the NE side of town, and there’s at least one other in the SE corner of the map, and oddly enough, the big Catholic church, which is down near F, isn’t shown).
Believe me, I know about small town churches. My house is near D, when I walk to the coffee shop down near J I often go by F and G. I know you can’t get elected to much of anything without having some association with a church. People know you by your church affiliation; if you’re a member of the Federated Church (C), you’re probably one of those liberal types and might be a university person; if you go to the Evangelical Free Church…well, let’s just say I might cross to the other side of the road to avoid you.
What Mike seems to fail to consider (Shakes does address it) is this: is this a good thing?
I’ve heard the “they’re a cultural resource” argument quite a few times, usually from people defending their church, or from people who don’t go to church but make this semi-patronizing suggestion that it’s where the little people go for their little slice of Western Civilization. It doesn’t wash.
I look at that map and see waste and lost opportunities.
First of all, these are sectarian separations—religion divides people. Very few people will go to E one week and F the next; the fact that these social networking centers represent largely mutually exclusive networks is blithely ignored in these suggestions that the church provides identity. Even scarier, though—imagine these towns dominated by a single sect.
Secondly, it would be wonderful to imagine these places as sites where people gather to appreciate great art, music and poetry, and experience the best of religious history. Think again. A typical church service is a few hymns, a harangue from the preacher, a few recitations from a book, a prayer or two, and some organ music. What is celebrated is not art, but dogma. Sometimes you do get good material: the church I attended in my youth had an excellent choir, for instance, and one thing I think the absence of church attendance deprives us godless people of is the opportunity to sing, and get instruction in singing. But those kinds of performance skills always play second fiddle to the primary function of the church service, the liturgy.
As someone who does not believe, I would not sit through over an hour of up-and-down, recite this, drone that, listen to this homily, etc., for 10 or 20 minutes of good music. Someone from one sect will not stomach the rituals of another to see the same, either. Any culture is excessively diluted by the noise.
Thirdly, I’m sorry, but we do not live in the seventeenth or eighteenth century any more. Religion is not the rich and generous wellspring of funding for art any more, nor does it seem to inspire much creativity. We don’t have Bachs generating great art out of their faith—what we have is music and poetry and plays put on by the churches that are simply poisoned by strident preachiness. The adjective “Christian” prepended to music, rock, theater is a synonym with “dreck” nowadays.
The central flaw with the cultural resource argument is that these are not just social clubs. They are social clubs with an ideological and metaphysical agenda that often dominates their discourse and makes them incompatible with each other and with the goal of supporting a shared social environment. What us godless fiends are arguing is not that the church organizations are necessarily bad and must be shut down, but that they bear this ugly baggage that cripples them in fulfilling that role that the apologists think is a redeeming virtue. Imagine a small town without that useless superstition muddling up the picture.
Imagine a Morris in which everyone’s belief in God has evaporated. They would still appreciate each other, though, and still like getting together every week to talk and sing and share ideas—those aren’t religious ideals, but purely human ones. Choir practice would continue; they’d still work on the Christmas pageant; coffee hour in the church basement would be a regular event; pastors would still be counseling couples, or getting kids together for activities. The only difference is that they wouldn’t be doing these things in the name of a non-existent being, in service to weird doctrines that claim unbelievers, including the members of the social club across town, are damned to hell and deserve it.
We could have performances of plays by the enthusiastic thespians at that nice building F, and there could be chorale performances every week at G, and maybe there’d be a book club at E…and every play wouldn’t be an exercise in heavy-handed morality that praises Jesus, and the songs wouldn’t all have to be hymns, and they could every once in a while crack some book other than the Bible.
Alas, that’s nothing but a fantasy. It’s not going to happen in my lifetime, I don’t think.
But please, don’t try to pull this feeble excuse that religion plays an important social role in small town communities. Sure it does: it stunts them. It restricts them. It turns them into the boring drone of dogma. It gives them dribs and drabs of culture while denying the diversity of it. If we really wanted a Renaissance, first thing we should do is evict the priests from their temples and turn those nice, big, airy buildings into celebrations of humanist ideals.
Those of you in the comments who have somehow interpreted this to imply that I think rural America is full of idiots are completely wrong. I’m arguing exactly the opposite.
There are people in small town America who are avidly participating in Bible study groups every week. Think about it: they are voluntarily getting together to think and talk about text, to engage in literature analysis. They do it over breakfast. They turn off the TV after a long day at work and get together to dissect a book. This is wonderful. Some of them might kick me for this, but they are being public intellectuals. My complaint is that this intellectual activity is put in a religious straightjacket—they are only talking about one book, and a very uneven one at that, and they are using study guides that discourage questioning anything fundamental about it.
