Finding my religion

A lifelong atheist, I went to church again last Sunday, for about the fourth or fifth time, which I think is enough times that I’ll probably stick with it (and enough that I feel confident talking about it in public without worrying that I’ve accidentally joined a cult).

So despite not believing, I’ve always been curious about religion. Clearly most human beings do believe in something supernatural, which is interesting and worthy of some thought. I was struck a few years ago by Alain de Botton’s book “The Consolations of Philosophy” how my modern liberal ethics and values are not in fact rootless, but deeply rooted in centuries of philosophy, and how us modern liberals are missing something that the church provides - people who’s job it is to be a kind of very practical applied philosopher, translating all this history and helping people to live better and cope with difficulty (Alain then made this argument himself explicitly in a follow-up book “Religion for Atheists”). I’ve also been struck by the economics research on happiness, which finds that people who practice religion tend to be on average happier, and that this is probably partly due simply to turning up to the same place every week with the same group of people, and partly something to do with the actual content - the consolation of the philosophy.

So my very rational calculating mind has turned further and further away from my earlier extremist Dawkins-ist atheism-ism (I don’t like religion because too many religious teachings are homophobic) towards greater curiosity with things like de Botton's "School of Life”, "the Sunday Assembly”, and modern Stoicism. My granddad actually even had a “humanist” funeral (I knew he was not religious but had no idea that he was so actively committed to non-religion), so this strain of thinking clearly runs in the family.

Then one day a couple of months ago I walked past the sign outside the church on Newington Green near where I live, proclaiming itself “The Birthplace of Feminism”, and remembered to look it up when I got home. And so as it turns out, this is the church that Mary Wollstonecraft attended in 1792 when she published “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”, one of the first works of feminist philosophy, well over a century before the Suffragettes campaigned for votes for women. Pretty cool. And then it turns out, the current Minister of the church, Andy Pakula, is an atheist. An atheist with a PhD in biology from MIT who loves science. He writes: "As a scientist, I would not entertain any ideas that could not be proven in a well-designed, objective experiment.” This is a church that stopped carrying out marriages in 2008 on principle until all couples had equal marriage rights.

And so, living 5 minutes walk away, I really had no excuse not to go. And it’s great, a place of “radical inclusivity”, where you are "welcome whether you are female, male, or other”, or anything else, and people come together to sing and listen to readings and share personal struggles and sit in silence.

This last Sunday before Christmas we had a very appropriately themed set of nativity stories (about weary travellers being told that there’s no room at the inn), seamlessly mixed with a heavy dose of amazing current stories, from a member of the congregation who just got back from spending a week helping and welcoming refugees landing on a Greek island, and from the church's charity of the month, which is a social club named Akwaaba (Twi for “welcome") in Hackey, for refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants. We’ve actually got loads of room at the inn (in fact the inn is facing a massive aging population crisis such that we need millions of working aged people to come live in the inn if we’re going to have any hope of paying for all those pensions), so it’s nice to be around people who appreciate that too.

So to conclude; research suggests that participating in an organised religion makes you happier, and if you’re a woolly secular liberal like me, then there are churches out there that are secular, actively pro- gay rights, pro- migrant rights, and radically inclusive.

Happy Christmas.

If you fancy taking a look, New Unity has a blog, a livestream on Sunday mornings, and a Youtube channel, but obviously none of these compare to being there in person, and there’s also a whole worldwide Unitarian/Universalist church movement (though it’s possible that not all the other churches will have atheist and MIT-trained scientist Ministers).

How to live well

Some interesting ideas from Alex Evans about the importance of building a movement

"Rich and I set out the need for a different theory of influence. Many of us who work in the fight for development, justice, and sustainability have I think been feeling the limits of theories of change that rely primarily on ‘insider lobbying’. We take that here as our starting point for asking what an alternative approach might look like: one that places much more emphasis on how we build new grassroots coalitions, transform values, and tell each other much deeper stories about where we are, how we got here, where we might choose to go next, and who we really are."

and then what those movements should do

We argue that it starts with the changes that all of us need to make in our own lives. This is partly because of the direct impact that such changes can have, of course, but we think the main issue here is something to do with the quality of intention that movements exemplify. Wherever movements not only demand but live out the change they want to see in the world, there’s a raw power there that can exert the kind of non-linear effect on politics that progressives so urgently want to see.

and from the full report

In practice, we think there are five areas that each of us needs to think about, which we describe in more detail below:

1. Live within our fair share of the world’s resources and environmental limits
2. Respond to poverty and inequality with radical generosity
3. Speak out prophetically
4. Use our power as a voter, a citizen and a consumer
5. Live restoratively and prioritise relationships

All of this is in a report for Christian Aid and supported by references to the bible rather than econ journals. Personally I’ve shifted somewhat from a Dawkins atheist to a de Botton atheist, and think there are important lessons here too for emerging secular congregations.

