The latest round of Christians vs the World on Substack seemed to kick off again this week. There were some pertinent observations about the discrepancy between Christ followed then by a retort against pagans. Such discourse often has me thinking about the nature of faith itself and how much it has changed in our societies. We all know our history in broad strokes - we have gone from being heathens to Christianity to Godlessness. None of this is really disputed of course by either side, but there is much that is still overlooked.
Presumably no matter your religious outlook if you are in this sphere you share some beliefs about reality. We all seem to acknowledge the differences between the sexes. We all seem to acknowledge that the nature vs nurture debate fails more on the side of nature. Man is not ‘tabula rasa’ he is subject to genetic and innate realities. As Bowden says in one of his more famous speeches “Beauty is biological, intelligence is biological, a predisposition to violence is biological.” At some deep level of shared agreement I think both parties arguing this week would agree that certain traits are linked to genetics.
Just as some men are more inclined to violence why would it not be the case that some are more inclined to religiosity? It is very clear to me, and I presume to others, that some people are just much more religiously inclined than others. This is where the decline of faith in the public sphere is most revealing. When everyone in society attends Church and participates in the public ritual of religion it is harder to discern the truly religious from the somewhat or irreligious. Men went to Church because it was what Men did in that society. Social pressure, coercion and duty put them there as much as genuine faith did. In fact we should even be cautious of confusing religiosity with belief. One can believe in God without being as religiously inclined as his neighbor - as troubling as that may be for some to hear. This is not confined to Christians by the way, this notion of religiosity would exist in groups of other faiths as well, Pagans, Muslims, Hindus, Jains, and the Woke.
The core of true believers is not accidental. Fanatics have often led the way and enacted their vision precisely because they function as an organized minority. Zealots who bring people along with them. Think of modern wokeness as an example. It is not a coincidence that it shares certain similarities to Christianity. Where one has original sin the other has ‘whiteness’ - don’t willfully misunderstand me here this isn’t about if wokeness is a continuation of Christianity only that both concepts (sin/whiteness) are treated with religious fervor by the core of true believers. The masses however always engage to varying degrees. Fickle is the crowd. Wokeness has its moment in part because the true believers are in positions of power and people just simply go along to get along. A great many don’t of course, there is both passive and active resistance. Power and influence exert as much force as faith in this arena and it is often observed that when the winds change most people will drift away, much as most people today no longer wear masks for covid. What remains will be the true core.
That core of people have to be different. In the same way Substack is populated by devout highly religious Christians. We don’t see many successful substackers on here who are kind of milquetoast about their religiosity: “Sure I am Christian and go to Church but I could take it or leave it, I mainly go for the wife and kids”. Speaking of the wife and kids it would be remiss to not observe that women on the whole tend to be more religious than men. Again not just in the Christian sphere. A well known Pagan figurehead has stated similar - that in his experience women are the true backbone of faith communities not just because they are helpful organizers but because often times they are actually more devout and serious. The Art of Manliness did a deep dive into how this manifests in the Christian world and made the following bold claim:
So what accounts for this disparity between men’s and women’s commitment to the Christian faith?
You may be tempted to chalk it up to the fact that women are just generally more religious than men. Which is true. Across all religions and around the world, women are 13% more likely than men to say that religion is “very important” in their lives. Several theories, from the biological to the cultural, have been forwarded by researchers to explain this gap, and among the masses, plenty of armchair analysts posit that women are simply more inherently moral or “spiritual” than men.
Yet women’s greater religiosity across all faiths doesn’t at all explain the gender gap within Christianity itself. For as it turns out, it’s the only major world religion with a significant gender disparity among its adherents. Women are only more religiously inclined when surveys of Christians are averaged with those of Hinduism, Buddhism, Orthodox Judaism, and Islam — faiths in which the religious commitment of their male and female members is close to equal.
For example, according to the Pew Research Center, while Christian men participate to a lesser extent in every area of their faith, the commitment of Muslim men and women to their religion is nearly identical, except in one facet — Muslim men are a third more likely to attend services than women. Muslim men and women pray at almost exactly the same rate, and are just as likely to say their religion is important to them.
So it isn’t true that men are less interested than women in all religions — they’re just especially indifferent to the Christian faith.
That is certainly food for thought for Christians. Though as noted it is not just in the Christian world that we see this discrepancy of faithfulness between the sexes.