Another example: these people have a better view of the performing arts than we urban smarty-pants often do. How many of us think a night of culture is a matter of buying a ticket and parking our ass in a seat and watching a performance? Here in the rural heartland, you are going to find more people doing the art: plays are huge out here, even if they are done by enthusiastic amateurs. I remember from my church-going days having a couple of hours of choir practice every week and doing a performance every Sunday. Again, that’s art, don’t sneer at it because it isn’t the Metropolitan Opera, and it’s limitations are these annoying religiously imposed constraints on the subject matter.
Minds are humming out here in the rural backwaters some people are demeaning. These are smart people, brilliant people, talented people, just as good as the ones in the Big City, and my point here is solely that religion is a force that holds them back.
Aaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh-Men!
Even scarier, though–imagine these towns dominated by a single sect.
uh, you mean like Haggert’s Megachurch/shopping mall?
indeed.
If you haven’t seen it yet, you really should watch the documentary “Hell House.” It does a great job of showing how scary the church is, but they also show you why some people are so dependent on it.
The guy they focus on has four kids, two of whom are handicapped. His wife left him and their kids for some guy on the internet. And the only thing holding the poor bastard together is thinking that all of this suffering is for a higher purpose, because otherwise he probably would have killed himself long ago.
What secular organizations are out there that will give this guy the same psychological and financial support that he gets from his church? They’re few and far between, especially in small towns.
(Let’s not get into the cruelty of the church’s “Hell House” using a scenario that echoes his own life as one of their cautionary tales. It’s probably the creepiest moment in a very creepy film.)
Utopia.
What secular organizations are out there that will give this guy the same psychological and financial support that he gets from his church? They’re few and far between, especially in small towns.
well, now, that’s a real good question.
why do you suppose that is?
it couldn’t be because churches are so easy to set up as regular income nonprofits now, could it?
or maybe it’s because of all the government subsidies they get?
hmm.
puzzler.
hint:
think – “self-fulfilling prophecy”
Re: “Christian” music/books/whatever equalling dreck–the Denver Post had a somewhat worthwhile feature today about the phenomenon of “Christian rock” vs. musicians who happen to be Christians. They were profiling Page France (meh), but pointed out that Sufjan Stevens (whom I quite like) is Christian and actually has some thought-provoking and non-dogmatic songs about his Relationship with the Lord. (Though it sounds like kind of a troubled Relationship, to judge from most of his lyrics… “Oh the glory when he took our place/But he took my shoulders and he shook my face/And he takes and he takes and he takes”)
The interesting flipside of this phenomenon is that many musicians won’t cop to actually being Christian because of the general nastiness of most of their co-adherents…
Great post. My youth was dominated by my church, and that’s where the majority of my social activities took place (not counting Boy Scouts, which was in ANOTHER church). I love group activities, and a social club that wasn’t religious, but had gatherings every weekend, is something I’d love to be a part of.
The only part I’d take issue is that of a town dominated by a single sect being the worst horror. Looking at a small town, if it existed in a vacuum, everyone belonging to one sect would be a (relatively) good thing. It would mean nobody being excluded. But since no small town exists in a vacuum, you’d have outliers who’d be persecuted, much as old hermits and widows who lived in the countryside were often taken for witches and evildoers.
I think the worst possible combination would be having two major sects, with a smaller one or two thrown in for good measure. Then we’d have someting akin to what’s going on in Iraq. If you don’t go to my church, then you are one of the baddies, therefore I can kill you, burn you at the stake, etc.
The best might be what is present now, with a dozen different ones, where no one group has the numbers and power to dominate in religious persecution, so no one will do it.
I know this isn’t the main point of the OP, but it struck me as an interesting thought experiment. Again, I’d be happiest seeing various social networks, but what would determine the variations? Geographic location, which could lead to class differences? Political affiliation, not that that doesn’t happen already? Interests and hobbies, which while useful, would that mean if I joined the outdoors social group I could never go to the music social group even though I like music?
I wonder if we humans don’t have an innate need to divide ourselves into smaller groups within the whole. Thoughts?
.. the fact that these social networking centers represent largely mutually exclusive networks is blithely ignored in these suggestions..
Is way too true, alas, and worse, what passes for their uniting theme is Pride in Ignorance and a high esteem for those use It to get as much as they can at the expense of all those others.
Sad crap, but true. Personally, as a Roman Catholic growin’ up, I generally got creeped out by even other Catholic churches, especially where the services varied greatly from those I was used to at my own. Seems to me, much like some other, less “righteous” means, avoiding maturing and a fuller understanding of the greater world is exactly how attending a Church, a churchgoer’s life demeans.
(Hey, I’m in a groove. Let it go. {-; )
Part of the advantage churches have in acting as social aggregators is that they impose little or no filter on who attends, except the willingness to be there. You don’t have to enjoy high-falutin’ lectures — and in fact are expected to mostly ignore the sermon, though few will admit that. You don’t need appreciation for fine art or music, nor will that be much offered. You don’t even need money. Yes, there is doctrine to which you are supposed to give nodding assent, but most of it is fantasy that will have no impact on your actual life. Even if it condemns some of what you do as sin, that can be your secret. Or even your avenue for confession, faux redemption, and further social bonding.
