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You're listening to the Michael Sherman show. Hey everybody, we're adding a special new feature to the podcast where you get to participate. I ask you a question of my guest. So here's what you're gonna do. Click on the link below and there you'll find the schedule of my upcoming podcast guests and you can see who's coming up. But the topics are and if you like to ask a question, just fill it out, fill out the form there, send that to us and I will read the question and your name on air and ask the question of our guest and we'll see what they come up with. So check it out. Click on the link in the show notes. All right, I've had on the show a bunch of episodes on religion. Not just, you know, atheism and theism and theology and all that stuff, but really a more interest to me is why people believe religions. What is the origin of religion? What's the sociology, anthropology, social psychology, religion and so on. And that's really what you do. You're not judgmental on, you know, religions in particular, just what's the explanation? And I really like that. It's data-driven, theory-driven. Maybe we'll just start there. What do you mean by religion? Okay, so in the reviews of the book, people are sometimes a little bit puzzled because I say two things about religion and they're not sure which of these things is necessary, which is sufficient how they relate to each other. So let me clarify what the two things are. What I define religion is as all of those activities that turn around the perception of interaction with invisible spirits, which intervene in the world that affect our welfare, that are susceptible to our communications and may affect our welfare in ways that make us better off if we engage with them in an appropriate way. But the kinds of activities that can be evolved is legion. So religion, in some sense, doesn't have an essence because it involves just an enormous range of activities from silent individual meditation to waging war at a massive scale, to singing hymns in a church, to performing Bible study, to engaging in rituals for the dead. In a sense, there's no essence to that. What unites it is the idea that these activities are performed in a sense of awareness that they are part of our interaction with these invisible spirits. And the second thing I say about them is that the particular way in which those activities fit together is through the notion of a platform. And a platform is like an economist's way of describing a community. Now, not all communities are platforms. The point about platforms is that their communities that bring people together and enable people to do things together that they would not otherwise do. And you know, we're used to platforms in the modern digital sense. So we think about Google and we think about Facebook and we think about Instagram and so on. But platforms have been around since the dawn of history. And you know, in some sense, a lot of ancient marketplaces were platforms. And platforms are also the fireside where people come together. And, you know, without the fireside, people would interact in very different ways in in hunting other communities. And so platforms make these interactions possible. And of course, there are many kinds of platforms that are not religious at all. But the particular skill of religious movements is that they use the logic of platforms to bring together people in activities that involve this interaction with the invisible spirit. So the interaction with invisible spirits are necessary condition to be a religious movement. But many religious movements are powerful because they use the logic of platforms in a way that secular organizations do as well. So there are lots of secular communities, political communities and, you know, digital platforms and so on that have nothing to do with religion. So not all platforms are religious and not all religious movements deploy the platform logic in particularly productive ways. But the most successful religions all do. Yeah, I'm going to read a portion here from your introduction that I think nicely captures this. Religions in short, are businesses. Like most businesses, they are many other things as well. They're communities, objects of inspiration or anxiety to observers from the outside cradles of ambition and frustration to their recruits, theaters of fulfillment or despair to those who invest their lives or their savings within them. But they are legitimate businesses. A fact that should give pause to some of their detractors, like me, but also empower those, their supporters as well as their critics who believe they should be accountable to society as other businesses are. And they need to be understood in terms of their organization as well as in terms of the mission they inherit from their founders. A convincing account of the success of businesses like Microsoft or Apple can't stop with charming stories of 13 age founders, voting obsessively in their parents' garages. It's a great sentence. It needs to understand the current structure of these businesses, their logistics and their corporate culture. A convincing account of the success of religious movements requires no less comprehensive and investigation. And 500 pages later, we have one. By the way, I should tell you this funny little coincidence. So you probably know about the Cato Institute in the United States, it's kind of a right wing libertarian, now more libertarian think tank. Anyway, I get mail from them. So I get the latest fundraising thing came with a bunch of bookmarks, right? So bookmarks with Cato Institute, individual liberty, limited government, free markets piece. So I threw it in your book, because this is when it came as the day I started reading your book. And then I just realized on the back, they have, they have quotes from famous economist Adam Smith. Let me read you the quote, because it's kind of funny here. There is no art which one government sooner learns of another than that of draining money from the pockets of the people. So I mean, I guess he's talking about government taxes, right? But you would distinguish, I guess, religious tithing from government taxes. Well, it's a spectrum. Government taxes, we don't mostly have a choice to pay. But at a margin, we do. I mean, I have chosen to live in France where taxes are quite high, but I also get very good public services. And I get health care that is grammatically more reliable than what many people in the United States get. And so, you know, I guess I like France, I didn't have to live here. I was born and brought up in Britain. I have a lot of ties to France. But so a lot of my choice to live in France is voluntary at the margin. I could have chosen to live somewhere else. And paying taxes is part of that calculation. Now, many people have brought up in religious movements where there are obligations that they don't choose. But at the margin, people do have choice. That doesn't necessarily mean that they exercise the big choice of joining the movement or to quit. But they can exercise some degree of discretion at the margin about how much they invest. So tithing is any part of it. And I start the book with the story of a very young woman who pays an enormous proportion of her income about 12% we calculated to a very, very rich pastor in Ghana. And what I wanted to say was that she does this lucidly. She does it knowingly. She's not a fool. Now, you may say, she should be spending the money on something else, like health care for her aunt or who would be a deserving destiny of that of those resources. But what she does is thought through. And we need to respect the thought processes has led to that, even if say, you're, I might not make that choice in her place. Yeah, I'm just thinking about taxes and tithing. One's voluntary. The other's not as a nice distinction between how the left and right tend to think about our obligation to help people who can't help themselves, let's say social welfare transfers. You know, one of the arguments conservatives make is that, you know, we're not heartless people that don't care about poor people and until he ill and addicted and people that have fallen on hard times. We just think it should be done privately through churches, you know, private nonprofits or whatever. And liberals then think, no, that's our obligation, all of us, collectively, through taxes. That's what we have taxes for. And it's sort of an interesting distinction there along the lines of what you're talking about here of how that affects how you think about it. You know, if I give money to a charity, I feel like I'm doing something directly. And I, you know, I get a kind of a little moral boost about it like, Oh, I'm a good person. I did this nice thing. Whereas with taxes, I don't feel that at all. It's just like, yeah, whatever. Okay, I guess we're all in this together. Yeah, I guess that's right. But again, at the margin, I mean, I don't, you know, I have an accountant who does my taxes and I don't say to the accountant to save me every penny. You know, I think it's bad to pay taxes. I say, make sure I don't end up paying ridiculous amounts more than I should. But the main thing I want to do is to ensure that I don't make mistakes. And, you know, end up not doing stuff that I ought to do. I think it's I actually think most tax systems, including in the United States, would collapse if literally nobody ever did what they felt they ought to pay their taxes. If everybody was chiseling to the maximum at the margin, the US tax system would collapse. And we've seen this in some very interesting sort of experiments that have been done in which, for example, people are warned that not enough people are paying their taxes and they should do more. And this has a paradoxical effect of discouraging people from paying their taxes, because most of us think, if I know that other people are mostly paying their taxes, then I'm going to be happy to do the same thing. And I think we underestimated our peril, the basic decency of most people. Now, of course, you know, David Hume said you have to, you have to design a government for naves. But even David Hume didn't say everybody's a nave. What David Hume said was that there are enough naves around that you need to make government nave proof. And in particular, you want to ensure that the tax system cannot be radically undermined by people who wish it ill. But it's still the case, I think that most tax systems are constructed on this understanding that most people will accept to pay that taxes without trying to squeeze the tiniest dime out of it in their favor. So long as they're reassured that most other people are doing the same thing. Yeah, I think you're, are you referring to that those game theory experiments, where everybody is given a certain amount of money, and then you're voluntarily put it into a pot, and then the pot is doubled or one and half times or whatever, and then everybody gets the same division. And if it's done anonymously, the moment somebody starts to short their contribution to the common pot. And it's obvious, because the overall average goes down, then everybody starts to cheat a