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By Root 1272 0

economic opportunity to European Jews. Most Jews responded as standard economics would suggest. As external opportunities blossomed, their options in the labor market increased, and the value of their time rose, they cut back on religious participation, giving rise to more relaxed forms of Reform and Conservative Judaism. But the ultra-Orthodox sects, like the Hasidim who emerged in Poland and their opponents the Misnagdim, who arose in Lithuania, chose the opposite path—rejecting modernity and demanding even more sacrifice from believers. In 1865, for instance, ultra-Orthodox leaders in Hungary passed a pronouncement called the “Pesach Din,” forbidding their followers from entering a synagogue that had adopted innovations like speaking German during the service, having a structure resembling a steeple, or employing a male choir.

To this day, the ultra-Orthodox maintain the clothes, eating habits, and lifestyle prevalent in the shtetls of Central and Eastern Europe. They reject modernity as corrupt and shun more moderate Jews. In Israel, they have lobbied the government to restrict retailing and traveling on the Sabbath. And despite entrenched poverty, men remain out of the job market into their forties, choosing instead to stay in the yeshiva studying the holy texts. From 1980 to 1996 the share of prime-aged ultra-Orthodox men in yeshiva who did not participate in the labor force increased from 40 percent to 60 percent.

The most successful religions at building enthusiastic flocks are usually the most extreme in their beliefs, like evangelical Christians in the United States or radical Islamists in Central Asia and the Middle East. Even in the face of increasing opportunities in the secular world outside, these churches have developed a growing following of truly fervent believers by closing down their options. They select their members among people with the fewest opportunities outside and erect higher barriers to keep them in. It is a strange strategy: raising prices to keep your customers. But it works.

The experience of the Catholic Church over the past few decades underscores the risk to religion of following the opposite path and trying to accommodate a rising secular world. Over the centuries, the Catholic Church has managed a large and complex list of rules, restrictions, and sacrifices, by pruning, tweaking, and fine-tuning them in order to survive the rise of science and maintain its relevance despite the spread of economic progress around the world.

But with a flock of about 1.15 billion, the modern Catholic Church has avoided radical strategies to build fervor by toughening up the rules. Perhaps it feared it could lose too many believers. Instead, it has sought to navigate narrow straits between tight strictures, which could turn off marginal believers sitting on the fence between the Church and the secular world, and openness, which would weaken the appeal of the Church for the more committed. By the standards of any secular corporation, the strategy has been wildly successful: Catholicism remains the largest religious institution in the world. Still, its efforts to soften the rules to accommodate modernity have cost it many true believers—who have decamped to the more strict and fervent denominations of evangelical Christianity.

In the 1960s, the Catholic Church struggled to adapt to a world that seemed intent on deviating from the straight and narrow. Wedded to a rigid biblical literalism, the Church seemed increasingly out of touch in this period of enormous social ferment. On April 8, 1966, Time magazine even splashed on its cover the question “Is God Dead?” in bloodred letters against a black background—and achieved its biggest newsstand sales in twenty years. “Secularization, science, urbanization—all have made it comparatively easy for the modern man to ask where God is and hard for the man of faith to give a convincing answer, even to himself,” wrote John T. Elson, the magazine’s religion editor.

The Church responded with a fateful decision to modernize. During the Second Vatican Council, which