Being a university town, I suspect Morris has its share of the social outlets that affords: lectures by learned professors open to public, art theatres that show indie films, political activist groups, etc. Consider, though, that unlike a church, those feature activities that can be appreciated only by a minority. That are appreciated only by a minority. Churches work in part by appealing to low common denominator, while offering a significant psychic reward: the attendees feel good about themselves by virtue of having attended. I’m not sure how you concoct a secular alternative that achieves that. The closest thing might be the neighborhood bar.
You live quite close to my in-laws.
“Religion is not the rich and generous wellspring of funding for art any more, nor does it seem to inspire much creativity…”
What about the creativity of a Dembski or a Behe- of ID as a whole? That’s a pretty obvious use of a fertile imagination right there. Why it’s the Sistine Chapel of fabrication and the high art of bad science- hell, it’s not science at all, it must be art.
BTW, would it be okay if I teleported Ken Ham’s new “museum” from nearby N. Kentucky up there to Morris? And do you know how I could build that teleporter?
Mmm, but what’s stopping secular small-town folks from having their own hall to conduct regular get-togethers? Nothing. So where are they?
Sure, there are the sewing circles and sporting teams and clubs and so on, but (most) religious folk attend those as much as any secular people do. It seems to me that church tends to be an extra. Take it away and it wouldn’t be replaced with something else – this is not a zero sum.
I don’t *like* this, but I think I know why it is: people like to define themselves in ways they like. Church is not just a social or cultural event for believers, it’s an achievement. Attendence is a virtue. This is a motivator that few other get-togethers can offer. And there’s a stick to the carrot, too – it’s Bad not to go.
So this little sting to the church-going experience gets people out there when they otherwise wouldn’t bother. It keeps even fairly apathetic believers from completely disengaging with their society – it provides a social activity that people will actually go to, and be motivated to continue going to.
Consider how much of a problem it is in some societies to have people who have no sense of civic or social engagement. Church provides that for some of our citizens.
I still agree the bad outweighs the good, but there is *some* good.
Ahhh jeez Dr. Myers I think you need to head to a real city. Do you really think there is enough creative talent in Morris to turn all those churches into producers of actual art? Not even close. The problem is that small towns are composed of the gene pool that hasn’t moved off to the big cities yet.
Even if you did manage to evict the metaphysics and the ideology from the churches around here, and turn them into 24/7 art generators, the results would be nothing you or I would probably want to visit. “Art” in small towns means “arts and crafts” (unless you are in one of those rare small towns that has been taken over by hippies).
Also, the music/dogma ratio has changed a bit. Last time I visited an evangelical church it was more like 50% music, including a drum set, electric guitars, etc. Not that it was any good mind you, but better than the chanting or the praying.
I think churches really are just social clubs. Most people really aren’t philosophically inclined enough to care about the issues you and I care about. They also don’t feel the need to make their knowledge cohere logically the way we do. A social psychologist would say they have low “need for cognition.” They beleive the dogma because of what they get in return, social support, a sense of belonging, and stuff to do with themselves. Spouting some mumbo-jumbo once in a while is a small price to pay. These people would flip over to the evolution side of things in a second if there was ever any real reason to do so.
There is another argument I would like to hear your thoughts on. There is some evidence that authoritarian parenting styles do work well for low IQ children. Could it be that, in much the same way, religion actually does provide effective moral guidance for some section of the population? I think you might see some evidence of this in prisons.
Did you know that a “hamlet” cannot become a “village” until it has a church.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/hamlet
Our town is bigger than Morris by quite a bit, but the plethora of churches is still noticeable. There are enough churches that racial groups and social classes can all be segregated, each with its own church. As for the Evangelical Free Church, I’ve always wanted to hyphenate their name for them.
I don’t get it.
Is pluralism good, or bad?
In PZ’s world, it can be whatever suits his dogma.
Myers’ vision:
sounds an awful like the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship.
I’m sure that the artistic merit of most contemporary religious art and music is slight, but it isn’t nonexistent. There’s a fairly new Greek Orthodox Church in Irvine, CA with some absolutely outstanding mosaics. I’ve been there twice for peformances of contemporary classical music by Orthodox composers John Tavernor and Arvo Pärt (under the auspices of the OC Philharmonic Society). I have no idea what the services are like, though.
First of all I’d like to say I’m a longtime reader first time poster and PZ, I really enjoy the blog (You can also chalk up another reader to your Wikipedia page).
