Rishon Rishon

Religion Genes

Razib of Gene Expression has a very interesting post on religion. He raises a lot of interesting questions, too many for me to summarize here without rewriting the post or boring you with a long laundry list – go read it yourself. I left the following responses in his comments section:

It seems to me that different religions would tend to appeal to different alleles (if religious alleles exist at all). Christianity and Mormonism, for example, are primarily faith-based religions, which require their adherents to believe in a particular theology, eschatology, and/or history. Skepticism about such beliefs would be a serious barrier to any member remaining religious, even if they were attracted to social or other aspects of the religion. Judaism (and I think, Islam), on the other hand, is primarily a lifestyle-based religion, the lifestyle being defined by halakha (Jewish Law, literally: "the way"). It requires only a vague belief in an undefined God (which according to the figures you cite, seems to be compatible with 80-90% of the population). Within Judaism, you find a wide variety of theological, eschatological, and historical beliefs, and a wide variety of social styles, from cold/analytical, to fiery/zealous, to warm/fuzzy - all of which are tolerated as being differences of style, not substance. On the other hand, to be Jewish, you have to be willing to follow halakha. Inability to do that would be a serious barrier to being religious, no matter how much you are attracted to the religion.

On the question of whether a religious revival is taking place or not, within Judaism, at least, the evidence is clear. The answer is both. Most Jews are getting less religious, but at the same time the religious community is growing. It used to be that there was a large middle ground: Jews who didn't keep halakha, but nonetheless considered themselves religious. This community is disappearing.

I don't think this is surprising. The modern world of the last 200 years or so has been a major challenge to inter-generation propagation of established religions. Only recently have modern-world-resistant strains of religion become common enough to be noticed. What we are seeing is the simultaneous growth of the modern strains, and the decline of the pre-modern strains. Our picture is muddled because the figures you cite combine both.

As to the pattern of observed religiosity, I think the most important factors are the degree of religious diversity, and the speed of incursion of the modern world. High diversity increases the likelihood of modern-world-resistant strains being present in the population, while a slow rate of incursion of modernity increases the time available for resistant strains to develop. We see the former in the US, and the latter in the Arab world.