Religion in A Godless Time
I have reflected on the connection between morality/religion and democracy off-and-on for a long while. In Western society, we’ve seen a decline in traditional religion and a simultaneous increase in economic inequality, as well as the rise of a curiously lop-sided ‘civic morality’. This essay was my initial attempt to think through some of these things, and I developed some of these thoughts further in a pamphlet on Narcissism and Democracy and an article on the rise of Woke. However, I think that these underlying thoughts are really what hits the nail on the head, and it’s why I’m publishing them here. I’ll also be part of a panel debate on Apocalyptic Thinking on November 23rd. Tickets (free) are here.
Religion in A Godless Time
Part I: In Which I Become an Involuntary Member of the Donor Class
A few years ago, I was grabbing lunch at a mall food court in the US. I paid cash and my mind had already moved on to the question of how to balance my meal, laptop case, and shopping on the way to the seating area, when I was interrupted with an ear-splitting 'WOULD YOU LIKE TO DONATE YOUR SMALL CHANGE TO THE CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL?' from the worker operating the cash register.
The entire line gawked in suspense as to how I would dispose of the ten cents I was due back from my payment.
Would this precious dime live out its life in the ‘remember-to-take-it-with-me-next-time-I-go-to-the-US’ bag at the bottom of my night-table along with the vintage Swedish kroner and the roubles that are bound to appreciate again someday? Would it make its small but worthy contribution to a subway ticket? Would it inhabit my wallet for months to come, as I dug around at check-outs, mumbling, ‘there are some pounds in here somewhere’?
So many possibilities.
But, as I said, everyone was staring at me, so I graciously nodded my acquiescence to depositing the dime in the Children’s Hospital Box next to the plastic cutlery.
'THANK YOU FOR GIVING!!!' the entire phalanx of fast-food workers shrieked, again very loudly, presumably so that everyone in the vicinity could appreciate how good I was, how good they were, and just how generally good we all are together.
I sang the Lego movie ‘everything is awesome’ song in my head for a while.
I also have my own lyrics to this song, which I call ‘everything is crazy’, but I reverted to the original ‘everything is awesome’ this time, as it seemed, for once, more appropriate to the situation.
Despite the nearly meaningless stakes, this event stuck in my head, because it got me thinking about the new religion. After much thought, I’ve decided to call this religion ‘Good Little Citizen religion’ or ‘GLC’ for short.
Welcome to Life as a Good Little Citizen
The typical member of the GLC congregation is an upper-middle-class Westerner, who is all about ‘giving’ and ‘kindness’ and prospering by ‘being good’ and ‘seeing the good’ and just generally goody-goodying around and above all feeling good. Because they are good. We’re all good! Everything is awesome!
I think you know the kind of people I mean: the ones who have a favourite vacation spot in Thailand, but drive an electric car ‘for the environment’; are on a gluten-free diet, despite not being coeliacs; tip their black-market servants generously and ostentatiously without raising their actual wages; discovered for the first time this year that black people can write books and that their favourite author of all time always was Toni Morrison; want to be a ‘good ancestor’; and believe that TED Talks are really deep.
They agonize over whether buying dairy or non-dairy milk is the ‘right’ choice; whether the peasants who provided their coffee made a dollar or a dollar fifty an hour; and whether at their lavish conference meals it’s OK to order scallops, because something about dredging, but they can’t quite remember.[1]
Gratefulness, also plays a key role in the GLC belief system. Grateful for the picture-perfect house that’s stretching the finances; grateful for the little uniquely-talented-kiddies’ school teachers for recognizing that talent; grateful for the private health insurance; grateful for the Ivy League education; grateful for the parents who bankrolled it all and for the cousin who pulled strings to get you your first job. So grateful. Because as long as you are grateful for what you have – so super grateful! – it’s obvious that you deserve it.
They also tend to fully participate in whatever charity thing is going down at the mall, like buying those Tom’s shoes so Tom’s can give a pair to a kid in Africa or, as aforementioned, flipping money into charity boxes at the food court.
I’ve been observing the GLC congregation for years, and it has been interesting if disturbing to try to figure them out.