Anyway, I’m currently a junior in college in New York City (though I’m currently studying in Cairo, Egypt) and a somewhat closeted atheist, although I probably openly appear slightly more than agnostic. However, I could see attending my hometown church in northeastern Pennsylvania for the rest of my life. I guess my church is one of those strange anomalies, as it pretty much embodies most of the good attributes you said in your post that churches formerly had. It’s a Presbyterian church, from which alone one can basically deduce nothing. I attended service at the First Presbyterian Church of New York City and it was probably the most liberal church I’ve ever set foot in (one of the sermons mentioned people of all faiths sitting down together at one table in heaven as a good thing) and they also had a practically professional chorus which gave an annual concert before Christmas of Handel’s Messiah. Last spring while volunteering for Habitat for Humanity over spring break in North Carolina our group stayed at Highlands Presbyterian Church in Fayetteville which was basically a scaled down megachurch (they even had a fully equipped gymnasium which hosted a fairly serious youth basketball league, a weight room, and yoga classes).
My church probably leans more towards First Prez in New York, but that is not to say that most or even many in the congregation are liberal, though it is the house of worship of choice of the president of one of the local universities as well as many of its professors (including a microbiologist). The choir director/organist’s day job is as the music director of the most prestigious prep school in the area whose choirs regularly tour internationally. His wife is a German cellist who often plays the classics during the service and the section leaders in the choir all are professional musicians or music teachers and are compensated. On Christmas Eve and Easter there is generally a brass quintet and violinists and at least once a year the choir performs a cantata accompanied by a small chamber orchestra. After the service every Sunday there is Sunday school for the children and “contemporary issues” for the adults which is a lecture given by a community member on topics ranging from Siberian Husky ownership to biology to a question and answer session from our US Congressman. The church building also plays host to AA meetings, local peace group potluck dinners, for a while it hosted the meetings of a local group committed to changing drug policy, and it rotates with other churches to house the homeless certain nights who are picked up off the street by a local nonprofit. The church also hosts and helps sponsor dinners for the poor and elderly on Thanksgiving and Christmas which usually feed over 500 and 800 people respectively (we even delivered 700 meals one year through 18 inches of wet snow). The former minister also was instrumental in getting hundreds of new units of low income housing built in the city as well as initiating a pulpit exchange with one of the local Jewish synagogues, where our minister preaches at the synagogue on Saturday with some help from the rabbi and the rabbi preaches at the church the next day with some help from the minister. We also have the whole congregation worship at the Episcopal Church down the street and the next Sunday their whole congregation comes down and worships with us, vacation bible school (which is kind of a sham even at my church) is also held jointly with the Episcopals. Oh, and the church also hosts senior recitals for many music students from the local college, and they also allow the youth of the church to completely run the service twice a year, including the sermon. Granted, my family has been a “pillar of the church” for about 50 years and have a key and are the alternate contact number if someone cant get through to one of the 4 or 5 people who work at the church, not to mention being responsible for a lot of the good things that happen there (my parents and uncle, who was also a former assistant minister, founded the Christmas dinner for the poor, as well as founding or being heavily involved with the drug policy group and the peace groups).
If we all had just one church like this in our town I think our views on religion would be a lot different and I think we would all be less virulently opposed to religion. I mean I’m not about to start believing a lot of the mumbo jumbo they’re preaching in there but there is a whole established social network sitting there, and that could be a good thing. After being here in Cairo for almost 3 months I’ve now realized that Islam here is never going to be erased but it certainly can (and desperately needs to) be changed. Too many Egyptians define themselves almost entirely on being Muslim and I think the same thing happens in the US. I realized on this trip how culturally Christian even my friends here who have never gone to church more than a few times a year are. But I think that a lot of good can be squeezed out of churches if they are reformed by an informed congregation. I wince a little every time we have to pray before and after working on a Habitat for Humanity build, but I certainly don’t support them any less for it. I also believe that there is a lot of good in churches that is being wasted. Few of us can deny that once you pare away all of the myth and dogmatic bullsh*t from religion the core is something even we atheists end up living our lives by. And believe me, my county is the only one in the country to have a Polish plurality and the Irish are right on their heels (at my brothers graduation last summer the girl going to Notre Dame got exponentially more oohs and aahs from the crowd when they announced it than did the ivy leaguer going to Penn), so I know all about the dogmatic bullsh*t.
I think the best strategy is to make it a point to go after dangerous extremist religion while not condemning religion wholesale, and also interacting with believers one on one. I doubt I would be an atheist right now had my parents not been very liberal Christians, nor would they be liberally Christians if their parents weren’t moderate to slightly conservative Christians before them. The most effective strategy to me would be to slowly turn down the blind devotion in people generation by generation by acknowledging the good things churches provide socially while questioning the indoctrination and dogma instead of just using verbal hostility. There are a lot of churches out there that welcome all comers and in some cases give many of their members a voice. While I don’t take particular pleasure in praisin’ the lord every Sunday, I do find pleasure in the community I find there, I also believe I can share my firsthand experience (which at the moment would be what’s really going on in the Middle East) with people, something they would not have access to otherwise. I think many of you out there who are scientifically inclined might find it doesn’t hurt to tag along with a friend or relative to a more liberal church a couple times a year and just chat with people one on one after the service, sharing both some camaraderie and your expertise. After all if the religious right slowly becomes the religious left, it’s a step in the right direction.
