Religion Is a Potent Force for Cooperation and Conflict, Research Shows

The article discusses a paper by Scott Atran and Jeremy Ginges that describes religion as strongly fostering cooperation within human social groups, as a means of competing more successfully against other groups. We read:

Across history and cultures, religion increases trust within groups but also may increase conflict with other groups, according to an article in a special issue of Science.

“Moralizing gods, emerging over the last few millennia, have enabled large-scale cooperation and sociopolitical conquest even without war,” says University of Michigan anthropologist Scott Atran, lead author of the article with Jeremy Ginges of the New School for Social Research.
“Sacred values sustain intractable conflicts like those between the Israelis and the Palestinians that defy rational, business-like negotiation. But they also provide surprising opportunities for resolution.”

As evidence for their claim that religion increases trust within groups but may increase conflict with other groups, Atran and Ginges cite a number of studies among different populations. These include cross-cultural surveys and experiments in dozens of societies showing that people who participate most in collective religious rituals are more likely to cooperate with others, and that groups most intensely involved in conflict have the costliest and most physically demanding rituals to galvanize group solidarity in common defense and blind group members to exit strategies. Secular social contracts are more prone to defection, they argue. Their research also indicates that participation in collective religious ritual increases parochial altruism and, in relevant contexts, support for suicide attacks.

They also identify what they call the “backfire effect,” which dooms many efforts to broker peace. In many studies that Atran and Ginges carried out with colleagues in Palestine, Israel, Iran, India, Indonesia and Afghanistan, they found that offers of money or other material incentives to compromise sacred values increased anger and opposition to a deal.

… This dynamic is behind the paradoxical reality that the world finds itself in today: “Modern multiculturalism and global exposure to multifarious values is increasingly challenged by fundamentalist movements to revive primary group loyalties through greater ritual commitments to ideological purity.”

We’ve been making this point here for years: religion is a strongly adaptive feature of human social and cognitive architecture, an innate propensity for which is almost certainly the result of the action of group-level selection in our evolutionary history. As I’ve argued in these pages, I suspect (with sadness, given that I’m an unbeliever myself) that secularism is strongly maladaptive for human groups (see this post, and the comment thread here, for example).

The authors of the linked article nevertheless express hope that a better understanding of this dynamic may enable negotiators to work around it:

But Atran and Ginges also offer some insights that could help to solve conflicts fueled by religious conviction. Casting these conflicts as sacred initially blocks standard business-like negotiation tactics. But making strong symbolic gestures such as sincere apologies and demonstrations of respect for the other’s values generates surprising flexibility, even among militants and political leaders, and may enable subsequent material negotiations, they point out.

I doubt it. Have, for example, the West’s repeated prostrations before the global Ummah brought us anything but contempt? Have they brought us any closer to harmony in the Middle East? It hardly seems that way. Nor have well-intentioned pow-wows between the leaders of incompatible faiths ever achieved much of anything at all, so far as I can make out — as predicted by Pollack’s Law of Interfaith Dialogue (as first articulated back in May 2010):

To the extent that dialogue between any two religions is necessary, it is unproductive, and to the extent that it is productive, it is unnecessary.

I see no reason to imagine this principle will be superseded anytime soon.

Iran: For the record. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei provided the following guidance in response to a question about whether it was sinful to use social media.

“In general, the use of social networking websites (such as Facebook, FriendFeed, Orkut, etc) is impermissible if their use entails a corrupt action (such as promoting corruption, spreading lies and false subjects) or if it creates fear of committing a sin, or if it boosts the enemies of Islam and Muslims, or if it is against the Islamic Republic’s laws.”

Comment: Khamenei’s comment is worth noting by a Western Readership for two reasons. First is that it shows how Shi’i Muslims are expected to ask their role models for emulation – the ayatollahs — for guidance on everyday activities ranging from eating to using social media.

The second reason is that the Ayatollah’s response conflates fear of committing sin with violations of the laws of the Islamic Republic or just boosting the enemies of Islam. In this moral architecture, illegality and evil are the same. That means that a traffic offense or other violation of national law is a sin, just like failure to keep the Ramadan fast, for example.