These are uncomfortable realities for some - there is a tension between elements of genetics and faith present. On the one hand we are often more materialist than the materialists we oppose. We don’t lie about the reality of 13% does 50%, yet in other areas all of us cling to more magical and spiritual understandings. If religiosity is heritable and a trait what happens in a society that seems to select against it? No matter what your belief system is it survives best when it has adherents and true believers. The major problem in Europe if you are Christian is that the Churches are in fact empty - devoid of believers. The people seem to have none of the religiosity of the previous generations, or does that remain but simply the societal pressures have lifted and most have walked away. What do the numbers look like of believers who don’t attend Church bar Easter and Christmas?
Peter Hitchen’s in “The Rage Against God” posited that one reason for the potential downfall of Christianity in Europe was The Great War:
The decline of Christianity, Catholic and Protestant, in Europe,dates from this war, in which the leaders of national Churches gave their support to the war-making of democratic politicians and so helped to destroy themselves for many years to come.
Previous European wars had been over more quickly, and had not brought about such terrible numbers of deaths and maimings. Many priests and pastors performed great acts of personal bravery and sacrifice, bringing comfort to the dying and not shirking terrible danger and privation. But the gospels could not really be made to endorse or excuse the gross mass murder, the rapid loss of all delicacy of language and feeling, everything which had been considered good and fair before; the acres of unburied dead rotting in plain sight until consumed by rats, the resulting growth of mercilessness and brutality at home, thanks to the corruption of men’s morals by what they had seen; the devastation of family life and social order. As the old regimes, one by one, crumbled and sagged, the churches crumbled and sagged with them.
He then goes on to take a look at England in particular - a place where Christianity has been in decline for much longer than most:
Protestant England was particularly troubled after the war was over because most of its very Protestant churches were unable to permit the prayers for the dead that so many bereaved families would have liked to offer. Spiritualism, with its promise of renewed contact with the departed, briefly flourished because of this, prompting Rudyard Kipling to write his poem ‘En-dor’, warning the bereaved that they were being cruelly manipulated for gain. But in general the Church of England suffered the decay in authority and the loss of trust and deference which affected every established pillar of English society. People had gone to war for things they completely believed in, and had been completely betrayed. Promised glory and hon- our, they had found hideous death, mud, sin, mutilation, rats and filth. They had, astonishingly, passed through it without any seri- ous mutiny (in the case of the British armies) or collapse in morale. But they knew, and everyone knew, that they had been fooled and that whatever they had fought for had been lost during the squalor of war. Among those who had deceived them were their Christian pastors.
Hitchens here might be seen as arguing against the notion of religiosity I am proposing - he suggests these external forces helped erode Christianity as much as anything but that itself doesn’t feel sufficient. To me it has to be this combination - after all people remained in the Church, there are still the devout and those inclined towards what faith offers. That is who remains today, and who is trying to rebuild the shattered attendances within the West.
If you’re someone reading this with high religiosity I’d be curious for you to step away from the evangelical/scripture side of the house for a moment. Force yourself to be dispassionate and look critically. What could be changed or done differently? What are the necessary conditions that require a rise in that sentiment, perhaps it is not all genetic and can be influenced? The religiously inclined are still out there, just the other day at the gym I listened to two men earnestly talking about the starsigns of their dog and how that has related to their existence. Absolute nonsense to my ears but those men are looking for something and seemed to be as deeply convicted about the matter as any of you on here. The coherency of their claims to an outsider was not an impediment to their goals…
The mainstream arguments for why religiosity has declined have been one attempt to answer some of these questions. They trend away from genetics and some offer interesting avenues to pursue. After all nature is not everything, things can be cultivated and taught and learned. We do not deny that. One thing remains unclear to me though. The questions (or attacks) made of Christianity by those who are not Christians, are they motivated by something that is the opposite of religiosity or by the same thing? That is to say is there a counter-part to this religiosity? It might seem deeply unsatisfying to the religious here but the answers offered outside of religion today seem to suffice for most people. For all the decay and turmoil and decline people are still stumbling on. The number of true believers required to keep society going has always been small, the rest go along to get along. Perhaps the message I want to leave with you is to think of your religiosity as an inequality. In the same way the beautiful person can never truly understand the life of the ugly person the religious person will never truly grasp the mind of the irreligious (and vice versa).