The Price of Everything - Eduardo Porter [89]
The precise content of religious rules is incidental. They just have to be costly to obey. In the sixth century before the Christian era, the philosopher Pythagoras founded a mystic religion heavily influenced by mathematics that proposed the transmutation of souls. Its prohibitions included eating beans, picking up what was fallen, touching a white cock, stepping over a crossbar, stirring a fire with iron, eating from a whole loaf, plucking a garland, sitting on a quart measure, eating the heart, walking on highways, letting swallows share one’s roof, and looking in a mirror beside a light.
The strength of the social glue confectioned from the strictures of faith helps explain why religion has proved so resilient over the millennia, surviving the rise of science, which has undercut many of its most deeply held dogmas, offering an entirely different explanation of how the world works.
Communes were popular across America in the nineteenth century, a time of great social experimentation. Hundreds were founded around all sorts of ideas, from the beliefs of the French utopian socialist Charles Fourier and the Scottish Robert Owen, father of the cooperative movement, to anarchist groups and dozens of religious sects. Very few survived more than a couple dozen years, driven asunder by the difficulty of ensuring cooperation and avoiding disputes over the allocation of resources, rights, and responsibilities. What is notable is that religious communes were two to four times as likely to survive in any given year as secular groups. The reason seems to be that they imposed hefty requirements on their members—including celibacy and restrictions on communicating with outsiders—that strengthened the bonds.
New Harmony, the commune established by Owen in Indiana in 1825, lasted only four years before falling apart among acrimonious disputes. The Oneida community in New York, by contrast, whose members believed that Christ had returned in the year AD 70 so they could establish His millennial kingdom on earth, lasted for thirty-three years before dissolving in 1881. That’s because their ties were reinforced by restrictive rules—including male continence so as not to waste semen, the collective ownership of children, and group criticism designed to eradicate undesirable character traits. And among the communes set up by religious groups, those with the most costly requirements outlasted those with less stringent bans and rules. In essence, religions that imposed the heftiest prices on the faithful were the best at ensuring communities’—and their own—survival.
WHEN BELIEF IS CHEAP
Religion encourages segregation by design. In Brooklyn, Orthodox Jews strain to remain apart from secular society and even other Jews. Marriages between Mormons and non-Mormons are three times more likely to end in divorce than Mormon-Mormon pairings. Religion is a finely tuned instrument to segregate societies—encouraging the faithful to fold in upon themselves, to trust one another, help one another, and nurture one another. This naturally entails keeping outsiders out and even going to war with them. The most successful religions in history have been those best equipped to separate the inside from the outside. They were the ones with the strictest rules.
That’s why religions’ most deep-seated fear is that opportunities in the outside world will weaken believers’ fervor. Since fervor ultimately determines the strength of the church and the quality of the religious goods it provides, its erosion amounts to an existential threat. So when faith is assaulted by secular temptation, churches’ first reaction is often to batten down the hatches and raise high the walls, demanding that believers sacrifice more to prove the purity of their belief. Some of the faithful might leave the fold as faith becomes more costly to bear. But for those who stay, the rewards will be correspondingly higher.
The pattern is apparent in the paradoxical emergence of ultra-Orthodox Judaism in the eighteenth century, just as the Enlightenment swept through Europe offering more