Wrong. It’s out of one frying pan, into another – while the fire continues to rage beneath everything.
If any lesson is to be learned, it is that atheists need to go out and establish more centers of social activity – not by making groups that forward the concept of atheism, but by simply being atheistic – what many would call ‘secular’. Rip out the dross, leave the gold.
“Small town churches, small town prisons”
PZ, this was a self-deprecating ironic joke, right?
If not, I want you to really put your money where your mouth is, and storm the gates. Go to these prisons, and free the prisoners! Tell them what idiots they are; I’m sure they’ll appreciate it in the long run.
eukaryote:
Your reasonable, considerate, passionate, polite, humanistic post is getting in the way of PZ’s self-righteous ranting.
Won’t you ever learn?
If not, I want you to really put your money where your mouth is, and storm the gates. Go to these prisons, and free the prisoners!
So I take it you’re going to go around to all the real prisons and freeing all the real prisoners. Money, mouth, put, pot, kettle, …
Just for reference, southeastern Idaho IS dominated by a single sect: Mormons. I think the next largest segment is the Catholics. When I was still going to a Methodist Church youth group, we would have interchurch activities with almost anyone, except the Mormons. They were the horrible, forbidden, evil OTHER. I suspect something similar would happen if the dominant sect was some other group: the smaller groups would band together against the “evil overlords.”
“So I take it you’re going to go around to all the real prisons and freeing all the real prisoners. Money, mouth, put, pot, kettle, …”
I’m a card-carrying member of the ACLU, an organization which supports prisoner rights and the rights of the accused to a fair trial.
I don’t consider churches, where people go of their own free will, prisons.
Re: “The adjective “Christian” prepended to music, rock, theater is a synonym with “dreck” nowadays.” — isn’t this just a consequence of Sturgeon’s law?
If you look, you can find (in much smaller quantities, to be sure) high quality music and art informed by the artist’s faith. Arvo Pärt, say, in classical music, or Christopher Burkett in photography. If you’re not sufficiently familiar with their work, and just look at Christian art en masse, you’ll see the dreck instead, because there’s so much more of it, but that may say more about how much effort you spend looking for good Christian art than it says about whether it is more or less likely to be good than any other kind of art.
But do Arvo Part or Christopher Burkett call their work “Christian music” or “Christian photography”?
Anything self-consciously labeled as one thing or the other, “Christian” or otherwise, will obviously be less than it could be.
The prisons are in their minds, Mr. Erickson. No one can free them but themselves, which is why hardly anyone escapes.
Even though I don’t believe in G/god(s), I like churches and (especially) cathedrals. I like walking past them, walking through them, seeing families going to them all dressed up on Sunday morning, seeing people give a crap about something besides money, TV, or PlayStation.
Call me crazy.
“No one can free them but themselves, which is why hardly anyone escapes.”
You obviously have a very high opinion of yourself. What, pray tell, have YOU escaped by not going to church? Do you “stay up as late as you want” on Saturday nights? Wow!
How peculiar. I don’t recall saying or implying anything about myself in my previous post.
Relative superiority depends heavily on the subject of comparison, don’t you agree?
“The prisons are in their minds, Mr. Erickson. No one can free them but themselves, which is why hardly anyone escapes.”
I’ll bet the person who wrote this thought it was really deep.
Stephen Erickson:
Nearly all those people who care about nothing but money, TV and Playstation are known as “teenagers,” and they eventually grow up into people who care about other things, regardless of whether or not they go to church.
OK.
You’re crazy.
Pretty nasty about it, too.
I’ve been trying to come up with a solution for this myself for a while now. Lots of talk, but no answers. The latest “New Atheism” reading list is full of talk but no solutions.
The only solution I’ve come up with is just living my life as I have been and demonstrating to my believing friends that Atheists are normal, stand-up, trustworthy, friendly people. I’m not saying I have to prove anything to them, and nobody has ever had any problem with my Atheism, but the only thing I can think to do is to just be a good example and to be outspoken about my non-belief.
But I’m searching for the solution. The solution that will start our society down the path to reason. It’s too early for politics, nobody can get elected without wearing their faith on their sleeves these days.
I thought about starting companion secular organizations that do similar things as Christian groups like the Salvation Army, or Habitat for Humanity, but that seems like so much duplication of effort and waste.
I wonder about “Atheist Evangelism” though. Like taking a group of free-thinkers into a remote village and set them up with solar power and train them how to make clean water or whatever, but also specifically explain that religion is a farce and they have the power to bring themselves up without any mythology. Unfortunately, I can’t think of a way to make it work in the USA.
But for now, I’ll continue to be satisfied with refusing to let people in while driving if they have a fish on their car.