That is not how Iranian law works in daily practice, to be sure, but it is the thinking of the religious leadership and the extremely devout. The West generally abandoned such thinking before the Renaissance.

Mr. McCreary’s comment, in turn, is worth noting in that it shows he felt the need to point out to Western readers what should be completely unremarkable to anyone with an understanding of Islam, and in particular Shi’a Islam: that it is a complete, all-embracing system that provides explicit instruction for every aspect of human life; that in Shi’a Islam the guidance of the Prophet is moderated by a divinely inspired clergy; and most important of all, that the separation of religious from secular authority — in other words, the subordination of man to Man’s laws rather than God’s — is a fundamental sin.

Rhetorical question: How, in this day and age, can any educated person living in the West not know all of this?

As I tried to make clear [in a recent podcast], we know that intolerance within the Muslim world extends far beyond the membership of “extremist” groups. Recent events in Afghanistan demonstrate, yet again, that ordinary Afghans grow far more incensed when a copy of the Qur’an gets defaced than when their own children are accidentally killed by our bombs—or intentionally murdered. I doubt there is a more ominous skewing of priorities to be found in this world.

Should people be free to draw cartoons of the Prophet? There must be at least 300 million Muslims spread over a hundred countries who think that a person should be put to death for doing so. (This is based on every poll assessing Muslim opinion I have seen over the past ten years.) Should Ayaan Hirsi Ali be killed for her apostasy? Millions of Muslim women would applaud her murder (to say nothing of Muslim men). These attitudes must change. The moral high ground here is clear, and we are standing on it.

Of course, millions of Muslims are more secular and are eager to help create a global civil society. But they are virtually silent because they have nothing to say that makes any sense within the framework of their faith. (They are also afraid of getting killed.) That is the problem we must keep in view. And it represents an undeniable difference between Islam and Christianity at this point in history. There are also many nefarious people, in both Europe and the U.S., who are eager to keep well-intentioned liberals confused on this point, equating any criticism of Islam with racism or “Islamophobia.” The fact that many critics of Islam are also racists, Christian fascists, or both does not make these apologists any less cynical or sinister.

The only way to know which way is up, ethically speaking, is to honestly assess what people want and what they believe. We must confront the stubborn reality of differing intentions: In every case it is essential to ask, “What would these people do if they had the power to do anything they wanted?”

This is a good beginning, and with it Dr. Harris parts ways with most of the political left. But it leaves us with the question: what to do? Here we hear only a familiar refrain: “These attitudes must change.”

Were I having a drink or three with Dr. Harris, I’d ask him:

“That’s it? ‘These attitudes must change’? But do you have any reason to think they will change? What if they don’t?”

They certainly haven’t shown any sign of doing so; the stubborn fact is that where there is any sizable Muslim population, a sizable subset of them will unapologetically harbor exactly the virulent Islamic beliefs and dispositions that Dr. Harris refers to here. “300 million Muslims spread over a hundred countries who think a person should be put to death” for drawing pictures of the Prophet, many of whom are willing to so something about it? What is the wisest posture for Western nations with large and growing Muslim populations to assume with regard to this fact? Surely it cannot be enough just to say “These attitudes must change”, and hope for the best.

I do respect Sam Harris — I admire his intelligence and forthrightness, and his readiness to consider every issue on its own merits. I often find myself agreeing with him, as I do with most (though not all) of this latest essay. I’d like to know how he would answer my question.

The British, meanwhile, are soon to be experts. Paul Weston explains.

Even Mr. Kristof acknowledges that this issue is hardly cut-and-dried. He writes:

Look, there’s a genuine conflict here. Many religious believers were sincerely offended that Catholic institutions would have to provide coverage for health interventions that the church hierarchy opposed. That counts in my book: it’s best to avoid forcing people to do things that breach their ethical standards.

