The Price of Everything - Eduardo Porter [88]
WHAT DOES IT COST?
The individual process of acquiring a religion evidently depends on many factors. Believers are often unaware of the trade-offs of their faith. Parents tend to make the choice for their kids. Most people conform to the religious beliefs of the communities into which they were born. Religious benefits do not come for free, though. Insurance costs money. The benefits of religious organizations depend on their members’ contributions of time, money, and effort. Churches—which can exert substantial moral pressure on their donors—are particularly good at extracting dues.
But money isn’t the most important of religion’s levies. The most significant costs of faith are the sacrifices it imposes on believers and the constraints with which it shackles their lives. From Judaism to Hinduism, religion carries an additional price in the form of a set of rules on dress, diet, grooming, sexual conduct, and even entertainment and social interactions. These rules are not incidental. They are essential to the survival of the faith. Onerous moral strictures weed out the uncommitted and guarantee a minimum level of solidarity and trust within the group.
Herein resides the core proposition of religion. The benefits of belonging depend on the zeal and intensity of every one of its believers, who donate time and money, buttress behavioral rules, provide moral support, and reinforce the mythical narratives that organize their world. The tougher the rules of admittance, the more committed members will be. This zeal is what gives value to membership in a religion for those who believe.
Rules banning secular activities serve to make sure that the faithful commit time and effort to the faith, spending little time enjoying themselves outside the fold. But sacrifices and behavioral constraints also discourage free riders—the nonbelievers and soft-core sympathizers who are unwilling to commit themselves entirely and whose presence would dilute the benefits for all.
This approach explains why radical religious groups are more proficient at terrorism than their secular peers—engaging in more extreme actions up to and including suicide. The sacrifices required to belong to the faith select those most likely to be good terrorists, naturally screening out the weaker members who would be most prone to defect and endanger the group. Suicide bombing is a service: it signals the intensity of the commitment to the faith and strengthens bonds inside the group. This is on top of any political agenda it may have.
In religious communities, dietary restrictions, tattoos, clipped foreskins, and other rules of behavior help the committed recognize one another, assist one another, and isolate themselves from the rest. Anybody who has ever belonged to a street gang that resorts to hazing rituals and demands a conspicuous patchwork of tattoos will understand how clubs set rules and demand sacrifices to segregate members from those outside. Muslims are expected to pray five times a day, donate a chunk of their income to charity, avoid eating food that is not halal, and participate in dozens of other rituals. Anybody who will subject him or herself to the full ritual treatment is unlikely to be faking it, and can thus be trusted as loyal and committed.
The twelfth-century Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides wrote that circumcision is not only mandated by God “to limit sexual intercourse, and to weaken the organ of generation as far as possible, and thus cause man to be moderate.” It is also supposed to give “to all members of the same faith, i.e., to all believers in the Unity of God, a common bodily sign, so that it is impossible for any one that is a stranger, to say that he belongs to them. For sometimes people say so for the purpose of obtaining some advantage.