Something that I’ve found particularly intriguing is that despite the fact that they are so clearly trying to placate a higher power by performing the correct actions and thinking the correct thoughts, most of the members of this new religion are a bit phobic about all of the previously-existing religions.
Indeed, if in the midst of, say, a pro-immigration diatribe, you chip in with some handy Biblical quotes about one’s duty to feed, clothe, and empathize with foreign travellers, you’re liable to be ostracized as a Jesus-freak rather than thanked for your contributions to the moral understanding.
For this reason, I initially tended to think of GLC religion as an attempt to create a moral framework for people who either grew up without religious education or who rejected traditional religion for a variety of reasons. Perhaps it was kind of a humanist thing, I thought, where people wanted to have morality, but for that morality not to be handed down from on high by God in an authoritarian fashion.
However, although that initial hypothesis seemed reasonable, I now believe that it was incorrect and that what is at play here is actually a lot darker.
Part 2: Traditional Human-Centred Belief Systems
Plenty of traditional belief systems revolve around more earthly codes of conduct than say Christianity or Islam do. Confucianism springs to mind as an example here, but there are also many instances of not-so-theistic morality in Western history.
Classical Greek and Roman gods were not the most morally-upstanding deities and therefore did not serve as solid role models for ethical behaviour. A pious Christian might ask themselves today ‘what would Jesus do?’ in a tricky situation, but it is hard to imagine a 3rd century B.C. Roman asking themselves, ‘what would Jupiter do?’ because Jupiter would have probably just thrown a lightning bolt at whatever the problem was and that is a hard trick for a mortal to emulate.
Nonetheless, despite the lack of clear godly role models, the ancients of the West (like practitioners of Confucianism) possessed a whole ream of helpful maxims telling them how to behave, as well as a boatload of traditional behaviour that they were expected to observe.
Over in Greece, the Temple to Apollo at Delphi had no less than 147 maxims inscribed on it, many of which would be familiar to believers today, for example, ‘Control your temper’, ‘Respect your parents’, ‘Shun murder’ and ‘Restrain your tongue’.
Similarly, the Romans subscribed to the mos maiorum (ancestral custom), which demanded that they cultivate attributes like discipline, loyalty and self-control.
Numerous other philosophical schools of thought also revolved around the concept of ethics and ‘rules for life’ – Aristotle’s philosophy of ethics, for example, or the Stoicism favoured by some prominent Romans.
While these ethical systems were often quite rigorous, they weren’t just about self-sacrifice.
The Delphic maxims also encouraged the reader to ‘Benefit yourself’, ‘Recognize fortune’, and ‘Use what you have’, while various forms of hedonism tried to figure out ways to maximize pleasure (a pursuit that turned out to be a lot more complicated than you might think).
Even the philosophers knew how to have a good time.
One of my favourites is the Greek philosopher Democritus, who lived around the same time as Socrates. Not only did Democritus somehow manage to come to the conclusion that matter was formed out of atoms two millennia before anyone would be in a position to prove it, he got a real kick out of seeing the ridiculous side of life, and is sometimes called ‘the laughing philosopher’.
As this indicates, philosophizing about what is ‘right’ or even just about what makes sense has never depended exclusively on receiving commandments from on high, and it isn’t just about pain, suffering and self-deprivation.
Therefore, the modern GCL-religion is far from unique in its somewhat a-theistic orientation.
However, I think it is unique in other respects, because it does not possess three key attributes common to both the ‘a-godly’ morality systems and modern conventional religion.
These attributes are:
The lessons are intended for long-term self-improvement (changes what is inside of you)
It’s all quite hard to apply
Negative events and one’s own capacity for evil are not denied
I’ll explain what I mean by these characteristics:
Self-Application
While members of conventional religions often attempt to get other people to join their religion, the idea (however stretched it may be at times) is that the proselytizee ‘converts’. They are supposed to genuinely accept the truth of whatever the proselytizer is telling them and become convinced of the basic doctrines themselves.