Quite so. And he gets the terminology right: what is at issue here is the Federal government “forcing people to do things”. That is not the same thing as prohibiting criminal acts, or prohibiting anything at all. There is a difference between prohibition and compulsion, and compelling people to perform acts that are in direct contravention to their religious beliefs has generally been recognized, throughout history, to be among the extremest forms of subjugation, right up there with rape, mutilation, and infanticide. If you wanted to degrade and humiliate a Jew or a Muslim, for example, you might force him to eat pig-flesh. And if you wanted to publicly and politically degrade and humiliate the Catholic Church, to make it bend the knee and kiss the ring, you would force it to issue contraceptives.

That many Catholics live in apostasy when it comes to this tenet of the Church’s teaching, as Mr. Krsitof and others have made sure to point out, is completely irrelevant here. The laity are not the ones who were brought under this compulsion at the whim of the Executive Branch; the Church itself was. Catholic doctrine is not configured by referendum.

Mr. Kristof, having acknowledged all this, soon loses sight of this important distinction between prohibition and compulsion, nevertheless:

The basic principle of American life is that we try to respect religious beliefs, and accommodate them where we can. But we ban polygamy, for example, even for the pious. Your freedom to believe does not always give you a freedom to act.

But of course the Church doesn’t seek to “act” here, not at all. It merely wishes not to be compelled to violate its own sacred teachings.

Mr Kristof clearly agrees with the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, that poor women having lots of babies is a bad idea all round (she expressed this eugenic, Progressive goal in her autobiography as a need to “stop the multiplication of the unfit”). Mr. Kristof argues that the “The cost of birth control is one reason poor women are more than three times as likely to end up pregnant unintentionally as middle-class women”, and that many are “relying only on condoms”.

Leaving aside what other reasons there might be, we should note here that condoms, if used properly, are extremely effective at preventing pregnancy, and that many married couples rely on them exclusively, in order to avoid the by-effects of oral contraceptives. From a public-health perspective, the condom is also the best method, short of abstinence, for preventing the spread of venereal disease. They are also cheap: a year’s supply, for a woman who has sex every single day, can be had for something like ten dollars a month. (Or, if she prefers, for nothing at all, in most cities.) Cost as an obstacle to contraception is simply not the issue that folks like Mr. Kristof would have us believe, as Andrew McCarthy argues here.

But let’s assume, arguendo, that the society at large does indeed have such a compelling interest in seeing that poor women are given contraceptives that it is determined to make it so. Even so it is hard to see why this couldn’t have been done without humiliating the Church in this way. Why not just cut out the middleman, and give the stuff away directly? Given what a political minefield this has become, wouldn’t that have been simpler, and more feasible politically?

I want to reiterate that I am no Catholic; I am not even a theist of any sort. I also think the Catholic Church’s position on contraception, like so many other positions it has stubbornly defended over the centuries, is ridiculous. But what I see here is a salient battle in the endless culture war waged by the Left against traditional society, and I see also an ever-expanding State garrisoning yet another patch of conquered territory, and bringing its inhabitants to heel. So I hie me to the ramparts.

Finally, I want to call out Mr. Kristof on a misleading statement that I will charitably assume is merely an oversight: he cites the source of some of his statistics, the Guttmacher Institute, as a “nonpartisan research organization on issues of sexual health”. The Guttmacher Institute is, however, hardly likely to be an impartial player in this debate, as we can see from its website:

Alan F. Guttmacher was president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and a leader in the International Planned Parenthood Federation in the 1960s and early 1970s, he saw the need for the institution that now bears his name, and he nurtured its development.

I considered disallowing comments on this piece, because we’ve already had ample discussion on this head. But I don’t like to do that, so I’ll leave the comment-box open.

This not only aroused predictably heated emotions on the Right, but was too much even for many members of the liberal media kingsguard (even the true-blue E.J. Dionne, for example, joined the chorus of indignation).

