Religious zealotry
Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. This religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today. I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity. ‘Respect for religion’ has become a code phrase meaning ‘fear of religion.’ Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect.
Salman Rushdie
The word “propaganda” comes from the Roman Catholic Church’s plan to improve the evangelization efforts in the 17th century. When we call it propaganda or psyops it sounds nefarious but really what it boils down to is persuasion of an ideology or point of view, just with tactics that we would deem manipulative or dishonest. In a free and liberal society we should have a flow of ideas and thoughts that can be presented and accepted or rejected by anyone at any time, including religions. That doesn’t mean they won’t ever do any harm. The argument in this section is that there are certain tactics of persuasion employed by religions that should be at the very least recognized for what they are and outright discouraged in some cases.
If I’m going to examine religious persuasion I need to make as objective an observation on my own biases and experiences. I was a full-time evangelist. As a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, I spent my waking days for two years attempting to persuade people to commit to joining and participating in the faith.
The main hook was that we had a message about Jesus Christ and about families, this helped us develop trust with some people early on. People don’t tend to join religions after talking to someone at the door for ten minutes so that relationship of trust becomes key. I will note that we were encouraged to be direct with our intentions by asking questions like, “If you knew this were true, would you agree to be baptized into the church?” This gets people making small, hypothetical commitments from the beginning. The mythology of Mormon missionary work is that the pitch or “the story of the restoration” is so moving that the “Holy Ghost” will testify of its veracity, usually through good feelings. This made it important to try and provide experiences that generate these good feelings.
The message is presented almost as a scientific challenge by inviting the person to read materials, engage with the church culture, and allow for their feelings about it to be the evidence that it is true. By testing the doctrine and the style of living, a person can gain a personal testimony that it is indeed a correct and worthwhile way to live one’s life. Come for the potlucks, stay for the Eternal Life and happiness. It is not truly a scientific test of course, the LDS church’s doctrine is not falsifiable in a Popperian sense. If you pray to know if it’s true and get an answer in the negative from the Holy Ghost, you’ll be told that you just need to keep doing it until the answer changes. The whole point of a religion is that it is an act of faith though, right? People don’t join churches after rigorous scientific research.
Being a faith based endeavour, it has the benefit of not having to rely on facts to persuade people to join, but recall: facts aren’t usually that persuasive anyways. Religions provide fertile ground for the targeted changing of one’s opinions, so the question becomes what they do with that power once they have harnessed it?
The LDS Church, like many others, asks a lot of its members, so having someone join the church is not like asking them to put on a Yankees jersey. Asking a lot of your adherents is actually an effective way to further solidify their allegiance. Churches that require a lot from their members actually tend to have stronger growth. Likely, this is due to the need we all have to be needed and to have a purpose, even if that’s being the guy who makes sure everyone gets a program on their way into the chapel. We need to do something that feels worthwhile, and churches are good at giving us a task of celestial importance. Religions are better than the average organization at getting people to be pro-social. Religious people donate more to charity and dedicate more time to helping the community. In that sense, whatever it is that religions are doing to instill prosocial behaviour, they should keep doing it. It’s hardly a psyop if you’re brainwashing people to be more prosocial.
That being said, even the churches with good intentions (I would imagine all of them would define themselves so) can misappropriate the human will that has been dedicated to them. The Westboro Baptist Church has become the flag bearing example for Christian religious extremism in America. Most sects that have been around long enough have a history of violence. The church I associate with faced religious persecution in the 19th century but then retaliated at times with its own violence, sometimes against innocent bystanders like the infamous Mountain Meadows Massacre. The Old Testament is chalk full of violence and the religious ‘right’ in the United States has become almost synonymous with gun enthusiast militias.
Many point out that what might be branded as religious violence really has more to do with the reaction to political oppression. Surely the two are connected but a few simple thought experiments can poke enormous holes in this idea. While the U.S. and other western countries have unjustly interfered and even invaded many Arabic countries, we do not see any of the Christians, Yezidis, or atheists of Iraq strapping suicide vests to themselves at the finish line of marathons. There is a lot of political strife and tension between the west and the middle east but to say that religious differences don’t play a large role in that conflict would be dishonest.
But let’s look at it from another angle. According to forensic psychiatrist Marc Sageman, in a sample of 400 members of Al Qaeda, very few of them studied religion in a way that you would expect of a religious zealot. Perhaps rather than being political or religious extremists it would be more accurate to call them cultural extremists. Ami Pedahzur, in his book Suicide Terrorism, points out that suicide bombers began being idolized and commemorated in the 1980s. This social incentive should not be discounted and has little to do with religious dogma. Sageman also cites the power of social bonds in radicalizing a potential suicide bomber. Religions might provide a social network in which these types of dangerous bonds can form but we can’t place all the blame on Islam for how some adherents abuse the social and cultural structures.
What makes religions potentially dangerous is not that they are inherently evil, it's that they almost always involve promoting adherence to a leader or ancient book over critical thinking. This is fertile ground for a psyop. Religions will talk a big game about their theological adversaries but the group that will get the harshest treatment will always be their own apostates. This is to keep the group ideologically pure. Voices of dissent are rarely championed in a religious setting, the truth of their ideology is sort of the whole point of a religious endeavour in the first place, so being critical of the sacred causes uneasy feelings and discord in the congregation, which isn’t ideal for attracting new believers.
While religions clearly affect the thought processes of its members, that which replaced religion wasn’t much better. In fact an argument can be made that they were worse. In the 20th century extreme nationalism, consumerism, and other political ideologies that were just as or more authoritarian and punishing to their own apostates became the quasi religion for millions. So we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves assuming all the world's problems would be solved if we imagined religions away.
The truth is, having a shared morality is regulating for us but there are psychological tradeoffs. It binds us and blinds us. The collective power that can be felt in a religion should not be discounted but neither should the vulnerability to strong biases in our thinking. Naval puts it succinctly, “there are two kinds of fools when it comes to religion; those who take it literally and those who think it has no value.”