After that, the convert is supposed, like all other members, to seek to fully understand the religion and control their behaviour to reflect whatever the religious beliefs are. Thus, a lot of religion tends to be focused on promoting introspection and attempting to bring your own actions into line with the will of a cosmic force, be that God, Tao, Allah, etc. This then naturally manifests itself in the world.
For example, cultivating compassion would affect how a Buddhist interacts with other beings, submitting to the will of Allah would affect how a Muslim thinks internally and acts externally.
The ancients, similarly encouraged people to ‘Accept your fate’.
This is why so much religion is about ‘inner peace’, because it aligns the inner and outer worlds of the devotee with God’s will or the cosmic force or ‘Universe’ (with a capital U) as my predecessor Buckminster Fuller was fond of putting it. You don’t align Universe around you (because…good luck with that…), you align yourself to Universe.
Really Hard
The second thing about most traditional belief systems is that they set a pretty high bar on expected behaviour.
Some religions teach that it could take many lifetimes to truly incorporate its principles into yourself; others that the point is to keep trying despite the occasional screw-up; others that intentions and being guided by an inner sense of conscience is most important. Still others, like Confucianism or some forms of Judaism, focus on the proper completion of certain rites. Whatever the particular focus, most religion is very demanding and recognizes that there is often a certain cleft between ideal and real behaviour.
Even a simple commandment like the injunction not to lie is difficult to fulfil, especially when one thinks of it in all of its ramifications. One of my favourite Islamic beliefs is the idea that someone who repeats an untruth because they neglected to verify the facts themselves is for all intents and purposes also lying.
Due to these high standards, most conventional belief systems don’t focus exclusively on being a good person, but also on just not being a bad one. Forgiveness and patience tend to play key roles, since so much of it is necessary.
Suffering, Death and Intrinsic Evil
Traditional religion and moral systems also tend to acknowledge that bad things happen. While they encourage their practitioners to avoid being the source of those bad things via the aforementioned methods (setting a high bar on behaviour and encouraging people to change their attitudes), none of them seems to really believe that a heaven on earth is about to come about any time soon.
Some of them have explanations for why bad things happen (God is testing you, the gods are playing with humans for their own amusement), but they also focus on how their practitioners cope with negativity without losing their integrity, rather than just on exterminating ‘evil’ from the planet.
Traditional moral systems also recognize the capacity of their own practitioners to behave wrongly or incorrectly or to have ‘evil inside of them’ in some form or other. Hence the need for discipline, and self-focus in achieving correct behaviour.
Conclusion: Traditional Morality – Not all Good, but Definitely Somewhat Useful
As you can see traditional morality all kind of hangs together, around some basically cohesive ideas, as well as lived experience.
This is not to say that conventional religion hasn’t had its downsides.
Oh, no.
Many professed believers are pure hypocrites, while others cling to absolutist, simplistic interpretations at odds with innovation and the scientific method. Worst of all, some of them do get it into their heads to foist their religious beliefs onto others. Even if one considers this to be an abuse of religion, one can’t help noticing that religion does often serve as a vehicle for these kinds of things.
However, there are also many upsides to most forms of conventional religion and morality.
They tend to recognize the capacity of every human being to make important moral decisions, regardless of their status in any other area of life. Thus, appeals to religion can often be used to attain at least a basic level of equality and some universal rights. They also tend to instil virtues that are useful. It’s hard, for example, to think of situations where things like discipline and self-control don’t come in handy. Conventional moral systems are also self-actualizing, encouraging the practitioner to focus on their own behaviour without worrying about others (as the Bible puts it ‘get the plank out of your own eye before going after the splinter in your brother’s’). Perhaps, above all, traditional morality provides a basis of expected behaviour and therefore helps to create security by ensuring that people can appeal to certain widely recognized spiritual obligations when necessary.
So, while traditional morality systems have certainly been abused, they have also provided us with some beneficial things, and it’s important to contrast this with GCL religion, which, in my humble opinion, combines all of the downsides of religion with none of the upsides.
Part 3: Good Little Citizen Religion
There are three axes on which to think of GLC religion that differ from conventional moral systems: Instability/Insecurity; No Commitment/The World Changes to Fit You; Everything is Awesome.