Now the administration has done some hasty backpedaling, in appearance at least, by granting an “accommodation” that says that Catholic organizations won’t have to pay for these services after all. Instead, the Imperium has graciously ordained that such services will simply be provided “for free” by insurers (“insurance”, readers may have noticed, being a word that is quickly being drained of all its original meaning).

The fundamental laws of nature, however, remain in effect even despite edicts from The One, including the one that says there’s no free lunch. Contraceptive services do not fall like manna from the sky, and if they are going to be provided, then they must be paid for.

The WSJ expands on this, here.

A quibble: in this post Kevin discusses Bill’s dualistic, antimaterialist position on the nature of consciousness, and in doing so skims a little too close, I think, to conflating intelligence and consciousness. We read:

I also disagree completely with Vallicella’s characterization of neuroscience. For him, neuroscience will never “teach us anything about consciousness.” The reality, though, is that neuroscientific theories are paving the way for us to make machines– robots– whose behaviors are becoming increasingly complex. If one definition of “intelligence” is “problem-solving ability,” then by that standard we have been building increasingly intelligent machines for years. Soon, intelligence will come to mean more than the ability to win at chess or participate in a Jeopardy! competition: it will mean the advent of machines that react without confusion in fluid social or physical situations. While true machine consciousness is probably a long way off, I don’t see its realization as an impossible goal. Intelligence isn’t consciousness, but it’s a vital component of consciousness. [Is it? -MP] One day, a machine is going to stare at us with the same speculative curiosity we train on it.

My point is that the increasing complexity of machine behaviors is the result of scientific theories that are grounded in a naturalistic (or, more precisely, physicalist) philosophy of mind. If mind is indeed utterly dependent on matter, as I believe it is, then we will one day be able to arrange matter in such a way as to form minds. This won’t convince the diehard substance dualists,* of course; they’ll go on believing that mind is somehow independent of matter without ever being able to explain how a particular mind is connected to a particular body. Unfortunately, their philosophy of mind can promise no progress: you can’t strive to create artificial intelligence if you believe it’s inherently unachievable.

I don’t have a lot to disagree with here, but I will say that I think it is critically important to pry apart three (at least) concepts that are often muddled together when people talk about these things: consciousness, intelligence, and intentionality. Bill Vallicella, in particular, seems committed to the idea that consciousness is necessary for intentionality; I’ve tried for many years now to get him to discuss this in light of such obviously intentional (and presumably non-conscious) things as the food-dance of bees, etc., but he won’t engage.

Likewise, I consider it perfectly possible for intelligence, even very high intelligence, to operate completely unconsciously (my experience with the Gurdjieff work drove this home very uncomfortably, if I had any doubt). I agree with Kevin that “If mind is indeed utterly dependent on matter, as I believe it is, then we will one day be able to arrange matter in such a way as to form minds”; we do that already, after all (and with unskilled labor!), by making babies. But it may well be that there is something in particular about biological brains that is uniquely capable of generating consciousness: for all we know, you can’t make a conscious machine out of silicon any more than you can make a ham sandwich out of glass.

But as I said, just a quibble. Go read Kevin’s piece here.

The ‘crux of the biscuit’ is this question: Do Western normative principles appeal to universal longings, and are therefore universally applicable across all peoples and cultures? Both liberal muticulturalists and neoconservative nation-builders seem to agree that they are.

Our commenter ‘The One-Eyed Man’ summed up with this:

…I do think that the principles in the Declaration of Independence are universal, applying to Muslims equally to Christians and everyone else.

This is a commonly held view, but with particular regard to Islam, it’s a fundamental error, of critical importance. I’ll try to explain.

As much as it may be fashionable (especially among unbelievers like me) to downplay the significance of religion in America’s founding, the Declaration of Independence explicitly expresses a Judeo-Christian understanding of the nature of God, and of God’s relationship with human beings. It clearly declares this understanding in its most famous passage:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…

The central argument of the Declaration of Independence is that the Crown, having repeatedly infringed on the rights of its American colonists, has voided its claim to sovereignty over them. So: what does it mean for men to possess inalienable rights granted to them by God, and how is this belief distinctly Judeo-Christian?