little bit in a little bit more than the whole thing collapses. So you need some kind of transparency, how much is everybody giving, and then some kind of punishment for those who free ride or cheat the system a little bit. Exactly. And so long as people are reassured that most other people are doing their fair bit, then most people are very willing to do their fair bit. And they're even willing to initiate doing their fair bit at the start of an experiment before they're reassured that everybody else is doing as well. It's, you know, people are not paranoid, clean, untrusting of others in most social situations in reasonably well-ordered countries that are at peace. Now, obviously, if you're in a part of Africa, whether it's civil war going on, or then, you know, you may be very unwilling to trust what some random stranger will do. But I think in countries that are reasonably well-organized and at peace, most people will assume that others are doing their bit. I mean, we see again and again in these game theory experiments that there is a subset of the population that our sociopaths, that really will be maximally selfish, but it's always a minority, which is very interesting. It's very, very rare to see a game theory experiment in which everybody tries to cheat to the max. What we see is a subset of people, a minority of people will cheat. And the framework of interaction has to be robust enough that the rest who don't try to cheat all the time are reassured that they're not being taken for a ride. And then on the whole, you can get an equilibrium, which is reasonably pro-social. Yeah, I was just looking to see, oh, yeah, you do have Christopher Bum's book in here. Yeah, I love his research on this that why didn't natural selection get rid of all the free riders and bullies and cheats? And the answer seems to be most groups can tolerate a small percentage, maybe 1 to 3%. And that's good enough. You don't have to get rid of every last one of them. But if it becomes like 20% or 30% then the group collapses, you have to have some kind of system set up. Yeah, that's right. And I think also it's because it gets marginally more expensive to get rid of the last sociopath, because when sociopaths are rare, they're very good at hiding. OK, so you have to really invest in enormous resources to try and make sure that you flush out the very last sociopath that's hiding in your society. So most societies, quite reasonably don't bother. They try to make sure that the real cheats and scoundrels and sociopaths are kept to a minority and are sufficiently afraid of what the consequences would be of trying to cheat all the time that they don't do it except on rare occasions. Yeah, I loved his discussion of the original capital punishment in these hunter-gatherer groups. This one big bad bully just will not come around and he is really being too disruptive to the group. So they take him on a hunt and they come back without him. Have you read Richard Rangam's book, The Goodness Paradox? I did. Yes. Yeah. Because that sort of develops that and shows how that actually made a huge difference to us genetically as well as yeah, as well as culturally. Yeah, Richard was on the show talking about that. Yeah, the paradox. Yeah. So well, anyway, that's enough of that because I wanted to run another idea by 25 years ago, I was researching how we believe my book about religion. And at the time, which I read at the time and really enjoy. Oh, thank you. Oh, my gosh. Oh, well, okay. So at the time I was the paradox to explain was how come America is such an outlier in terms of its religiosity compared to European country? So, you know, there were two ideas floating around. Let's just call them the free market explanation that is in America, the government doesn't support churches. So they have to compete with one another like businesses. So this would be along the lines of what you're proposing here as businesses. And that therefore, they have to up their game and make it really relevant. Like, I don't know if you've probably been to some of these mega churches in the United States, but these services are unbelievable. I mean, it's a show. And there's, you know, live music and singing. And it's a whole, you know, hours long. And people go there for the day, free babysitting, free parking. I mean, it's, it's really quite the thing that you don't see in European churches. And then the other explanation was the kind of social welfare that if the government is covering, you know, the kind of the safety net there, that religions used to do, what do you need religion for? I don't know. So what are your thoughts on those two explanations and is America? I think those, yeah. Yeah, those two are a big part of the story. But of course, as many people are now starting to say, well, if that's all it is, then how can we explain the decline in religiosity that seems to be coming up in the US right now? And so that's why fairly early in the book, I get into the Adam Smith theory of religious competition, which says that one of the things that can undermine it is a deal that is done between religious leaders and political leaders. And basically, the more dynamic is a religious movement, then more envious political leaders become of the legitimacy that the religious leaders have acquired through their dynamic capacity to compete. And so what they do is they offer the religious leaders a deal, which says, look, we're going to regulate this activity in such a way that you're going to be protected from your competitors. And in return, we want you to say nice things about us in your sermons and tell people that, you know, the government is legitimate, or even that the emperor is a god or whatever it may be, whatever, maybe the most appropriate way of fitting that deal into the contemporary culture. And so what Smith said is that this is actually really bad in the long run, both for the politics and for the religion, but it's irresistibly tempting in the short run. And what I think we're seeing in the US is not that the competitive vigor of churches and other religious movements has dimmed, but that we're starting to see a serious change in the old understanding that the government would keep more or less out of religion. Now, it was always a little bit discussable at the margins. I mean, the government always had a kind of establishment Protestantism to it. But the establishment Protestantism was pretty low key. And the fact that right now you have, first of all, a majority of Supreme Court justices or Catholics and clearly seem to be guided by Catholic doctrine in some of the decisions they're making to affect the well-being of their fellow citizens. The fact that Protestantism in the US has very nicely shown by a great book by David Hollinger published a couple of years ago, that US Protestantism went from being relatively neutral in a slightly condescending, establishment old fashioned way to becoming very politically engaged in the interwar years and in the early post-Second World War years, when mainstream Protestantism became by US standards quite liberal, and that this sparked a reaction from people who were temperamentally more conservative, who said we don't like the way in which our churches that we thought suit about politics are trying to push us in a more liberal direction. And the result was that they moved into the evangelical movement, which was more accepting of their kind of conservative political orientation. What we're seeing is that it's much less accepted than it was 30 or 40 years ago, that the US political system is a kind of open arena in which different religions and different churches can operate freely without the individual members of those communities being told what to do on religious grounds by an alliance of political and religious leaders. So I think that that is threatening to move religiosity in the US in a more European direction, where, you know, for several centuries, religion was associated with the conservative half of the political spectrum. And the result was that if you weren't a political conservative, you couldn't very easily be a full-throated religious believer. And I fear that, well, fear is perhaps the wrong word because they try not to be judgmental, but I suspect that if the movement towards making an alliance between right-wing politics and religion is further entrenched, this is going to give religion a kind of political spin throughout US society that will actually be very bad for its ability to command support across the political spectrum. That's not a foregone conclusion. And as I said before, if you read David Hollinger, it's called the book called Christianity's American Fate, and it really illustrates beautifully how if you like the hijacking of religion by politics, it's not just a right-wing thing. It was actually a liberal thing in so far as it affected mainstream Protestantism in the interwar years and the post-war years. It's not sadly in my book because I came across his book too late for the divine economy. But I think it's a terrific book, and it really helps to understand the antecedents of the connection between religion and politics in the US today. Yeah, Catherine Stewart on the show, her book is The Power of Worshipers. This is about the rise of Christian nationalism. They're like, "What happened to the moral majority in Reagan's in the 1980s and all that stuff?" They kind of morphed into this new group that these are the sponsors of prayer breakfasts that all politicians feel they have to do, and you know, where the deals are made behind the scenes of, you know, "We'll get you the votes if you get us the judges we need," that kind of thing. It's sort of like how could concern-- You have a great first day of school. Oh, this must be your teacher. No, I'm the person who makes a referral to see the teacher. I need to have him fill out this little evaluation form, but he's five years old. Okay, I can see he's struggling with reading and writing. I recommend we start him in kindergarten. That's a bold analysis. Don't most referrals seem pointless? Get the care you need when you need it with a Pacific Source Health Plan. No referrals required to see a specialist. Find a plan at PacificSourceMembersFirst.com. The derivative of Christians possibly support Trump, and during the Trump administration for first four years, I asked people this because I do a lot of God debates. I'm in these churches. How can you possibly support this guy? You're the party of morals and family values and all this stuff. I mean, look at this guy. Their answer was basically, well, first this was before the overturning of Roe v. White. He's going to get us the judges we need, which he did, to do this thing we want legally and overturning Roe. And then also God works in mysterious ways. Look at the flawed characters in the Old Testament that he used to deliver his message in Trump's just like one of those. And, you know, basically-- And then also, of course, the pragmatic aspect. It's a two-team game, and you have to pick one team. That's our team. It doesn't matter who the leader is, but I'm voting for that team. I think that's right. It's about which community you belong