Instability
I often think GLC religion would be rather like having a 12-year-old absolute Pope. Things change. A lot.
Sometimes, that’s because no one really thinks anything through – GLC is very bandwagon-y and ‘of the moment’. No one required me to think through the American healthcare system to contribute to the children’s hospital, for example. It was just a matter of not demanding my dime back.
But even on issues that are more divisive than helping sick children, GLCers often skimp on the intellectual grounding. For example, I have often spoken to people who are against the idea of controlling immigration to the United States in any way, shape or form, and I often express my gratitude for their work, as I have to show up a whole hour earlier for American flights leaving from Ireland in order to pass American immigration. I let them know how much I will look forward to that ending, chiefly so that I can stay in bed longer.
At this point, people often look at me very strangely and explain that I will still be subjected to immigration control, because I don’t ‘really need it’ [to enter their country].
How some form of ‘immigrant deservingness’ is going to work out is hard to see, not to mention how one is going to have an open border to Mexico but customs checks at JFK Airport.
But one could see how a 12 year old would get gung-ho behind something like this without trying to come up with a more unified theory of immigration that may involve regulatory adjustments rather than blanket statements.
Because they often don’t work out the details GLCers often raise issues with incredible intensity and then drop them completely when they get pushback they can’t easily deal with, leaving others confused.
The instability of GLC also becomes obvious, not just in this faddish nature of so many objectives, but in how much its goal posts shift.
If GLCers campaign for free-range chicken to be served at all restaurants and a restaurant takes this up, and only serves free-range chicken, a true GLCer will not feel satisfied at the result – everyone now eats free-range chicken – which surely should make anyone who believes that free-range chickens lead a more humane existence than other chickens happy. GLCers, however, do not relax.
They move the goalposts. Yes, free-range chicken may have been the thing three months ago, but now that everyone is doing it, it isn’t special anymore. Now chicken has to be organic or corn-fed or ‘traditional free-range’ or some kind of special chicken from France.
As this indicates GLC religion is not about measuring oneself against a cosmic goal (which is eternal and thus, at least, predictable), it’s very much about the pecking order here and now (which is subject to radical revamping).
Insecurity
This instability inevitably leads to insecurity. Not just for everyone else, but for the GCLer themselves.
As a result, some of the GLCer’s favourite phrases are ‘Shame on you!’ and ‘How dare you!’
Indeed, the average GLCer will let other people know that they told a third party, ‘How dare you!’ as if this were some highly significant action.
This is because, due to the frequent changes in their belief system, GCLers often don’t have the foggiest clue why they are doing what they are doing, not to mention why they are doing it so zealously. Since they lack a strong internal moral framework, doubters really destabilize them, and must be punished vigorously, and above all publicly. Internal judgement (Benny went to a stripclub, what an immoral scuzzbucket!) would be pointless, since they don’t have that kind of internal moral conviction. Most GLCers have no idea whether it is immoral and degrading to women to go to a stripclub or empowering and feminist. It could be one thing on Monday and another on Tuesday.
However, not only do GLCers lack an internally stable idea of right and wrong, they face the additional problem that Rest of World gives little credence to their views and thus there are no official mechanisms they can turn to for enforcement. Thus, in the absence of any formally agreed-upon rule that the transgressor has allegedly flouted (eg the transgressor has stolen and should be arrested), they attempt to force compliance with of-the-moment-rules that no one else recognizes via intimidation (‘Shame on you! How dare you!’)
This is one of the deepest inconsistencies of GLC-religion. They need to always be doing something that hasn’t caught on, e.g. special kinds of chicken (because how else could they feel morally superior?) but for no one else to ‘get away’ with failing to observe those rules without being punished (because it triggers their insecurity, given as so few people recognize their moral framework). Thus, they attempt to punish transgressors themselves, and are in fact, always looking for such transgressors.
No Commitment
GLC religion does not have obligations – it has choices.
On many occasions I have observed a GLCer’s tortured attempts to determine the most righteous things to order off, say, a Cheesecake Factory menu.