First, this assertion reflects the belief that a loving God grants these rights as part of His covenant with mankind — a covenant made first with the Jews, and then extended to the rest of humanity by Jesus Christ. Central to both is the idea of a loving God who, loving all men as individuals, directly grants each of them the assurance of His protection. The Declaration explicitly places this direct, individual assurance from God above any earthly institution’s power to abrogate.

But the idea of a loving Creator with whom mere humans may enter into this sort of personal covenant is directly at odds with the Islamic concept of God. The Islamic God Allah is perfect, transcendent, and aloof; the idea of Allah deigning to “love” a mere human is absurd, and indeed the thought is offensive to God’s majesty. The great Islamic theologian and philosopher Abu Hāmed Mohammad ibn Mohammad al-Ghazzālī, who died in 1111 but remains probably the most influential Islamic theorist of all time, argued against this by pointing out that love implies a need, an incompleteness, on the part of the lover that can only be fulfilled by the beloved. But God is perfect, continued Ghazzali, and complete unto Himself — so the idea that He might have a longing that can only be fulfilled by reciprocal love with mortal men is an abomination, as is the notion that He would enter into an equal partnership with anyone or anything at all.

This brings us to a second point: the very idea of an irrevocable covenant, as implicit in the concept of inalienable rights, necessarily implies a limitation of God’s sovereignty: for God to make an unbreakable promise necessarily limits God’s freedom of action. But the divine Will and infinite potency of God obviously can permit no such limitation — again, the very idea is an offense and an abomination.

Furthermore, the Declaration of Independence is a product of the philosophy of the Enlightenment, which in turn has at its foundation the idea of a lawful natural world. This concept also reflects the Judeo-Christian assumption of a loving God: one who, having endowed Man with the gift of reason, provided a world that operated without caprice, and that was subject to reliable regularities that human reason could comprehend. But again, this idea of a lawful Cosmos necessarily limits the freedom and sovereignty of God. Indeed al-Ghazali went so far as to say that because God’s power is infinite, His moment-by-moment attention to the world’s every minutest detail is what maintains the world’s seeming regularities, and the appearance of lawful connections between observed causes and effects is merely an illusion. If drinking water seems to alleviate thirst, it is only because God, on each occasion, has chosen to follow our drinking of water with the relief of thirst. But to imply that God’s choice in the workings of His creation is constrained by natural laws is again to suggest that God’s sovereignty is limited, and is again an abomination.

Finally, there is the Islamic concept of tawhid, or the unity of God. This idea was developed extensively by Taqi al-Din Ibn Taymiyya, a medieval Salafist whose teachings still exert great influence. In his widely read paper A Genealogy of Radical Islam, Quintan Wiktorowicz explained (emphasis mine):

One of Ibn Taymiyya’s most important contributions to Salafi thought is his elaboration of the concept of tawhid — the unity of God. He divided the unity of God into two categories: the unity of lordship and the unity of worship. The former refers to belief in God as the sole sovereign and creator of the universe. All Muslims readily accept this. The second is affirmation of God as the only object of worship and obedience. Ibn Taymiyya reasoned that this latter component of divine unity necessitates following God’s laws. The use of human-made laws is tantamount to obeying or worshipping other than God and thus apostasy. [20th-century Muslim theologian Mawlana Abul A’la] Mawdudi adopted this position and drew a sharp bifurcation between the “party of God” and the “party of Satan,” which included Muslims who adhered to human-made law.

This idea, which is very much a part of mainstream Islamic thought throughout the world, raises an impassable barrier between Islam and the Judeo-Christian tradition of a distinction between divine and worldly law — the root of America’s founding principle of a separation of Church and state.

There is much more I could say about all of this, but it’s late, and this post is already long enough. I hope, however, that I have shown that it is a mistake, and betrays a dangerously superficial acquaintance with core Islamic doctrine, to imagine that bedrock American principles — in particular those Enlightenment principles expressed by Jefferson in our Declaration of Independence — apply as aptly to serious Muslims as they do to those of us raised in the Western religious and cultural tradition.

