I’ve wondered for years if the real cause of pastors’ hostility to the Internet isn’t satanic-porn and -gaming, but the ease with which information is shared — about their own execrable conduct, about the progress of scholarship. Daniel Dennett seems to think that might be right.
Today one of the largest categories of religious affiliation in the world—with more than a billion people—is no religion at all, the “Nones.” One out of six Americans is already a None; by 2050, the figure will be one out of four, according to a new Pew Research Center study. Churches are being closed by the hundreds, deconsecrated and rehabilitated as housing, offices, restaurants and the like, or just abandoned.
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“Let any one dare to speak to me of its ‘humanitarian’ blessings! Its deepest necessities range it against any effort to abolish distress; it lives by distress; it creates distress to make itself immortal.”
Nietzsche
Could anything turn this decline around? Yes, unfortunately. A global plague, a world war fought over water or oil, the collapse of the Internet (and thereby almost all electronic communication) or some as-yet unimagined catastrophe could throw the remaining population into misery and fear, the soil in which religion flourishes best.
With hardly any significant exceptions, religion recedes whenever human security and well-being rises, a fact that has recently been shown in numerous studies, but was suspected by John Calvin in the 16th century.
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Religious institutions, since their founding millennia ago, have managed to keep secrets and to control what their flocks knew about the world, about other religions and about the inner workings of their own religion with relative ease. Today it is next to impossible.
The progress of Biblical scholarship has been especially devastating; practically no scholar anywhere — those without a contractual obligation to uphold the company line, like the Southern Baptists, I mean — believes that Abraham or Moses actually existed, and there is solid reason to question the historicity of Jesus himself. King David has been shown to have been little more than a small-time regional gangster. The persecution stories are mostly myths (like today).
Christianity is not true, and there is no educated, intellectually serious dispute about that — and most pastors knew that when they graduated from seminary or, at least, had the information to know (if not the thinking skills). Today, thanks to the Internet, everybody else is figuring that out, too, and that’s why pastors are so strident nowadays: They know the jig is just about up.