Seeing their predicament, I find that a really fun thing to do at this point is to try to sell them on the benefits of becoming a Jain. Jains are practitioners of an Indian moral system that does not recognize a central god and they adhere to an intricately thought-out diet specifically intended to inflict the least possible violence.
Surely, if one is deeply concerned with animal welfare and living a good life, one might want to look into practices such as the Jain approach to diet.
However, rather inconveniently, if one accepts that one has a moral obligation to follow a certain diet, then you don’t get bonus points for doing it. One finds it hard to imagines Jains getting excited over another day of refusing beef or Orthodox Jews high-fiving each other for completing yet another shellfish-less week.
When members of traditional belief systems conform to that tradition’s dietary expectations, they are…well, just conforming to expectations. No one gets a medal.
This is contrary to the GLC-religion which is that being good feels good, so you do have to get a buzz off of it. Moreover, everything is a choice, which means it is reversible. No locking yourself in forever.
And it does feel good to order a salad if someone else orders a pork taco, because you can make pointed comments about how much some people harm the environment.
But tomorrow at the steak house is a whole new day.
God might still be there, but this exactly is why GLCers don’t have God or any other similar continuity concept that would exact the kind of ongoing dedication that gets onerous fast.
The only important thing is that the pork taco people won’t be there and they can have a grass-fed steak while complaining about the pesticides in other people’s salads.
This is, it is fair to say, the complete opposite of rigorously applying ethical rules day in and day out, regardless of where you got those rules from and it is one of the prime reasons GLCers are so aggravating to others.
You Don’t Change to Fit the World, the World Changes to Fit You
It is hard to see how one could make the world a better place more efficiently than by making oneself a better person. It’s the one thing you completely control and all of your actions have important effects. Thus, I believe it is no accident that conventional morality systems focus on this point. It’s actually the quickest way to reach the ultimate goal of world harmony (or whatever).
However, GLCers are more into changing the world than themselves, because, as aforementioned, they lack the commitment to change themselves. In fact, they believe the world should make it easy for them to make the choices that make them feel good about themselves – the subsidies for the electric cars and home retrofits that they can well afford, for example. Or medical care for their undocumented landscapers. I mean, when you don’t want to pay all those pesky payroll deductions, but also don’t want to feel bad about something happening to someone…really, what other alternatives could there be?
As this indicates, the GLCer is a lot different than the person who is willing to pay any price at all for their convictions or develop things purely as a matter of public policy devoid of moral overtones.
The GLCer is the one who insists on the subsidy and the gloating rights. Rather than saying, ‘I would like to be a righteous person and am committed to changing myself to be that person’ they would like to be a righteous person and therefore the entire political system has to change to enable that to be possible without significant effort on their part.
This is contrary to the self-actualization and cultivation of inner virtues so prevalent in conventional morality systems, and has to do with the fact that GLCers only experience morality as a performative event for external consumption rather than primarily as an internal conviction and alignment with God/Fate/whatever.
Everything is Awesome
The third and final odd thing about GLCers is that despite their constant finger-pointing and righteous attempts at rearranging the world around themselves, they don’t really have that reverential fear that tends to go with so much other religion. Nothing, actually, is awe-some in the technical sense of that word (inspiring awe, which is kind of like a paralyzing, mind-blowing emotion that you’d feel in the presence of God).
But the world is curiously without suffering. And a world without suffering would be pretty awesome in the conventional understanding of the word.
This is perhaps the most mind-bending self-contradiction of GLC. According to GLCers the world is about TO END (fascism, climate change, all women are literally going to become the Handmaidens from Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel and forced to give birth to their quasi-owners’ children), but GLCers are still able to find the time to get gluten-free muffins and shop for vintage wrapping paper.
As this indicates, GLC is not just a breeze on the commitment-front, it also has at its core the belief that the world is, in a very fundamental way, basically OK.
For a GLCer being taken over by a fascist dictator is very much like not being taken over by one.
Sometimes this inability to acknowledge real evil or suffering manifests in GLCers’ tendency to make mountains out of molehills. A good example, is how in the aftermath of Brexit many European academics shrieked about the inhumanity of having to fill out a form for permanent residency in the UK as if they were about the be stretched on the rack. If on a scale of 1 -10 having to fill out a visa form is a 10 of incomprehensible suffering…well…life’s a peach. The worst day of one’s life would culminate in a papercut or some other horrendous ordeal.