to. And what was very interesting in the US for so long was that the communities were not principally defined along political lines. Now, of course, we know, and it's been true for a long time, that there's a lot of sorting in the US by, for example, where you live. Famously, there's a code sorting for what kind of school your kids go to, but there's also a code of schools sorting by what kind of church you go to. So, a study I cite by Raj Chetty and Matt Jackson and others using Facebook data is really interesting because what it shows is that it compares different kinds of communities that people belong to their churches, but also that workplaces, their schools, and so on, and says, in which of these communities are people most likely to make connections across socio-economic lines? That's to say, you know, poor people are within those communities are more likely to interact with more prosperous people, to the extent that they're able to become Facebook friends with them. No, of course, you may say, well, Facebook friends, maybe it's not the same thing as real friends, but that's a matter for another discussion for another day. But they find something very interesting of which the first part may strike you as rather encouraging, and the second part much less so. So, the first part is, it turns out that churches are the best mixers in the sense that within churches, poor people are much more likely to interact with with with with prosperous people, much more so than within schools, within workplaces, or within neighborhoods, etc. The bad news is that churches are much more segregated by income than these other things. So, it's as though people are saying, well, you know, when we go to church, we're going to feel obliged to interact with all sorts of people that are not in our socio-economic comfort zone. So, maybe we should pick a church where that's not going to be too much of a challenge. And so, you do have a lot of segregation by socio-economic status in churches, much more I think that we don't have the data than would have been the case study 40 years ago. And it's also true that segregation by politics is greater. But that said, the evidence suggests that most US churches are not ramming their politics down people's throats. I mean, a minority are, and they're the ones that we see the stories about, you know, the pastors who are, you know, urging people to vote for one politician rather than another. But that's largely because people are sorting into churches that match their prior political convictions. But when something like completely unexpected, like the COVID pandemic came along, I found in research I cited in the book with my colleague, Ivar Ivar, that when this was sort of pretty much orthogonal to what people's prior political convictions were, you know, whether you should move online or whatever, it became correlated with people's political convictions. Later, when the pandemic hit, there's basically no difference between, you know, Republican areas and Democrat areas and how willing they were to go online, what they posted about on their Facebook pages for the church. They were mostly talking about, you know, how the community can come together, how we can all write this out, how important it is to get good medical treatment. And initially, how important it is to get vaccinated. When the whole thing became more and more politicized and divisive, then you start to see a difference, you know, churches and Republican areas are doing much less posting about the importance of getting vaccinated than ones in Democrat areas. But when the pandemic first hit, most churches were not engaging in major political propaganda about this. They were just doing the stuff that communities need to do, which is say, stay safe. Look after yourself. Tell us how we can help you. Tell us how we can communicate with you. And I thought that was relatively encouraging to see how the churches are behaving. The ones who were standing out early in the pandemic for being very politically polarized were a very small minority. Interesting. Yeah, I should point out to be fair that Democrats do this as well in their churches. I've told this story before, where my best friend, Michael Coles, in the late 90s, ran against Newt Gingrich in Savannah, sorry, in Georgia, in the Kennesaw area of Georgia, where Newt was the representative there. And Newt was kind of at that height of his power. So Michael had, you know, very slim chance of beating him. But I went back there to support him on the weekend before the Tuesday election. And on Sunday, we went to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s church, the old church that's still there. And his name is, you know, all over. And it was, you know, first of all, it was quite the experience to go to an all black church, which I had never been. I mean, it was a, it was a show. It was, you know, Protestant churches are so boring by comparison, you know, everybody's singing and up and down and holding hands and amen brother and they're interacting with the preacher and so on. But then toward the end, the preacher, you know, he says, Hey, by the way, we have a special guest with us today. It's Michael Coles. You know, our friend, Michael Coles, Michael, hey, say hi to everybody, say hi to Michael. Now, you know, Tuesday is an important day. You know what to do. And it's like, Oh, I see. Okay. Absolutely right. And indeed, you know, in Democrat areas, we saw a big spike in political posting around Black Lives Matter. That was a big deal. So, you know, what, what I think you can conclude from this is that there's a lot of polarization in the sense that, you know, people tend to go to the churches that they're comfortable with. But what we did not see much evidence of is pastors ramming down the throats of their congregation propaganda that the congregation don't want. That seems to be much less common than I expected when we started looking at this pace and Facebook evidence on how churches were behaving. You know, what what seemed to happen was that the community and the pastor find a way of matching what they're comfortable with in mixing politics and religion. But there seems to be very strong survey evidence that most Americans do not want religious leaders deciding their politics for them. Interesting. That's good. Another minor point here, since you've covered in the book on countries that actually help fund some religions like in Germany, my wife's from Germany. So I didn't know much about this until she told me she was baptized Catholic. She went to an all girls Catholic school all the way through high school. And when she got her first job, they started withholding taxes and sending it to the Catholic church. Like, what? She had to opt out, right? And to opt out, she had to go down to the courthouse and fill out all this paperwork. And they said, no, but no, okay, now you understand that after this, you can't like get married in the Catholic church. You can't get, you know, this and that. And he goes, yeah, that's fine. And they said, but but there's a lag time for two more months, we're still withholding the taxes from your paycheck. He's like, wait a minute. When a contract ends, it ends for both parties. Well, not in this case. Yeah. Did you like the example of Iceland, which, oh, yeah, which has the government withholding taxes for people, but it's very, very unusually broad in terms of what it allows the county's religion. So there is a religion in Iceland that is exclusively open to people who are atheists and do not like paying taxes. Right. There's what the humanists in Germany, they get some taxes, not as much as the Catholics and the Protestants, but they get some as well. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I guess fair, fair is fair. But that would get to this point. If the government is funding religions, then they don't at least say part. I don't know how much Catholic church really depends on government tax money, but then they don't have to be as motivated, they're not as motivated to be relevant to their congregation. That was exactly Adam Smith's point. There's this wonderfully sort of sarcastic paragraph in book five of the Wealth of Nations where Adam Smith talks about, you know, why the Church of England is having so much difficulty facing up to competition from the dissenting churches, in particular, the Methodists. And, you know, lots of people were saying, Oh, it's all to do with basically the Methodists are dumbing down the theology, they're, they're producing, you know, they're catering to the lowest common denominator, they're preaching any old garbage just to get people into their churches and so on. And Smith basically said it's not the theology, it's, it's, it's the incentives. And he said, look, he says, there's, I wish I could remember the sentence exactly. He says something like, the, the, the parsons of the Church of England are frequently men of learning and elegance. And of course, you can feel the full force of his sarcasm, as he says, learning and elegance, because learning and elegance is what you acquire when you have a lot of spare time, because you're not really getting out there and trying to persuade the members of your community to get into the church and to get active. And he says they frequently have the characteristics, the qualities of gentlemen or the qualities which commit, commend them to gentlemen. But that basically he said they lack the incentives to fill the pews of their churches, which the, the methodists do. And you know, the methodist preachers, if they couldn't fill a tent full of people, they wouldn't eat, they'd get no income. And, you know, Smith was way before his time in, in trying to say, look, theology is not unimportant, but look at organization. And often the theology is an outgrowth of the organization. If the religious movement feels that it needs a piece of theology in order to increase its revenues, that's what it'll do. It's not like it first becomes convinced of the theology and then it does everything it can to advance that it is figuring out how it can speak to its public and how it can get its public to become committed. And the theology is often the tool that it uses to do that rather than the precursor to the way in which the religion organizes. Yeah, along those lines, let's go back to your definition of religion that directly or indirectly involved interaction with invisible spirits who intervene causally in the world and who can be influenced by appropriate appeals from human subjects. Okay, then what do you make of secular Jews? Like a lot of my scientists friends are Jewish, they're atheists, but they're Jewish. I mean, they're culturally Jewish. They, you know, they historically, they have that tradition. They enjoy the high holidays and all that stuff. Is that not religion even though they're atheists? Yes, that's a great question. I think it is religion. And it's religion because a lot of the stories that are told around Jewish rituals are ones that make sense in terms of the chosen people. I mean, you can't talk about the chosen people unless they're chosen by somebody. And so I think that many secular Jews take part in