Incidentally, could PZ be any MORE contemptuous and condescending to a place where he chose (giving him the benefit of the doubt) to live?
Mmm, but what’s stopping secular small-town folks from having their own hall to conduct regular get-togethers? Nothing. So where are they?
uh, perhaps you missed the post i made earlier about funding and self-fulfilling prophecies?
did i need to elaborate further on why there are fewer secular social institutions than religious ones, especially in small towns?
really, it’s pretty obvious.
more money means more churches, more churches mean more people decide to go to them, more people decide to go means their kids do too… lather rinse repeat.
ever try to start a non-profit and get funding for it?
ain’t easy… unless you have a regular source of income like a collection plate, and government subsidies.
you want to see more secular social insitutions? tell your government to stop playing this game with the churches, and level the playing field.
Mostly to Erickson: yes, Pärt and Burkett’s strong Christian beliefs figure prominently in both of their online biographies and seem to be an important part of what motivates them to create their art. Which is why I chose them. Did you think I would just pick two names of people who happened to be Christian but whose Christianity had nothing to do with their art?
Of course, as with all good art, one can enjoy theirs (as I do, though my musical tastes don’t usually run to classical) without sharing the same beliefs.
Anyway, this is all avoiding the main part of my point, which was to argue that at least some of the cause of PZ’s feeling that Christian art is dreck could be an observer effect: his unfamiliarity with it makes it hard for him to find the good stuff among the dreck, while he has already filtered out the dreck from genres that interest him more.
Proof?
I don’t consider churches, where people go of their own free will, prisons.
Okay. I thought you meant it literally when you really meant figuratively. They don’t look anything like real prisons so I guess that wouldn’t make much sense. My bad!
“Incidentally, could PZ be any MORE contemptuous and condescending to a place where he chose (giving him the benefit of the doubt) to live?”
Could you be any MORE contemptuous and condescending to a blog you chose to read?
Anyone who wants to make this world a better place is welcome to vote for the Democrat in their district.
We’ve got an enormous amount of work to do to save the ocean for the fish (and for us), the atmosphere (for us, the trees and the fish) and for us.
Losing this one is a giant step towards extinction for all that we hold dear.
Being an archaeologist, I tend to look at culture the way biologists look at ecology. Humans may not find sea cucumbers very attractive, but from an evolutionary point of view they’re a successful taxon. In nature, whatever works is good.
And to me, as a cultural relativist, it seems like the members of Morris’s various sects are a lot like sea cucumbers. They’re quite happy with their subcultures: it works for them. The community doesn’t look at all attractive to me, but it’s still there and people are still going to church. So somehow that culture works, I have to give them that. And maybe that’s all that matters in society.
Now, in my own local Swedish culture, church attendance rates are in free fall. I think PZ would thrive in this cultural biotope.
I don’t think PZ was stating that Christians can’t make good art — they most certainly can. But, walk into almost any working class church in SmallTown, Minnesota, and you’re not going to find anything that the rest of us non-believers would describe as “art”, or “music”. Instead, you will find, if anything, a lot of post-modern minimalist decor (let’s be charitable), plus the most insipid, uninspired cookie-cutter warbling that has ever assaulted the human ear drum.
This has not always been the case. Religion has also inspired some truly beautiful American music: e.g. sacred harp/shapenote singing, as well as old-time gospel. It’s just sort of run off the rails in the last… oh, 60 years.
Could you possibly be any more self-righteous? And could you possibly contribute any less to the discussion?
I usually just lurk here, but your numerous, content-free, whine-plentiful posts are annoying the crap out of me.
Well, the ancient parish church I can see from my font windows now has other things happening in it.
They hold 6 or 8 concerts every winter, for small band, usually of renaisssance-to classical period music.
Last week we had the amazin Trevor Pinnock on Harpsichord….
I’m gald to say that the old hellfir-evangelical preacher (long since dead, I’m glad to say) who used to preside ther would NOT have liked it.
Of courese, there are the others – “Potters House” (Ugh) controlled from Arizona – aaargh!.
Of course, the old church is CofE, and the oldest but you can see now is from about 1380, but it was founded about 980 ….
The other village continuity is provided by the Public Houses and restuarants in our little sub-village – “but you live in London” I hear you say>
So?
London is “The little village” (Kipling) it is a giant village-of-villages, all 11 million of us…..
Try putting postcode E17 9Sb into “multimap” or similar, provided you are centred on the UK, and you’ll see what I mean.
I like walking past them, walking through them, seeing families going to them all dressed up on Sunday morning, seeing people give a crap about something besides money, TV, or PlayStation.
Funny, that’s not what I see. What I see is a bunch of people who during the week couldn’t be bothered to give a crap about anything other than material possessions, coming together on Sunday in the best clothes they’ve got and making note of who drives what kind of car, who’s wearing the most expensive clothes, and who isn’t there and must therefore be hellbound.