Aid and religion

I'm generally enough of an aid evangelist that I can put aside my rabid atheism when it comes to religious aid organisations. I suppose that makes me a bit of a consequentialist - when the need is so great, I don't really care about people's motivations as long as they are doing good.

But are they really doing good? A new paper by Niklas Bengtsson in Economic Development and Cultural Change looks at a village-level education project run by a church in Tanzania. They find substantial positive impacts on literacy and education attainment - but - only for the children of Protestants. The children of Catholics living in the same village were unaffected.

Now this wouldn't necessarily be a problem if these programs were all being funded with private donations, but close to a fifth of NGOs receiving support from USAID are Christian organisations, with apparently similar proportions from official donors in Europe. All of which is quite worrying.

Now maybe the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Tanzania is not typical of most religious aid organisations, and others are much better at providing assistance to people of different faiths, but it does raise some serious question marks. 

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

My favourite quote so far: 

“When I was small and would leaf through the Old Testament retold for children and illustrated in engravings by Gustave Dore, I saw the Lord God standing on a cloud. He was an old man with eyes, nose, and a long beard, and I would say to myself that if He had a mouth, He had to eat. And if He ate, He had intestines. But that always gave me a fright, because even though I come from a family that was not particularly religious, I felt the idea of a divine intestine to be sacrilegious. 

Spontaneously, without any theological training, I, a child, grasped the incompatibility of God and shit... Either/or: either man was created in God's image-- and God has intestines!-- or God lacks intestines and man is not like him... 

Shit is a more onerous theological problem than is evil. Since God gave man freedom, we can, if need be, accept the idea that He is not responsible for man's crimes. The responsibility for shit, however, rests entirely with Him, the Creator of man.”

Chart of the Day: Gay Marriage in America

read more at the Monkey Cage.

And here is an equivalent chart for Europe.

Probably the best Economist-Priest in Juba

The vision of Jesuit priest Michael Schultheis, the [Catholic University of Sudan] just started its third year. "We're about a month late starting classes," said Father Schultheis who has a Ph.D. in economics from Cornell. "That's because we had to find a new location."

From the HuffPo, Hat Tip: TH

Why is America so much more religious than Europe?

it is precisely the de-regulation of the religious market and not, as is often assumed, the residue of the “puritan founding” that explains why Americans are so much more religious that Europeans. [Finke and Stark] estimate that rates of religious adherence in the colonies reached their maximum at about 20% and religiosity took off only after previously protected monopolists lost their privileged access to colonial markets (starting in 1776).

From William Roberts Clark in a survey essay on the political economy of religion.

The religious markets approach typically explains variation across time and space in terms of the regulatory environment. In the absence of over-regulation of religious markets, a variety of religious firms hawking variegated religious products can be expected to arise in response to the natural heterogeneity of religious preferences. Consequently, one would expect to find a vibrant religious market where the regulatory environment allows low cost entry of new firms and where state-run monopolies are absent.

The theory also fits with experience in Latin America:

As the Catholic Church lost its ability or willingness to impose monopolies, Latin America countries came under increased pressure from protestant groups who attracted many followers and also spurred Catholics into action

The essay also disputes the phenomena of significant secularisation in Europe:

Stark places one more nail in the secularization hypothesis by arguing that its acceptance has been fueled in part by what he calls the “myth of past piety” in Europe. Current differences in religious behavior between  the U.S. and Europe are  not  the  result  of  secularization  in Europe but  rather  the  fact  that Europe was never as christianized  as  commonly believed.  In 1551 the Bishop of Gloucester  found,  for example,  that more than half of his 311 parish priests could not recite the Ten Commandments

The Manga Bible

I've been meaning to read the bible at some point. For literary purposes or something. But I'm too lazy. Until ARISTOC bookstore came to the rescue with this. Recommended.

Muslims and Christians in Africa

From the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life

See also the BBC’s summary of 10 things we learnt

Missionaries and Aid

“A root problem is a liberal snobbishness toward faith-based organizations. Those doing the sneering typically give away far less money than evangelicals. They’re also less likely to spend vacations volunteering at, say, a school or a clinic in Rwanda.”

Nick Kristof writes in defence of faith-based aid in the New York Times. Blattman agrees but Matt seems to be sceptical.

I am a bit of a Dawkins-reading-militant-atheist, but I have to say I have complete respect for the individuals who take their kids to non-family duty stations, stay longer than average aid workers, and work tirelessly.