Atallah talks about the unique centrality of Islam in Arabic-speaking lands. He also has this to say about Western indignation over the ubiquitous persecution of Christians in Muslim territory:

I need you to please understand that Muslims hate it when the West speaks up for Christians. They absolutely despise it and we become the victims.

More here.

It’s a substantive exchange, and worth your time. While I agree in principle with Mr. McCarthy’s point — that there are certainly, particularly here in the West, many self-professed Muslims who are not politically “Islamist”, and therefore the term is a useful one — the fact remains that a supremacist interpretation of Islam flows coherently, naturally, and persuasively from Muslim scripture and tradition, has been the “mainstream” interpretation throughout history, and continues to be so now. Wherever Islam goes, there will be “Islamism”.

Read the McCarthy piece here, then Robert Spencer’s reply here.

Note: I realize, of course, that to some of you this exchange will just seem like two black-hearted xenophobes arguing about how many jihadis can dance on the head of a pin. Feel free not to comment.

These entertaining remarks seemed to bother just about everybody, as far as I can tell (except other evangelical Christians, of course.) Not me, though: I like a man who comes right out and says what he thinks, and I thought Pastor Jeffress was making perfectly good sense. Why wouldn’t a Christian like him want a Christian president? Why wouldn’t an evangelical Baptist think Mormonism is a bizarre perversion of Christianity? (It certainly seems that way to me, and I’m just a Hell-bound, godless heathen.)

Anyway, the Washington Post has lent Mr. Jeffress its pulpit, and he has responded with what I think is an excellent riposte. You can read it here.

One of the book’s central messages is that God is dead. New evidence, however, reveals that God hasn’t been dead at all. He’s just focusing mostly on Nascar these days.

Leaving aside the Holy Spirit, about which nobody seemed to have any clear idea at all, the problem was how to assemble a coherent model that included all of these three features at once:

1) God, the First Person of the Trinity, is of the purest, transcendent divinity, eternal and uncreated and beyond real human understanding. There’s nothing human about God.

2) Christ was a man. That’s vitally important to his role as Redeemer: that he suffered as a man would suffer.

3) Christ is divine. Obviously this is a essential tenet of Christianity. In some sense at least, it is necessary to be able to say that Christ is God.

So the question is: what is Christ, that he can bridge, in one entity, the gulf between man and God? If Christ is to be truly identical to God, then he cannot in any meaningful sense be human; to the extent that Christ is human, he is necessarily distinct from God. Broadly speaking, there were two opposing views, neither perfectly satisfactory.

First was the view that Christ was in fact simply God made flesh, and that to the extent Christ had any real human nature at all, it was mixed in him with God’s divinity as water mixes with wine. But if you simply make Christ God Incarnate, then you are saying the the mind of Christ was really the mind of God. This was horrifying to some theologians, as it completely fails to satisfy requirement 2).

Second is the view known at the time as Arianism, which saw Christ as subordinate to God: a created being, partly human and partly divine, in which God’s divinity mixed with Jesus’s human nature in the way that oil mixes with water — separate and distinct, though both contained in the same vessel. The problem with this view is that by binding Christ so firmly to his humanity, it diminishes him in relation to God.

Attempts to untie this knot often descended to plays on language. Were God and Christ one “substance” (homoousios)? Were they of non-identical, but similar “substance” (homoiousios)? Or were they of different “substance” altogether (heteroousios)?

Well, who the hell knows! The one-substance faction gained the upper hand at the First Council of Nicaea in 325, but the problem never went away.

Anyway, Maculloch’s account of all this wrangling, and all the parties involved, is very interesting. As I was reading about it, though, a stray idea popped into my head: why not a quantum Christ?