Of course, I live in the south, so my experience with church may be different from yours (actually, it must be, if you really believe the stuff you wrote in the post I quoted).
Incidentally, could PZ be any MORE contemptuous and condescending to a place where he chose (giving him the benefit of the doubt) to live?
I don’t know – could you be any more desperate in your desire for attention from him?
I mean, why else do you do this?
Hey, lay off Stephen Erickson. All he does is whine, yeah, but at least he’s not hoody.
And let us not forget about the shameless “prosperity theology” that is very common nowadays, like the Prayer of Jabez business and the theology that Jesus Christ was rich(!)
I’d created an IIDB thread on that
(the Rev. Crefio Dollar)
To be fair, I don’t think this phenomenon is in any way limited to the churches. It’s just one aspect of the destruction of genuine popular culture by pre-packaged commercial “popular” drivel, made possible by the technologies of mass communication beginning with radio. No humane person can regret the enormous gains in the diffusion of well-being resulting from technological progress, but we should not pretend there haven’t also been losses.
Tevye: “Tradition, tradition! Tradition!”
“After all if the religious right slowly becomes the religious left, it’s a step in the right direction.”
“Wrong. It’s out of one frying pan, into another – while the fire continues to rage beneath everything.”
You’ve got to be kidding. While I personally won’t have my intelligence insulted just to get the benefits of the church Eukaryote described, I’d prefer that over one of those evangelical ones. What liberals, religious or not, do you know that picket abortion clinics or carry signs saying, “God hates fags” at a gay man’s funeral? I’m not saying there aren’t any, but they are so few compared to the conservatives.
It IS a step in the right direction. Do you really think we’re going to make tremendous progress overnight? …with OUR reputation???
Eukaryote, I thought you gave interesting insight from another point of view. You are most likely getting others to actually think about the whole idea of religion instead of immediately getting defensive about their side like it’s a football team.
It’s always a mistake to forget inertia. These churches are pre-existing, organized forms of communal activity. Nobody had to invent then from scratch in recent memory. People are born into families affiliated with the pre-existing organizations. Over the centuries, a great deal of wonderful art and music and much colorful and genuinely moving (if often nonsensical) ritual has been developed.
How do you organize a bunch of folks whose common feature is what they DON’T believe? Try organizing a group of people who DON’T collect stamps. When believers marry or die, they have prescribed rituals, hallowed by long familiarity, and the result of an evolutionary process that often leads to ceremonies of great beauty. When we marry and die, we make up our rituals on the fly, and, since most of us aren’t, in fact, very good at this stuff, it is usually dreck, and there is no evolutionary process to weed out the worst and allow the best to flourish. The Book of Common Prayer, bosh though it is, works far better than some new-fangled, treacly incantations accompanied by wind chimes or sitars.
You can’t invent old.
Eukaryote: That’s a beautiful description of church. I grew up going to a Presbyterian church in a small town and, while the church was much smaller, the experience was similar to what you describe — until our openminded minister retired and was replaced by an evangelical.
Caledonian: I completely agree with your idea. “…atheists need to go out and establish more centers of social activity – not by making groups that forward the concept of atheism, but by simply being atheistic – what many would call ‘secular’. Rip out the dross, leave the gold.”
Seems hard to do though. In small town America, the ecology niche for social activity is currently filled by churches and supplemented by lodges like the Moose, the Odd Fellows, the American Legion, etc. It will take a long time for something different to evolve. I wonder too if the individualist streak that is so strong among so many atheists prevents a critical mass from forming in those places where secular organizations might have a chance competing with churches.
“Could you possibly be any more self-righteous? And could you possibly contribute any less to the discussion?
“I usually just lurk here, but your numerous, content-free, whine-plentiful posts are annoying the crap out of me.”
Apparently I’m not taking the medium of blog commentary seriously enough for some people. Duly noted.
PZ, Minnesota sounds like a foreign land. Down here the social fabric of every community is high school football. These folks go to church at every opportunity to be seen and gird their loins for the scuffles against the godless, but Friday night under the banks of lights with the prancing cheerleaders (all following the obligatory prayer)is the opportunity to beat the snot out of an adjoining community. The Monday morning coffee shop conversation is football – not the latest liturgy. Do you guys have any culture at all up there?
I am not strong supporter of religion, and PZ’s arguments are usually very good. This one can be, but I think you are applying it more generally then it probably applies in the real world. Okay, in your town people of various religious factions oppose one another. It happens in other parts of the world as well. But it is not universal. For instance, I was raised methodist. However, I went to an Epsicopal middle school (also attended by just about every protestant branch you could imagine, catholics, eastern orthodox, jewish, hindu, and probably others I can’t even remember), and not only were people of other religions not opposed somehow but the school routinely brought in local religious leaders of other religions to talk about their beliefs and customs. I went to a methodist church (when we did go to church), although we tried various other churches of various branches. The minister there was good friends with his next door neighbor, a Buddhist. That is just how things were in my area. People didn’t care. It wasn’t divisive. Social circles included wide varieties of faiths. It is the same where I am now. My social group includes Atheists, Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Protestants of various sorts, Jews, Muslims, and Hindus. People know what each other are and are not allowed to due, know how seriously each other take their rules (ranging from “not at all” to “very seriously”), and nobody cares.