the rituals that have a sense because of a story about where they came from and how the rituals came to be. And I like, by the way, you sent me that link to your great podcast with Neil Van Luven, whose book I didn't know, but with whose argument, I'm very strongly and sympathy, as you will know from having read my chapter on belief. And it's very clear that you can have what you might think of as a kind of semi-detached attitude to the theology. If the theology underpins and gives some point to the ritual, which you find very attractive on all sorts of other grounds. Now, I just reviewed a fantastic book by Robert Eisen called Jews Judaism and Success. And if you don't know it, I strongly recommend it to you. The subtitle is something like how Jews came to be so successful in the modern world. And he basically tackles the question, why is it that Jews are so overrepresented by measures of economic success, scientific success and artistic success? And he basically puts it down to the influence of rabbinical Judaism, beginning very early on in the first few centuries of the common era in which he claims that the influence of rabbinical Judaism was to put an emphasis on certain values, like the value of individual autonomy, the value of scholarship for its own sake, the value of rigorous pursuit of ordered understanding of the world, that was not the source of economic or scientific or artistic success immediately. Because of course, Jews were prevented from entering into most of European society until really very late, or late 18th or the 19th centuries. But what he says is that it provided them with this enormous stock of values that once they were allowed into European society and then both American society and so on, they could then turn to a considered and ambitious pursuit of success in these different fields. And then he says, because he's very rigorous about this, he said, but wait a minute, there's an obvious objection to this, which is that actually most of the most successful Jews in these fields were secular. And what he says is, look, of course they are, because what rabbinical Judaism did was not to give you the full package that you need, but it gave you the indispensable ingredients. But in addition to the ingredients, you then needed to take a step further. And that's exactly the argument that I think people have made for Enlightenment values. We have people like Deirdre McCloskey and Joel McCare who talk about how Enlightenment values sort of helped European society in particular and then North American society to become more economically successful. But when you went, where did those Enlightenment values come from? Many people, including, for example, the late Larry Setontop who was a good friend of mine, said, actually, a lot of those values were in some sense Christian in an early way, that the Christian church put emphasis on these values. And what David Eisen, Robert Eisen, sorry, is to say, look, actually the rabbis got there even earlier. And they got there in a way that was more driven by the need for survival of Judaism in a very hostile world. And of course, for nearly two millennia, this didn't pay off in terms of success in the wider society because Jews weren't allowed into the wider society. But it gave them the ingredients, which they could then build on going further. And in many cases, then turning away from their rabbinical roots, just as many of the figures of the Enlightenment were indebted to Christian values even as they then sought to go beyond Christianity, in many cases, to actually resist and to repudiate Christianity. And so that makes sense to me. You can, you know, just as your parents are responsible for lots of things, but your parents then don't aren't the people who make all the choices that you make as an adult. But you could not have done the things you do as an adult without the values that your parents gave you. Those ingredients include from these rabbinical traditions, rationality and reason, logic, the assumption that the universe is knowable. And we can know something about it by applying these tools out of which then science emerges. That is exactly what he claims. Now, I'm not saying that I'm completely convinced by the story, because I think there are some things he leaves out, including the fact that Jews were more urbanized than pretty well any other ethnic community, ethnic or religious community, much earlier. And I think that urbanization provides an exercise in all of these values that is a sort of rival explanation to the, to the education and these values that he claims were provided by rabbinical Judaism. But he does provide, I think, some pretty convincing evidence that rabbinical Judaism was, how can I put it, an important developer and promulgator of values that later became important in a kind of Jewish, Jewish enlightenment. And it's not in my bibliographies, because again, it's a book that I discovered since completing the divine economy. But I strongly recommend it to you. And it's a sign to me of how many different researchers are, I think, converging on trying to see the influence and the behavior of religious movements in a social setting in which they're competing with each other, in which they're competing in simultaneously, not just in the belief space, but in the, in the economic space and the social space and the ritual space in all kinds of spaces. And that we can have a discussion about that without having to decide whether this or that aspect of Judaism is true, or, you know, you and I can just discuss that whether or not we agree with the particular nature of the teachings. Yeah, I ask because a lot of Christian theologians, I debate, argue that science arose from these traditions that were grounded in the Judeo-Christian worldview, and that it wasn't a battle or a contest at the time during the scientific revolution, the age of reason, the Enlightenment and all that stuff. I think it was Rodney, didn't Rodney Stark write a book about this? The kind of the rationality behind Christianity or Christianity giving a foundation to rationality. Yeah, and Brian Vickers, for example, has, I mean, this is 30 years old out, but here's a book called something or other than the Enlightenment, I'm forgetting the title, but it basically argues that sort of scientific and what you might think of as more magical or more theological accounts of the world were much more closely intertwined during what we think of as the rise of the Enlightenment than the typical historical story allows. And again, I don't see it. For me, the metaphor is, you know, what happens as people pass through different stages of their lives, that, you know, what seems obvious to you as an adolescent is not what seems obvious to you as an adult, and by which I'm not saying religion is adolescent and science is adults. It's a way it's I mean, again, some people might make that judgment. I might make it in a different setting, but I'm just saying that there are things that you do when you're young that build who you are when you're older, and you don't take the actions and do the things that are important to you when you're older, using exactly the same values and tools that you had when you were younger. But the values and tools you had when you were younger may still be the necessary condition for you to act the way you do when you're older. Yeah, and then related to that, I've been thinking a lot about different kinds of truths. This is my next book truth. What it is, how to find it, why it matters. And difference between say empirical scientific truths for which we use statistical methods and signal detection theory and Bayesian reasoning and all that stuff. But I think most political truths or religious truths are not in that same category. So, for example, when people like myself or Richard Dawkins say, well, the resurrection didn't really happen. And one response, well, one response is yes, it did. And here's my 500 page book with all the arguments for why the resurrection literally happened. But I think most you have a great first day of school. Oh, this must be your teacher. No, I'm the person who makes a referral to see the teacher. I need to have him fill out this little evaluation form. But he's five years old. Okay, I can see he's struggling with reading and writing. I recommend we start him in kindergarten. That's a bold analysis. Don't most referrals seem pointless? Get the care you need when you need it with a Pacific source health plan. No referrals required to see a specialist. Find a plan at pacificsourcemembersfirst.com. Those people, that's not why they believe the resurrection happened. It's just, well, that's I'm a Catholic or I'm a Protestant. I'm a Christian. This is what I believe. And whether it's true or not, you know, how would I know? I don't know much about these things. It's just what I believe. It's just kind of part of what I am as as a Catholic or or Protestant or whatever. And and it's less important that it be literally true. So like when you again, back to your definition, this, you know, this interaction with invisible spirits, how would anybody know that there's really invisible spirits? I mean, you so my point is this that that's less important. They're getting something. I think this is a deeper message of your book. It's less. Those things are less important. It's this community. It's this platform that I'm getting a lot of value out of. And yeah, I think this probably happened and there's an afterlife and I'm going to have an in Jesus will be there. Whatever. But I don't know. But that that's less important than the other things I'm getting. I completely agree with that. And I just add one nuance to that, which is, I think a lot of people underestimate the sheer variety within any one religious movement. You know, within any one movement, even if it's the Mormons or even if it's the Seventh Day Adventist or even if it's people you think of as being fairly on the niche part of the religious spectrum, you will have an enormous range of motivations of the members. And some members will really, really care about the theology. And they'll say, everyone has to care about the theology. So I mean, I have Catholic trends who really, really care about trans substantiation. And they think it's really, really important that you believe that. But the data are against them, not in terms of the truth of some sense, trans substantiation, though that is a separate discussion. But the data against them in terms of whether most Catholics care, most Catholics do not care about whether trans substantiation is true. And so, although I know many Catholics who sincerely believe it's really important to believe that and who, you know, who say, you know, you cannot be a true Catholic and you don't believe it, the data are overwhelmingly against their being typical. They are not typical. So you have lots and lots of Catholics who have trans substantiation, yeah, whatever. And that's really important. I think that the sheer variety within these movements is an intrinsic part of what makes them so vibrant and so alive. The moment they become focused on, you know, a narrow set of theology being crucial, then