The way a piece of quantumstuff (a “quon”) presents itself depends on the way you measure it (to be specific, in the way you reduce its eigenfunction): measure it one way, it’s a wave, measure it another way, it’s a particle. Also, the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics specifies complementary pairs of attributes: the accuracy with which you determine the value of one attribute of a complementary pair (position, say) causes a proportional fuzziness in its complement (the complement of position is momentum). If you conduct your measurement so as to have maximum certainty about attribute a, its complementary attribute b is maximally undefined; it just can’t be helped. (And by the way, this isn’t just a problem with measurement, either: making a precise measurement of a forces b actually to become maximally undefined.)

So maybe Jesus the Son of Man is just Christ-measured-as-a-human. And maybe Divinity and Humanity are complementary attributes of Quantum Christ: zero in on his human aspect, and you know nothing certain about his divinity; focus on his Godhead, and you cannot pin him down as a man.

Just a thought. Please don’t ask me what the equations are going to look like.

He quotes a scholar from the Chinese Academy of the Social Sciences “We were asked to look into what accounted for … the success, in fact, the pre-eminence of the West all over the world. We studied everything we could from the historical, political, economic, and cultural perspective. At first we thought it was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past 20 years we have realised that the heart of your culture is your religion. Christianity.”

Over at Mangan’s, our friend Dennis has taken up this passage in an interesting post of his own, The Curiosity Deficit of the East. I left the following comment:

When I read this I wondered if the Chinese scholar himself had said any more about why this should be so: about what, exactly it was about Christianity that they thought best explained. As it turns out, the next line of the quoted passage reads (my emphasis):

“The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism and then the successful transition to democratic politics. We don’t have any doubt about this.”

It is very interesting that a representative of a state-sponsored academic institution of the Communist and officially atheistic People’s Republic of China would come to this conclusion, and even more interesting that he would be permitted to express it publicly.

I’d still like to know more. In what way, specifically — by what mechanism — did these scholars think that Christian morality accounted for the West’s flamboyant (and flamboyantly capitalistic!) success?

There are two parts to this. First, the “emergence of capitalism”. What about Christian morality uniquely fosters capitalism?

Then there’s the “transition to democratic politics”. Implicit in this is the remarkable assertion (for a Chinese scholar to make in public, at least) that democracy is a key factor in our global domination. And of course Christianity explicitly distinguishes between God and Caesar. But again: why do you suppose the Chinese Academy of the Social Science concluded that Christian morality is more conducive to democracy than to collective socialism?

Any thoughts?

Christian conservatives, such as Pat Buchanan or Lawrence Auster, see Christianity as the bones and sinews of Euro-American civilization — the essential structural framework that has shaped and supported it throughout its history. To them the secularizing trend in the modern West, and with it the loss of the moral compass and social fascia that religion provides, is the key to understanding our culture’s decline.

On the other hand, Western Christianity has also arguably become, by its radical inclusiveness and universalism, an important force for the deracination and ethno-cultural deliquescence of Europe and The United States. (This is, of course, a hot topic on the religious Right.)

The West has not only been defined by Christianity, though; for most of Christian history it has also imagined itself to define it. This, however, has been changing, and Christendom’s center of gravity has been moving south: most significantly, to Africa and Latin America. As it has adapted to these places, it has changed a great deal, and has taken on many alien characteristics of local traditions: ancestor and idol worship, pantheism, and ethnic determinism of a sort that puts it, in many cases, in direct opposition to Western interests, and in particular those interests championed by Western conservatives. Christianity in its European form may soon be quite irrelevant.

At Alternative Right, Matthew Roberts discusses all of this in a substantial essay. Here.

I’ve been rather harsh on Islam in these pages over the years, but given the transforming effect this Book has had on me I may have to re-think a great deal of what I have said — not only about religion in general, but also Islam in particular, and about the defensibility of our decadent Western civilization.

I’m still trying to digest all of this — my head is spinning, and the ground is shifting under my feet. I’ll have more to say shortly, insh’Allah.

(The study might have been somewhat slanted, however; one of the metrics used for confidence in naturalism was “liking Dawkins”.)

