The Overview (Monday, July 19)
A major study shines light on American religion, profiling a rising star in Christian higher education, political scientists reflect on how animus shapes American politics, and more.
I just returned from a relaxing and encouraging weekend retreat with friends and colleagues at the Initiative on Faith and Public Life, and there’s a lot of recent things to cover, so let’s get right to it…
Here’s the Monday, July 19 edition of The Overview:
1) The Deseret News’ Kelsey Dallas writes a characteristically helpful review of what happened at the U.S. Supreme Court in the last year regarding religion, and what folks can look for in the future. Specifically, Dallas points to at least four cases involving a religious question, including a big one about state funding for students at religious colleges in Maine.
2) The Washington Post’s Michelle Boorstein reports on Washington DC agreeing to pay legal fees in a case involving Capitol Hill Baptist Church. The city, in a settlement with the church, must pay over $200,000 of the church’s costs after the church challenged the city’s policy barring it (and other religious entities) from meeting, indoors or outdoors, during the pandemic. Boorstein quotes an attorney with First Liberty Institute, the Christian legal group representing the church:
Hiram Sasser, First Liberty’s executive general counsel, said the payment of legal fees was standard after the court ruled in the church’s favor last fall. Still, he said the settlement is significant.
“It shows the first amendment is alive and well, and I don’t think you’ll see the government shutting down congregations without really good reasons,” he said.
3) The Public Religion Research Institute released a massive study on the state of religion in the United States. Three of the most interesting findings:
Roughly 70 percent of Americans identify as Christians of some sort, but white mainline protestants outnumber white evangelicals, 16 to 14 percent. Given that this survey relies on self-identification, the “evangelical” label may be becoming less popular.
The “nones”—those without a religious tradition—comprise the largest individual portion of religion in America, at just under a quarter of the population. This is consistent with other recent surveys of American religion.
The highest levels of religious diversity is found in urban areas of the country, with the lowest levels of such diversity in the south and rural areas.
4) The Atlantic’s Emma Green interviews Esau McCaulley, a professor of New Testament at Wheaton College and author of Reading While Black. McCaulley is a prophetic and complicated voice in American Christianity, and he’s needed now more than ever. Here’s a taste of the conversation:
There are people who look at me suspiciously because I’m too proximate to evangelicalism, or they look at me suspiciously because I’m too proximate to Black spaces and I speak too plainly about racial injustice. It’s not an easy place to inhabit, but it’s the place that I believe God has placed me.
5) The New Yorker’s Zoe Heller writes on the nature of cults. She argues that it is too easy to dismiss those with unorthodox views as “cultish,” since, in reality, most of us hold deeply important views based on little or no “evidence.” Consider this:
If we accept that cult members have some degree of volition, the job of distinguishing cults from other belief-based organizations becomes a good deal more difficult. We may recoil from Keith Raniere’s brand of malevolent claptrap, but, if he hadn’t physically abused followers and committed crimes, would we be able to explain why NXIVM is inherently more coercive or exploitative than any of the “high demand” religions we tolerate? For this reason, many scholars choose to avoid the term “cult” altogether. Raniere may have set himself up as an unerring source of wisdom and sought to shut his minions off from outside influence, but apparently so did Jesus of Nazareth. The Gospel of Luke records him saying, “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.” Religion, as the old joke has it, is just “a cult plus time.”
Heller also discusses the QAnon phenomenon through this lens:
The silos of political groupthink created by social media have turned out to be ideal settings for the germination and dissemination of extremist ideas and alternative realities. To date, the most significant and frightening cultic phenomenon to arise from social media is QAnon. According to some observers, the QAnon movement does not qualify as a proper cult, because it lacks a single charismatic leader. Donald Trump is a hero of the movement, but not its controller. “Q,” the online presence whose gnomic briefings—“Q drops”—form the basis of the QAnon mythology, is arguably a leader of sorts, but the army of “gurus” and “promoters” who decode, interpret, and embroider Q’s utterances have shown themselves perfectly capable of generating doctrine and inciting violence in the absence of Q’s directives. (Q has not posted anything since December, but the prophecies and conspiracies have continued to proliferate.) It’s possible that our traditional definitions of what constitutes a cult organization will have to adapt to the Internet age and a new model of crowdsourced cult.
6) The New York Times’ Thomas Edsall comments on Donald Trump’s “cult of animosity,” drawing on exchanges with several political scientists on the forefront of these questions. Edsall reports that animus toward certain groups was a statistically important variable in explaining support for Trump, regardless of the party of those surveyed. But this kind of animus is not exclusive to supporters of the former president: Edsall talks about the idea of “partisan schadenfreude,” which involves finding pleasure in the suffering your political opponents. Quoting one expert, Edsall shares:
Schadenfreude is a bipartisan attitude. In our study, the schadenfreude measure ranges from 0-6. For Republicans, the mean score on this measure is 2.81; for Democrats, it is 2.67. Notably, there is a considerable amount of variation in how much partisans express schadenfreude: some express very little schadenfreude, while others exhibit an extraordinary amount. Those who identify as a ‘strong Democrat’ or a ‘strong Republican’ tend to express greater levels of schadenfreude than those who do not strongly identify with their party.
Edsall suggests that this could lead ambitious politicians on the right—such as Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley—to attempt to emulate Trump’s rhetorical and political style, further escalating the role of animus in American politics on both the right and left.
Keith Raniere "physically abused followers and committed crimes," huh? No way, that sounds really familiar to a certain branch of the Christian faith that has it's headquarters in a certain area of Rome. It is important to understand that while cults use the same tactics, cults all are highly individual. Mormonism, for example, is a cult started by a practicing magician and known fraudster that had built-in update mechanics so it was able to survive persecution, and now it enjoys relative social parity with Christianity. Heaven's Gate, on the other hand, while using all the same tools of forced isolation, utilized the depression of a few individuals and the ego of one leader to drive all of them to suicide because they couldn't stand to face the harshness of reality that abandoned the free love, drugs, and peace of the 60s. Cults depend on who starts them. Joseph Smith wanted to have sex with a bunch of women and get money, while Marshall Applewhite of Nike Decade fame didn't want to have a job and hated the world.
The term cult goes back to occult—read hidden knowledge—which references the deepest levels of Western religious history. Cults claim hidden or secret knowledge, and claim that their teachers are the only purveyors. If we think about Christianity, it actively rooted out the Gnostic secret schools of the early church period. There lies the slight difference between cult and religion. Priests aren't really claiming to have secret knowledge à la The Rosicrucians or The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. They definitely fall into the some of the same pitfalls though. The only reason why there's a debate about applying the label "cult" is because it hurts people's feelings to have their perspective shifted about their own behavior/beliefs. Often people aren't really aware of the things that they profess to believe. (See the postscript for some elaboration on this.)
TL;DR, Christianity didn't go the secret schools route, but it's origins are certainly steeped in cultic behavior.
P.S. I highly recommend the following video for anyone interested on the "cooler" sides of the Bible that gets lost in the weeds. Very neat stuff. https://youtu.be/kwvguW8xBx0 If people fully accepted that the biblical parts of the video were 100% real, I have a feeling that they would act differently. Just my humble opinion.