sometimes they can survive in a very, very hostile environment, because that's what then they become cults. But if they want to be brought based religious movements, they can't do that. And what happens is that, you know, within the same church, you get the people who really, really think trans substantiation, trans substantiation is important. And the people who really think it doesn't matter. And there are historical moments like the, you know, the council of Nicaea when it really, really mattered whether you were a homosian or a homo-usian, but not because anybody had the slightest idea of how you would tell the difference, but just simply because it was who were your friends. And, you know, if the right guys came out ahead in the council, then you would be politically powerful. If the wrong guys came out in the council, you might die. But those are the products of particular historical political circumstances. I think that in most religious movements, in countries at peace today, there's just a huge range. And the people who really care about the theology are a minority. And they're a very sincere minority, but they're not typical. Yeah. Isn't this the point you make about marriage brokering in religions that people going through the rituals, it doesn't really matter what the rituals are, that you're doing the rituals tells me something about your character. And that's so it's a proxy for something else. Yeah, absolutely. And so, I mean, this is one of the things I liked most about the work that my colleagues and I did in Ghana was that we found, I think, pretty uncontrovertible evidence that people, many people go to church to find a marriage partner. But the crucial point about that, the twist, is that you don't go to church to find the kind of marriage partner who only goes to church to find a marriage partner. You go to church to find a marriage partner who is going to church for some other reasons. And that's why the churches could do this so well. You know, if they were just trying to, you know, to rival, you know, single as bars or dating apps, it wouldn't work. Interesting. Okay. I want to ask you about roughly called, let's say, the social gospel versus the prosperity gospel. You know, there's kind of a division, at least in the United States. You know, Christians who think our job is really to take care of the poor and, you know, man, the soup kitchens and so forth. And that's what Jesus taught us. And then you have the, you know, Creflo dollar. Do you know this guy? Creflo dollar with his $2,000 suits, you know, God wants you to be rich. I don't know if this is a particular guy, but I know many other people like him. Yeah. Yeah. But so what do you make of that division? Well, I think there are slightly less different than they look at first sight, because having seen some, I mean, again, I start the book with this example of this young Ghanaian woman who gives 12% of her income to a very church whose pastor is incredibly rich. And she does so knowing that he is. And the prosperity gospel is a big part of the story. And it's, I mean, it's not just in the area of prosperity. It's also in health. So we're talking about communities where many people are very poor. They're also very financially insecure, which is not quite the same thing. That is to say, not just that they're earning very low incomes, but that at any moment their income can drop to zero. And they have very few savings to fall back on. But the same thing is true of their health. They may be suffering from many chronic health problems, but at any one moment they could have a catastrophic health emergency and they'd have no resources in which to do it. And in those circumstances, the community offers them two things. One is a social gospel. So we should not underestimate how many of the, for example, the Pentecostal churches, which are based very strongly around the prosperity gospel, also have a social gospel. That is to say, you know, if you go to the church and you fall sick, you'll be visited. And you may be able to get a loan. If you lose your job, you may be able to get some money to tide you over while you're looking for a new job. But the very interesting thing is that the prosperity gospel ties in with the social gospel, because if you've been supported by the church when you lose your job, when you get a new job, your obligation is then to tell everybody in the church about it and to make a very big donation. And so in some sense, I think we underestimate at our peril the extent to which the social gospel and the prosperity gospel sort of feed on each other, they are both of them compatible with an ideology that says we're all in this together, even if there are almost obscene differences in prosperity between one person in the church and another person. And the sense that we're all in this together is we look after you where things go badly. But as soon as things go well, then you really have to share the good news with everybody. And sharing the good news is not just telling everybody, it's also dipping into your wallet in a big way. Yeah, that's um, it reminds me of two being Cosmeti's theory about friendship and coalitions, which are formed to even out the uneven resources of hunter-gatherers in that you have to do sharing. And there are rituals around that to make sure that it happens equitably and so on. And but it's not enough to like fake being a good friend, because we're fairly good at detecting when someone's phony. So you have to actually believe it. Like I really, really actually do like you. And that's why I'm giving off the cues that you perceive I really like you because I really feel that. And that's the kind of basis of true friendship and trust in between people. Yeah, absolutely. And it works for, in particular, these communities with so a lot of the religious movements I'm looking at are ones that are not you know, traditional ritual communities in, you know, villages whose population has been similar for many hundreds of years. But I'm looking at cities, I'm looking at mosques in Darasalama, I'm looking at Pentecostal churches in Accra. I'm looking at Buddhist temples in Japan or in China. And these are communities that are much larger than the kinds of forager communities that might use in two people thinking about. Now, you know, the big difference is that in a forager community, we more or less know who's who. Now, that doesn't mean as I think some rather simple pictures of forager communities would tend to make us think that, you know, I know everything about you. I mean, I may have known you for 20 years. I have colleagues that I've known for 20 years and I still can't quite figure out whether, you know, if push came to shove, I could really trust them. You know, we all, we all have this experience. So you may interact with somebody in a certain range of circumstances and you don't know how they behave outside that range. So there's a problem of sort of extrapolating outside the comfort zone and you don't know whether somebody would really be trustworthy if push came to shove. So we have all of these problems of credible signaling and so on, even in communities that know each other well. But the real challenge in these, you know, these big cities, somebody comes looking for work from, you know, rural Ghana to Accra, what are they going to do? I mean, they know nobody. So this question of how can they find a marriage partner? It's just the same as how can they find a job? How can they find and also how they can they find some dignity? And I think that's really important. You know, you live a really tough life. You make all sorts of sacrifices and for what? And you need somebody to reinforce the sense that what you're doing is worthwhile. And that's what these churches are incredibly good at doing. They're, they're incredibly good at making people feel valued. Now you may say, okay, it comes at a high price. I mean, Pastor Sherman, you're asking me to, you know, give you 12% of my income. And that's a very naughty suit you've got on and so on. And that's a lot. But you also know that if you just said, well, actually, I'll do your bargain basement deal, it just wouldn't make me feel valued in quite the same way. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm not sure secular institutions could ever do that. I mean, you don't work at Google or Apple or whatever, to get dignity, you know, you're you to make money and you want to have meaningful work. That's a different kind of thing, I think. There are, you know, attempts by atheists and secularist humanists to have these ritual weekly meetings, you know, the, like the Unitarian Universalists, they meet Sunday mornings. I've been to many of their sessions and they, you know, they're atheists, so they, but they sing hymns to Newton and Spinoza and they have testimonials about how they lost their religion. And I don't know, they like the candle and all that stuff and they sing certain songs. I never really did it for me. And I'm not sure it would ever catch on. I know there's there's movements, I think, in England as well, to build these building of churches for secularists. And they've never really taken off in the same way because I think they're offering something different than what you're talking about here. Yes. And I think they depend on a great deal of prior affinity between the people who belong to them. One of the, I think, great competitive advantages of these large movements like Pentecostalism, but also like many of the Islamic movements that you see in in Africa or in Asia. And I'm not talking about the, you know, the very, the, the Islamic movements that get much more fundamentally inclined people. I'm talking about the mass Islamic movements is that they're very relaxed about what you need to sign up to when you first join. You know, there's this image that people in the West have that, you know, Islam is this incredibly fundamentalist and demanding religion and something. But often when you first come in through the door, it's really very laid back. You just go, you see, if you like it, somebody might offer you a mint tea or a cup of coffee, depending on, you know, and, and you talk and you don't have to be serious about any one particular thing. You just have to be willing to accept that the community might have something to tell you. And I think a lot of the, a lot of the movements that are more secular. I mean, I wouldn't call them aggressively secular, but let's say pointedly secular. So you talk about the Unitarian churches and so on is that they, it, it's sort of very clear what general line on things you will have to sign up to if you get serious about that. Whereas I think a lot of the large churches and mosques and so on, of course, you have to listen to a sermon about what this now is. But a lot of the activity around you is just, it's friendly, it's people smiling at each other, it's people saying the blessing, it's singing, it's, it's stuff that is not cognitively committing. And that's great because that, I mean, one thing we know about belief is that propaganda works. I mean, if, if you trust me, I can tell you stuff that is just racy from the point of view of empirical