Now I am not claiming that this is universal, nor am I claiming it is even the norm. I am just saying there is no reason religion has to be divisive. It is divisive in general because humans are naturally xenophobic. They oppose everything that is not seen as being a part of their own group. That seems to be natural for humans. Some religious groups prey on that, fostering an “us versus them” attitude in order to keep people in the church. Anyone who tries to leave is a “them” and ostracized. But that is far from universal, and could equally apply to just about any human endevour. Social groups, politics, country, ethnicity, social class, profession, company, even the particular school of thought or practice you subscribe to in your job, these all can be and routinely are leveraged to take advantage of natural human xenophobia. Religion is particularly adept at this it seems (as are countries), but that is not an integral component of religion. It is merely an integral component of human nature that we have to fight hard to oppose. If people don’t segregate themselves based on religion they will just do it based on something else (as they do now).
I guess this illustrates the difference between small-town Quebec (where I have visited, but never lived) and small towns in the US. In Quebec, there would generally only be Catholic churches, though once in a while you’d find Pres. and Angl. ones where there had been English settlers too. And that’s it. None of this hypercompetition. And, of course, they are much less used today …
I think founding social networks on a commonly non-shared belief might not work for large-scale popularization. In fact, I think this is part of the reason why we are a minority in America. Trying to organize and motivate people by what they don’t believe in doesn’t work very well. Any atheist “movement” that tries to encompass worldviews as divergent as Marxists, Objectivists, and everybody in between isn’t “herding cats” — it’s herding badgers. What about emphasizing our positively held beliefs of at least a middle-road subset, i.e. secular humanism?
Part of the problem we have right now is that Joe Sixpack thinks that we aren’t interested in morality and don’t hold moral beliefs and probably aren’t very moral, either. This is a serious liability, and we have got to overcome this. We want to make the world a better place, and we want to good, so why not place more emphasis on this?
Oh, come off it. You expect me to belive that
is actually a joke?
Is your post an admission that I shouldn’t take any of your comments seriously?
Is “incidently” the new “I’m just sayin'”?
Ichth, I don’t agree because I do not base my opinion on one country. The world does not do things the same way, and (in my experience) lots of places do not have nearly the level of financial support for religion you may see in the US, and they have less, not more, social engagement.
The same funding in another context would not have the sense of obligation that church attendence has. There is a subset of society who are only engaged because that engagement comes from a church.
I agree that it’s hard to organize activity on the basis of “what we don’t believe in”, except as a defensive reaction to herd pressure. There are atheist clubs out there, but would I want to join one?
Models for secular organizations:
UU church (“we believe in tolerance and social justice”)
Socialist organizations, especially around 1900, and perhaps still elsewhere; lots of belief in a cause, and pools of blue-collar intellectualism.
Objectivist groups, maybe?
And, going way back, the gardens of the Epicureans, with shared belief in empiricism and quasi-hedonism and ideas of how to live one’s life for happiness. Not that we know much about how they ran.
I thought of the UU Church too. They probably suck up the atheists that are looking for a social church-like framework.
Objectivists? Sorry, they are too much like evangelicals, except in my experience they worship money instead of God. They are fundamentalists with Atlas Shrugged for a Bible.
I agree with j.t.delaney: “We want to make the world a better place, and we want to good, so why not place more emphasis on [morality]?” That is what the seems to bother religious people most about atheists. Yet I don’t see how we can do that. As others have already said above, atheism does not take a moral stance on anything.
Used to, but many of us got turned off when the once-prominent humanist strand of UU tradition started being shoved aside in favor of various childish forms of “spirituality” such as “UU paganism”, with the active encouragement of a succession of God-talking humanist-disliking denomination presidents.
i think it was briefly mentioned only once in the posts, but it needs to be said more explicitly:
sure, the churches give people in small towns a real social connection. but that connection typically reinforces racial and class distinctions. perpetuating social networks through churches merely perpetuates segregation of various factions of small towns that would likely be better off unsegregated.
Fascinating!
As for creating groups, why not study the Drinking Liberally meetups? No rules, no dues, no agenda or officers–just people loosely defined as dems/libs/progs who set a meeting place, date and time, and do it! (At last count, there are 165 groups in 41 states.)
Here in Nashville, we’ve also just started another group (meeting monthly at Blackstone Brewery) that is modeled in the same way: NashvilleGreenDrinks, for the ecologically- and conservation-minded. (I missed the inaugural/November meetup; I’ll be at the December.)
Frankly, our individualism and “herding-cats” reputation requires a very loose structure, where the bonds are made between minds but not by shackles…