Two things stand out: first, that people’s views on intelligent design vs. Darwinian evolution were unformed enough, prior to their participating in the study, as to be influenced in any significant measure by reading the brief synopses given to them of the two positions; second, the conclusion by one of the researchers that the study shows that people “may need to be explicitly taught” that a naturalistic worldview can provide a solid philosophical foundation for purpose and meaning.

Story here.

The student, Andrew Bieszad, who graduated this past May with a master’s degree, describes systematic harassment and intimidation for his Christian beliefs, and for his questioning of Islamic dogma. His Muslim classmates told him on at least one occasion that he deserved to die.

Before recounting these details, though, Mr. Bieszad points out a fundamental reversal in the academic study of Islam in America (and presumably in the West generally):

Islamic studies in Europe began as a Christian missionary enterprise, born out of necessity rather than interest. Islam was the first religion Christianity encountered that, as theological doctrine, sought to convert Christians and regulate their religious practices. In turn, Catholic priests and monks, particularly in the Middle East, Spain, and Italy, worked to convert Muslims from Islam, as well as to educate Christians so they would not convert.[1] This changed following the fall of Muslim Spain in 1492 and the military expansion of Spain and Portugal and later England, Holland, Belgium, and France into Islamic countries. Catholic and Protestant missionaries followed their nations’ armies and compiled information about Islam and Muslim peoples. This information made its way back to European universities and gradually transformed Islamic studies from a missionary enterprise into a full-fledged academic discipline, sometimes called Orientalism.

Orientalism was originally defined by both political and religious visions. Politically, the colonizing governments sought to understand people to rule them more efficiently. Spiritually, missionaries sought to understand Islam to convert Muslims to Christianity more effectively. Both groups took an interest in studying the Muslim world. They translated and studied thousands of Islamic texts from Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish sources. Their work formed the foundation for academic disciplines such as archaeology, anthropology, Egyptology, Assyriology, and of course, Islamic studies.

Islamic studies changed significantly in the decades following World War II, with the massive reorganization of European empires, national boundaries, and colonial identities. One idea that gradually took root in academia was that the Muslim world was the victim of systematic prejudice stemming from European “ignorance.” The only way to rectify this was through embracing Islamic ideals and peoples while repudiating the Christian and Hellenistic roots of Europe. Edward Said, the Palestinian-American professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia, eventually codified these views in his highly influential Orientalism, in which he argued that criticism of Islam or of the Muslim world is either a covert attack on the humanity of Muslims or gross ignorance in need of enlightenment.[2] Simultaneously, Muslim groups exploited this situation to promote Islam by funding Islamic studies programs and cultural venues at universities, who in turn reformed curricula in order not to offend Muslim sentiments. In a short time, scholarship in Islamic studies was overtaken by Islamic missionary and political interests.

Academia is filled with biases and presumptions upon which entire belief systems are constructed. The inhabitants of the West are privileged to have the freedom to examine and criticize ideas and beliefs and respectfully agree to agree or disagree. This concept is anathema to Islam, since in Islam academia exists to propagate orthodox Islamic dogma. In Islamic studies at universities today it has become difficult to disagree with Islam and still maintain one’s credibility, safety, or ability to study in school. Academia has refused to question Islamic teachings, and has thus become a participant in promoting Islamic orthodoxy at the expense of academic integrity. I know this because I am a product of this environment.

In other words, an academic system originally intended to prepare Westerners for projecting political or missionary influence into the Muslim world now serves almost exclusively as a conduit for Muslim influence to infiltrate the West.

In The Hinge of Fate, the fourth volume of Winston Churchill’s incomparable history of the Second World War, Churchill wrote (page 279):

I have often tried to set down the strategic truths I have comprehended in the form of simple anecdotes, and they rank this way in my mind. One of them is the celebrated tale of the man who gave the powder to the bear. He mixed the powder with the greatest care, making sure that not only the ingredients but the proportions were absolutely correct. He rolled it up in a large paper spill, and was about to blow it down the bear’s throat.

But the bear blew first.

Read Mr. Bieszad’s article here.