verification. I can tell you that, you know, quantum theory says, you know, light can pass simultaneously. And, you know, there can be a cat that's both dead and alive and so on. And you'll say three bags full, policy, right? Well, no, you wouldn't because you know, I know I'm not a physicist. But, but, you know, if you, if you, I could tell you stuff that would just seem wild. And if I had the right credentials, you'd believe it, even though there's not a way, you know, there's no way you can verify that or even get the sense of the intuitive and the reasonableness of that. And so I think a lot of religious movements, it's very similar, you, you go in and you know, it's not like there's this huge sort of barrier at the door saying, you can only come in if you sign up to pronunciation and stuff like that. You don't have to. It's very relaxed. And, you know, because many people who write about religion are not very relaxed about it because they have personal experiences that I think we underestimate how effective the recruitment mechanisms are, which make it relax, which say, you know, okay, you've just come to Daris Alarm from rural Tanzania. Here's a cup of mint tea, come and come and join us and, you know, see what happens. Yeah. Well, that's what happens when you go into a Scientology office here in Hollywood. You know, you're not going to hear about Zeno the Galactic Warrior and all that, you know, the crazy stuff that Elrond Hubbard made up. And most people that I've met that are Scientologists, they don't care about any of that. You know, when that came out, you know, through South Park and through the internet and so on, you know, and I asked some people, but they're like, I don't, Zeno the galactic, I don't know, whatever, you know, we're helping people that are drug addicted in our Alcoholics. That's why I'm doing this. Like, all right. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, I think your book, it sounds as though you're absolutely putting your finger on something that's really important about that, which is the essential optionality of much theology. Now, some people really want to go the whole way. And this offers them a theatre in which they can do that. And I use the word theatre advisedly. I mean, it links up with what Neil Van Luven was saying that. And, you know, and I don't use theatre disparaging either. I mean, you know, a lot of the most powerful experiences any of us has are in the theatre in some way. And so, most religious movements are very careful about giving to individuals who don't otherwise have a theatre in their lives, a way in which they can be in the theatre. And the theology plays a part in that. But you don't have to go further into the theatre than you feel comfortable with most of the time. The problem sometimes comes if you get foreign and you want to come back. But that's why that, you know, the way in is much smoother than the way out, as many people, including myself, who left religious movements. No, but the fact that the way is sometimes very difficult on the way out doesn't, it sometimes makes us underestimate how comfortable it all feels of where. Yeah. I was talking about cults, new religious movements, how religions get started, why some succeed, why some fail. Scientology's still hanging in there. Its critics have been telling me for 25 years, it's going under at any moment. Yeah, they own a lot of property. They have a lot of money invested in it. And I don't think it's going away anytime soon. Mormonism is here to stay. I mean, we had a presidential candidate, Mitt Romney was a Mormon. Yeah. And, you know, they're a pretty tight-knit group. I know a lot of Mormons here in California, they take care of each other. The whole 10% tithing thing is enforced pretty ritually. And but as far as I know, I mean, there's some abuse like there isn't any organization, I guess. But, you know, it's a tight-knit. But why did Mormonism take off back when Joseph Smith was doing his thing? There were lots of those kind of groups. What do you make of why some succeed and others don't? Well, I think the first answer is you have to be very careful of survivor bias. Yeah. Because so, you know, I mean, if you can ask the same question about restaurants, I mean, most new restaurants fail. Okay. And I think we pretty much know that what makes the difference between restaurants that succeed in restaurants fail has some system to it, but an enormous amount of luck. You probably know the story of the singer Rodriguez, who he was the subject of that amazing movie called Searching for Sugar Man. This was the guy who produced two albums in Detroit in the early 1970s, and they were complete failures. And then they found their way into South Africa, which at that time was a sort of completely cut off area culturally from the rest of the world. And he became a huge star in completely unknown to him. His records were being pirated. And he was, I mean, as in the movie, they interview people who say, no, he was bigger than Elvis. He was really a huge star. Everybody in South Africa thought he died. And then they eventually, you know, when South Africa opened up, they discovered that here were these two parallel universes in which the same singer and the same music had completely flopped in one and completely succeeded in another. And that's a kind of parable about the way in which, you know, a restaurant could flop in one place and succeed in another. And obviously, there's some clear things you mustn't do to maybe successful running a restaurant, but there's a huge amount of luck in it. And so I think the same thing is true with religious movements. And I'm sure there are many, many religious movements lost to history, which are just as exotic and interesting as as Mormonism. And they failed. And what made Mormonism succeed was, first of all, the, in some sense, the, you could say, I mean, a little bit like Christianity, the, almost the good luck that the charismatic leader died early enough that, you know, before information might come to light that might make them seem less charismatic, or before they got old and catchy and disagreeable. And, you know, but while some of the golden halo of their earlier achievement could, could then be put into good use by a really gifted entrepreneur who would take the movement to the next level. So I think that was a piece of accident that helped the Mormon Church much as it helped the Christian Church. In the case of the Christian Church, I say this several points in the book, the fact that it happened to appeal to women and slaves in a time and a place where women and slaves got really the rough edge of Roman morality in all sorts of ways, economically, physically, sexually. But they were nevertheless not so ground down that they couldn't, they didn't have some space to make their own autonomous religious decisions meant that sort of Christianity hit that sweet spot where it was able to appeal to people who had very little autonomy, but they nevertheless had enough autonomy to make it into a movement. And, you know, back in ancient Babylon, the people who didn't have the autonomy could not have been the public for a new movement like Christianity. And, of course, much later, didn't quite have to, you know, there were many different competing movements appealing to the downtrodden. But Christianity hit that sweet spot and took off and obviously once it acquired a certain momentum, the momentum itself took it forward. So what, you know, there's a lot of luck, but you could also point to a certain, if the dice fall in the right way, with the right, in particular, I think the crucial movement is when the first founder dies or is eclipsed or retires of what's going to happen next. And I think it's that moment that really makes a huge amount of difference. And there are, if we were to run the tape back, there are a lot of movements that it just would seem just as exotic as the moments that failed. And I wouldn't want to put a huge amount of money in advance on whether it was the moments that were going to succeed or those other ones. But we can look back and say once they got, and after all, you know, the US in the 19th century was a big place. So particularly if you could then get people on the Mormon trail and they could come to Salt Lake City and they could organize in a way that for a while was relatively free from predation from outside. Of course, later they then came to have trials and tribulations with their own, but they could build on the heroic story of the Mormon trail. And there's a lot of evidence that, you know, people were given positions of responsibility based on either true or mythologized accounts of, you know, how brave they were on the Mormon trail. And so if you happen to have a movement that was sufficiently organized, that you could build a common myth, I mean, myth being whether you go back to the founder myth or, importantly, the equivalent of the flight out of Egypt for the Mormons was, you know, the Mormon trail. And, you know, the people who'd done heroic things on the Mormon trail were then people who were given particular authority in the Mormon church as it was being built. Then I think you've got the basis for a movement that can start to, you know, respond to the modern world, including things like abandoning polygamy when it proved politically expedient to do that. Yeah, that was Brigham Young who did all that. And that's what it takes. In the case of Scientology, David Miscavige took over after Elrond over died, or I should say, moved on to the other plane where he is apparently still riding science fiction. I don't know if you've ever been to Scientology offices, but they all have a desk. They all have a desk with a pen and a writing pad where in case he comes back. Yeah. Yeah, that's, I do think luck has a lot to do with it. Bart Nerman also makes the point on the growth of Christianity. Once you get a toehold, did you get a little tiny momentum? Compound interest of growth takes over and you only need like half a percent a year or something or some tiny amount. You don't have to convert a lot of people, right? And often try to get data from Mormons about their conversion rate, you know, when the boys go out on their white shirts and their bicycles on their mission for two years. Do they really convert many people? And I think the answer is it doesn't really matter. That's not why they're doing the mission. It's, you know, it's discipline growth and things like that, which is good. And so the two ways to grow religion is through conversion and fecundity. Oh, by the way, I loved your section on the shake. First, the Quakers and the Shakers. And then, you know, I had no idea there were so many groups who were celibate. And of course, that's going to hurt your future growth. But anyway, say a few things about that if you like. Well, so I think there's an interesting set of questions about why would any religious movement want to do anything else than just have as many children as possible, given that, you know, having children is the most effective way to bring new people into your movement. Sometimes it's because the movement finds itself an incredibly hostile