At others, GLCers turn to the quick fix for harm inflicted. Publishers may have ignored and downplayed black authors, for example, for decades, which means that countless black writers went through the very real suffering of being underpaid, summarily rejected, and for many of them probably eventually giving up on being a professional writer. In other words, many people were tormented through others’ prejudice and carelessness. Conventional religion would require one to acknowledge that one may have really hurt some people, and maybe to look back and see how you could make amends to those real people.
GLC religion requires you to give a book award to a black person right now and claim that you invented black literature by giving ‘lesser heard’ voices a chance, rather than just processing their manuscripts fairly and diligently. Bonus points for referencing that it is ‘now time’ for this breakthrough, as this implies there were good reasons for not doing it before.
GLCers make good better. They don’t deal with problems.
Another aspect of ‘everything is awesome’ is the belief that one has control over things over which one has no control. GLCers ‘fight cancer’ because cancer is not a dangerous disease that has a very real chance of killing you no matter how much you want to stay alive, it’s something that can be fought…with attitude.
Because believing something different would be horrifying and the GLCer (like anyone else) would feel helpless and terrified.
In short, the GLCer complains about everything, but truly believes in the harm of nothing.
Part 4: Conclusion
What GCLers want is:
a belief system that is convenient and not too much hassle
something that allows them to look good without getting into all the whys and wherefores
to keep the good vibe going, so no fretting over the eternal soul and so forth
Historically, most people who have felt this way, haven’t been terribly keen on religion and tend to just chuck it altogether.
However, for GLCers their thin religion fulfils an important goal: it creates a new pecking order, that they can potentially be on top of.
I have come to believe this is the only reason why they subscribe to GLC.
You might be more successful than them, you might be smarter, but hey, they saw you order scallops or you didn’t give to the children’s hospital at the mall, so you’re clearly evil and the rest of your accomplishments don’t count. Their treatment of Elon Musk is a great example of this in action. Yes, the guy might be a billionaire who has, against great opposition, changed the heavily polluting transport industry and revived the American space programme, but did you know he smoked pot on Joe Rogan and gave his kid a weird name? Those are the kind of random things that take him to a more comfortable position in the pecking order.
GLC also gives its practitioners a justification for why they deserve the things they have.
They deserve 50 pairs of shoes, because they bought some at Tom’s and Tom’s gave a pair to some poor African kid somewhere. They deserve the best food because it’s organic and they are ‘doing their part’ for the earth. They deserve to fly first class to a five-star resort because they stopped using plastic straws.
I deserve to keep shopping, because I gave some change to the children’s hospital. Like the Biblical ostentatiously-giving Pharisee, everyone saw me do it! I’m good.
GLC is not a humanist thing. It’s not some new attempt to hammer out an updated, less smiting-happy, more reasonable religion for the modern age. If that were the case, it would be a more slow, stable, committed process.
Instead, GLC is less reasonable and more smite-y. There’s no getting the plank out of your own eye. There’s no trying to align yourself with Universe. There is no responsibly refusing to repeat things you’ve heard but haven’t verified no matter how juicy they are.
Thus, all of the negatives of religion are present in GLC – the self-righteous fanaticism, the hypocrisy, the attempts to separate the worthy from the unworthy, with none of the upsides.
This is why, although it is a small church – GLC still worries me.
Perhaps there is some deep need in humans to create a moral pecking order that conventional religion once fulfilled, and that this thing is whipping around looking for something to cling to.
‘If God did not exist, we would need to invent him,’ Voltaire is quoted as having said.
But GLCers haven’t invented a new God, they’ve tried to replace him, putting themselves in the highest role, and I believe that the last people who did that were the Nazis and Communists with predictable results.
Recommended reading: Bart Ehrman’s Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife. Fun, history-focused, apolitical look at how ideas of the afterlife have developed over time.
[1] FYI: I’m not going to name names, but everything in here is a real-life example.