and difficult circumstances. And, you know, the the the the shakers, I don't know enough about the history of shakers. I guess I shouldn't get drawn into that. But the Scott C movement, which I also talk about, who actually went further than the shakers in the sense that they were not only celibate, but they didn't trust themselves to be celibate. So they removed the organs that would tempt them to break their celibacy. And I mean, you know, these were people in an incredibly difficult hostile environment, where what they figured that they could do was to attract people through their business success and their business acumen. And this was a really strong example of the costly signaling theory that you could prove that you're an absolutely reliable person because you've committed yourself to your business venture, which is what most of these guys were doing. I mean, it was also a religion, but it was very strongly predicated on worldly success. And you were a person who could be absolutely counted on to put in the midnight hours in the office, so to speak, but you know, because you were not out chasing women and partying. And, and that, you know, made the movement surprisingly successful for a while, but except that it didn't survive Stalinism. And, you know, we have, I keep talking about survivor bias, you know, you can, a movement may be very successful up to a point. And then the environment changes and suddenly the things that made it successful up to that point become millstones around its neck. So I guess I'm very intrigued by the fact that, you know, a bit like the restaurant business, and I mean, some people. Get a bit annoyed with me for constantly making analogies between restaurants and religious movements. But, you know, I'm very serious about restaurants. I think, I know, restaurateurs who really put their souls into it. And, you know, eating is a very profoundly, I mean, it's a very physical thing. It enters into you, and you, you make food for the people you love. And there are people who, they're not in the restaurant business to make a fortune. They're in the restaurant business to express love. And I get that. So for me, it's not a demeaning analogy, but the restaurant business is massively diverse. You know, it's McDonald's. It's the little corner restaurant. It's downmarket chains. It's upmarket chains. It's very local restaurants. It's franchises. It's all sorts of things. And you see all of this in religion. It's, you know, and that was, I've constantly faced the challenge in doing this book. People would say to me, okay, what's the essence of religion? And in the end, I just want to say the essence of religion is it doesn't have an essence. It is, it is about community, but there are lots of other things that communities too. So what kind of community is it? Well, it's a community that somewhere or other makes reference to invisible spirits. But as you absolutely rightly point out, and with the case of many secular Jews, it's still a religion that they're doing, even though for them, they don't want a part of the theology. But you still can't take part in the seda. You still can't take part in, you know, the different rituals of Judaism without feeling profoundly moved by that story of the chosen people. And of course, if somebody says, well, who chose us and why? And is this still true? You might then equivocate. But unless that story of the chosen people matters to you, then you're not going to be part of that community. And again, I talk about Shia Islam, which shares with Christianity this astonishing feature that they celebrate the martyrdom of their founder. I mean, you know, from the point of view of classic of, you know, Greek or Roman religion or, you know, religion prior to to that. I mean, it's just a crazy thing to do. Why would you, why would you celebrate a loser? And it was just the astonishing skill of those two movements to say actually our loser was only apparently a loser. He was actually ultimately the winner. And there's some roots of that if you go back to the cult of Osiris in Egypt and so on. But what these guys did was build a story. And you know, to go back to the restaurant analogy game, which, you know, I really don't mean to be demeaning, you go to many restaurants that are curated with love. And they tell you a story about themselves. They say, you know, we moved to this place when we were a young couple and we start our own farm and you have found a table and we put our love for the land into this and, you know, our olive oil is from our own land. And I mean, this is an origin story. And people who could storytellers will be successful whether they're restaurateurs or whether they're religious leaders. It's all stories, Paul. We're storytellers. And I mean, every political party has a story, you know, things are right back when we were in power and now they're terrible because the other guys are in power. But put us back in power and things are going to be great. You know, everybody does that, right? All right, let's do a slow wind up here and take a big picture look. Let's go back think ourselves back into a twilight 10,000 years ago, you know, as bands and tribes of hunter gatherers began to coalesce in the chief comes and states, you go from a few hundred people, you doesn't do a few hundred to a few thousand 10,000 hundred thousand, you know, Jared Diamond makes the point that you can't have these informal means of conflict resolution where everybody sits around the little dirt quad in the center of our little village and and hash out our differences. You need some kind of structure. So we got two big things, government and religion. How do you think about how it all started and maybe if you want to comment on the evolutionary origins of it? Is it an adaptive feature, a group selection model? Is it a byproduct of something else? Kind of give us the big picture. Okay, so I think there are two broadly competing visions of that story. One says that a religious sensibility preceded and enabled the growth and the size of society. So there's all the literature going back to big gods and so on are in our ensign and and his colleagues. And I have a lot of respect for that. And I think it's undeniably true that this idea of big gods that we have sort of police in the head that make us behave pro-socially when there are not mechanisms around for our neighbors to police everything we do has I think it's descriptively true of a lot of people in large scale societies. The fact that it's descriptively true doesn't mean that it's the right origin story. There's an alternative origin story which says that society's got big first because creating a physical surplus which could be stored meant that the powerful members of that society would emerge from the same kind of processes that happened in hunter-gatherer societies that were successful hunting fighting etc. They had greater success with with women etc. They didn't face pushback as we see in the work of Chris Berman others from people jealous of their new found leadership because they could basically hire thugs to they could hire mercenaries to keep themselves in power. So what do you need to hire mercenaries you just basically need enough stored grain to pay the mercenaries with. Okay and for a lot of mercenaries it's much nicer feeding off the stored grain that the ruler gives you than it is having to farm the stuff yourself. So then the question is well why is why is religion necessary? Well because it's actually very expensive to build a large scale society just on mercenaries. I mean running a police state is incredibly resource intensive. So is there a way in which you can actually persuade people to go along with it with relatively low scale policing and I think the evidence for that is very strong. So there are lots of evidence for example on the growth of human sacrifice. I mean I may not be inclined to believe just intrinsically in a big god but if I've been brought shivering and terrified into a large amphitheater and some really powerful people in my society are you know decapitating my next-door neighbor and are basically telling me that this is commanded by a higher power than I can't see. I mean I said to you before propaganda works I'm likely to believe that and so I think the alternative story was that essentially coercive power preceded ideological power. And I think broadly I mean you know there's lots of research going on and some of it using phylogenetic methods for example which is part of the evidence for the second story over the first is I think far from conclusive but broadly I favor the second story over the first. But I also favor I quote Kim Strelny quite a lot in the chapter on evolution there and I think Kim has a great way of showing how you can come to have the elements of a religion gradually and I think a lot of the people I don't include you in this but I think some of the more you know of the militant atheists sort of say well you know that there had to be a moment in which you came to believe this crazy stuff and you know humanity must at some point have bought into it and what Kim is really good at doing is explaining how you can have the elements of a religious movement that gradually takes on greater momentum and greater weight and you can imagine sort of something like Marla's Symphony of a Thousand sort of the crescendo builds up or you know the last movement of Beethoven's Knights that you have the the buildup of the religious movement so that by the end you're buying into it but there's no point in which you can actually say okay where did I start to believe in the big god the what happened was that the big society proceeded the big god and so I think I'm broadly favorable to the idea that big societies preceded big gods but that didn't make the ideological role played by big gods unimportant it's just that it wasn't the precondition for building the big society it was a natural consequence of the way in which a big society once created could hold together bearing in mind that it's spectacularly resource-intensive to run a police state for people who really don't want to be governed by the police that's a great story that's a good account yeah I largely agree with that as well as to wrap it up the future of religion you've convinced me that it's not going to go away you know a lot of us in this business think well you know it's the rise of the nuns look it's happening finally but your data shows that in fact around the world religions on the on the move in a lot of areas Pentecostalism apparently is the fastest growing religion in the world or a christian branch of religion that's how you I mean in some sense you know the the Jehovah's Witnesses are faster growing because they start from a much lower base but oh I don't think I don't think it's particularly interesting to have a contest as who's growing fastest but yeah but you know there's a lot of fast growth there and in particular Christianity is not being pushed aside by Islam that's just not happening yeah yeah and also again the theological matters that rationalists go on about including me is secondary this is not really why they're there in the first place you know exactly I mean when I do these debates about the origins of the universe and the fine-tuning and all the argument the cosmological argument all that stuff the average person going to church they don't care about any of that that's that's not why they're there and stuff yeah that's right I mean the one thing I'd say though is that you know it might seem as though I'm saying both you know religion is going to be around forever and we should get used to the fact that's true I should also be saying we should you know whether however scientific or rationalist or whatever we are we should also relax about that fact because it's not intrinsically a bad thing but we haven't talked very much about this and I would wouldn't want your readers to go away without feeling that I do talk about some of the bad stuff I mean I have a whole chapter on abuse and I think that there is of course abuse happens in many many different kinds of organizations it's not unique to religion but I'd want to say that the crucial thing is about abuse is that yes there are abusers who are bad people but abuse is much more likely in some structural situations than in others and we can think about that in a in a constructive way and if we can find ways to ensure that the religion are treated as legitimate businesses but therefore also as accountable businesses then I think everybody's going to be better off including members of religious movements we don't have to see this as a zero-sum game between you know the atheists and the and the believers I'm just not into zero-sum in that dimension I think we can find more constructive ways to get religious movements to live alongside secular movements well I mean the Catholic Church has paid out hundreds of millions of dollars for sexual abuse rhymes and they're still surviving I guess you know they can absorb a lot of that but they could do with thinking much more constructively about what it you know it's not they're still very tied into the rotten apple theory and I think the rotten apple theory is bullshit I mean yeah yeah the the the problem is that there will be rotten apples in all over the place the question is about the enablers okay why do some organizations have more enablers with them it within them than others and it's getting at the enablers rather than the rotten apples that you really have to think about and most enablers are decent people but they're just decent people who would rather look the other way yeah well that's what happened yeah I was also astonished that your analysis of the structure of the Catholic Church I thought it was way more hierarchical with multiple levels but it's nothing like say Google or Apple or giant corporation yeah that's right I mean it's I think people don't really realize this there's basically only four layers there's the individual believer there's the priest there's the bishop there's the there's the pope now there's many more layers of status so you know if you're a decan or an archbishop or something but but in terms of authority I mean the archbishops advise the pope but basically the bishops are the ones you know it's the the pope is responsible to the bishops in some sense and similarly the priests are responsible to the bishops and that means that this is incredibly flat and so no pope can keep an eye on what all the bishops are doing and no bishop can keep an eye on what all the priests are doing and so it's been inevitable since the founding of the Catholic Church that they would have to look the other way on all sorts of things all the time every pope has done it you know this I mean now stuff's coming to light and people are saying you know Francis did it too and also did Benedict and such that's there's no point in having a contest for which pope did it more every pope has turned a blind eye to abuses every single pope there's no point in saying who's a good pope who's bad pope we got to look at the structure we got to say that if you're that if you have that flatter structure then there's a bandwidth problem for the top levels they cannot keep an eye on everything that's going on so you've got to change the structure that doesn't mean you need to have more hierarchy but it means you need to have more counter-bailing power at all of these different levels and so just to go back and yeah would it help if priests could marry I don't think that's the big deal I mean it's that's not a fix I mean there's and by the way there's just as much abuse in in Protestant churches um it's coming less to light paradoxically we've learned more about in the Catholic Church because being a centralized organization they realize that they need to um allow inquiries and stuff like that and so it's coming out earlier in the Catholic Church but it's going to come out everywhere and um so I don't think I don't think priesty celibacy has much it may make a little epsilon difference at the margin but that's not the thing yeah the problem is the structure yeah well boy scouts yeah they're probably exactly yeah yeah yeah okay last question this is coming out of left field completely crazy we're gonna cut we're about to colonize Mars do you think in a thousand years there'll be religions on Mars yeah absolutely yeah I mean I it's um I think if anybody tried to find a little charter planet on which you know they could say the condition of coming to this charter planet is that you are not religious um you know it would work for the first colonizers and then a couple of generations later you'd find these these churches starting up I think trying to keep religion off Mars is a fool's errand we went do it um we could try and uh you know help to ensure that on Mars there's a healthier relationship between the religious businesses and the other businesses and the other institutions of of uh ordinary society hmm oh I did forget to ask you about Islam and that there's kind of this debate about to what extent the violence uh that we see in the Middle East and other uh uh spot areas are religiously theologically driven or is it really American foreign policy and we have troops here and there and it's really more political um you know you know probably know some of this I know you know some of this research on uh you know they organize these uh terrorist cells through soccer teams and things like that and and these kids that are doing this and being recruited they're not biologically fine-tuned to any of this you know they're just joining a band of brothers that are against this evil empire America that sort of thing what are your thoughts on that yeah no I mean I think um recruiting people for violent ends um will always be easier if you can tell them a story um but and you know I make the analogy in the book between recruitment to jihadi movements and recruitment to the Crusades in the Middle Ages and there's this really interesting analogy where um I I point out that Thomas Heghamahu's uh now teaching in Oxford has done this study of jihadi literature and one of the more interesting parts of this is these videos of the jihadi's weeping and it seems kind of strange because they're supposed to be very manly but here are these videos showing that some of those brutal jihadi's are actually very tender and they're moved to tears by all sorts of things by the sufferings of fellow Muslims and everything and so one of the questions why did they do this and the idea is that when you're recruiting people for something very violent you need to tell them a story about why they're not bad people when they do that and so you have to tell them a story about how that they it's linked to being tenderhearted and the interesting thing is you go back to the Crusades and it's exactly the same thing there is this whole literature on the weeping crusader the weeping crusader who's that you know of course he has to be tough he has to hat the heads off women and children in the holy land but at the same time he has to be moved to tenderness by the sufferings of his fellow Christians and so what I think we see is that religions are it's a technology you know it's like it's like guns are technology I mean you can use them for all sorts of ends the guns don't kill the people the people kill the people but the presence of the guns changes the options that the people have for fighting each other and so I basically think people are fighting each other for the same old bad reasons they're competing over land they're competing over access to scarce resources including women they're competing for status they're competing for sexual prowess they're competing for also I mean all of the bad old things and religion is just one of the technologies they use for doing this so you know it's I mean I have I got this message from a friend in India who said you know why you not why is your book not to cover the elephant in the room which is intrinsic violence of of of Islam you know it's much more violent and you know I said to him have you read Leviticus 20 I mean it's a horrible right chapter you know the point is Leviticus 20 is not really used in most countries as a justification for killing homosexuals except in some countries like Uganda where the political and social conditions make it acceptable to use that in the fact that the violent verses in the in the Quran are used as justifications are killing reflects the underlying political contest that's going on and the fact that in a political context which where people have decided strategically to use violence they reach out for the technologies available to them which include AK-47s and include you know suicide vests and they include verses in whatever may happen to be their religion available to them here it is the divine economy how religions compete for wealth power and people get it this will inform your understanding of religion greatly all thanks so much for your work thanks for talking to me wow Michael is happy about this stuff so interesting what are you working on I've admired your your work for a long time and it's great to meet you in person I've been working on something about how we can induce elderly politicians to retire before dementia gets hold of them and if you think that recent events in the Democrat party have made that less pressing I would beg to differ I think the fact that most people in the Democratic party thought that they could get the president not to run for reelection only because he might lose the election not because it might leave us with a very old man making existential decisions about the future of the country on the planet for another four years is I think a very worrying feature in the current situation yeah so that's what I'm thinking about next good that's important all right thank you Michael after investing billions to light up our network T-Mobile is America's largest 5g network plus right now you can switch keep your phone and we'll pay it off up to $800 see how you can save on every plan verse for eyes and AT&T at t-mobile.com/keepandswitch up to four lines via virtual prepaid card a left 15 days qualifying unlocked device credit service ported 90 plus days with device ineligible carrier and timely redemption required card has no cash access and expires in six months
