Richard Sosis compared the fates of several hundred religious and secular American communes founded in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Almost all eventually dissolved, except for the extremely successful colonies of the religious group known as Hutterites: all 20 Hutterite colonies that were in Sosis’s sample survived. Leaving aside those Hutterite colonies, 199 sampled colonies eventually disbanded or died out, always preceded by a loss of faith in the group’s ideology, and sometimes also by natural disasters, death of a charismatic leader, or hostility of outsiders. However, the annual probability of dissolution was four times higher for the secular communes than for the religious communes. Evidently, religious ideologies are more effective than secular ideologies at persuading members to maintain a possibly irrational commitment, to refrain from deserting even when it would make rational sense to do so, and to deal with the constant challenges of living in a community that holds property in common and that is at high risk of being abused by free-riding members. In Israel as well, where for many decades there have been both religious kibbutzim and a much greater number of secular kibbutzim, the religious kibbutzim have been more successful than the secular ones in every year, despite the high costs imposed on religious kibbutzim by their religious practices (e.g., abstaining from all labor one day a week).
Measures of religious success
The other solution that I have found useful for resolving religion’s paradoxes is the approach of evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson. He notes that a religion serves to define a human group competing with other human groups espousing different religions. The most straightforward measure of a religion’s relative success is its number of adherents. Why does the world today hold over a billion Catholics, about 14,000,000 Jews, and no Albigensian Manichaeans (members of a formerly numerous Christian sect believing in the dual existence of evil and good supernatural forces locked in eternal struggle)?
Wilson proceeds by recognizing that a religion’s number of adherents depends on the balance between several processes tending to increase the number of adherents and several processes tending to decrease that number. The number of adherents is increased by believers giving birth to children and successfully raising their children in that faith, and by conversions of adherents of other religions or previously non-religious people. The number is decreased by deaths of adherents, and by losses of adherents to conversion to other religions. One might pause at this point and say, “Of course, that’s obvious, so what?—how does that help me understand why Catholics believing in Christ’s resurrection outnumber Jews who don’t?” The power of Wilson’s approach is that it provides a framework for examining separate effects of a religion’s beliefs or practices on those various processes increasing or decreasing the number of adherents. Some of the results are straightforward, while others are subtle. It turns out that religions practise widely different strategies for achieving success.
For example, the American religion known as the Shaker movement was for a period in the 19th century very successful, despite demanding celibacy of its believers and thus lacking completely the commonest method by which religions propagate themselves (by having children). The Shakers achieved their success entirely by winning converts for many decades. At the opposite extreme, Judaism has persisted for several thousand years despite not seeking converts. Not surprisingly, Christianity and Islam, which do proselytize, have far more adherents than does Judaism, but Judaism has nevertheless persisted because of other factors contributing to its demographic growth: relatively high birth rates, low death rates except at times of persecution, emphasis on education to generate economic opportunities, strong mutual help, and low losses by conversion of Jews to other religions. As for Albigensian Manichaeans, their disappearance was only indirectly due to their belief that the forces of evil and of good are locked in eternal struggle. It wasn’t the case that that belief discouraged Albigensians from having children, or that it was so implausible as to prevent their winning converts. Instead, that belief was anathema to mainstream Catholics, who declared a holy war against the Albigensians, eventually besieged and captured their stronghold, and burned all remaining Albigensians there to death.
More subtle reasons emerge from Wilson’s framework for answering one of the biggest questions of Western religious history. Why, among the innumerable tiny Jewish sects competing with each other and with non-Jewish groups within the Roman Empire in the first century AD, did the one of them that became Christianity emerge as the dominant religion three centuries later? In late Roman times Christianity’s distinctive features contributing to this outcome included its active proselytizing (unlike mainstream Judaism), its practices promoting having more babies and enabling more of them to survive (unlike contemporary Roman society), its opportunities for women (in contrast to Judaism and Roman paganism at that time, and to later Christianity), its social institutions resulting in lower death rates of Christians than of Romans from plagues, and the Christian doctrine of forgiveness. That doctrine, which is often misunderstood as the simplistic notion of indiscriminately turning the other cheek, actually proves to be part of a complex, context-dependent system of responses ranging from forgiveness to retaliation. Under certain circumstances, experimental tests carried out by playing simulation games show that forgiving someone who has done you one wrong may really be the response most likely to gain you advantages in the future.
Another example of the use of Wilson’s framework involves the success of Mormonism, which has been among the most rapidly growing religions of the last two centuries. Non-Mormons tend to doubt the claim I cited earlier, by Mormonism’s founder Joseph Smith, that the angel Moroni appeared to him on September 21, 1823, to reveal golden plates buried on a hilltop near Manchester village in western New York State and awaiting translation (Table 9.2). Non-Mormons also doubt the sworn statements of 11 witnesses (Oliver Cowdery, Christian Whitmer, Hiram Page, and 8 others) who claimed to have seen and handled the plates. Hence non-Mormons may wonder: how have those apparently implausible claims led to the explosive growth of Mormonism?
Wilson’s approach involves realizing that a religion’s success in increasing its number of adherents does not depend on whether its tenets happen to be true, but instead on whether those tenets and associated practices motivate the religion’s adherents to conceive and successfully rear children, win converts, constitute a smoothly functioning society, or do all of those things. In Wilson’s words, “Even massively fictitious beliefs can be adaptive, as long as they motivate behaviors that are adaptive in the real world…. Factual knowledge is not always sufficient by itself to motivate an adaptive behavior. At times a symbolic belief system that departs from factual reality fares better.”
In the case of Mormonism, its tenets and practices have been outstandingly successful at promoting demographic growth. Mormons tend to have many children. They form a strongly supportive and interdependent society offering a full and satisfying social life and incentives to work. They emphasize proselytizing; young Mormons are expected to devote up to two years of their lives to winning converts, either overseas or else near home. Mormons are expected to pay to their church an annual tithe equaling 10% of their income (in addition to paying the usual U.S. federal, state, and local taxes). These high demands for commitment of time and resources guarantee that those who choose to become or remain Mormons take their faith seriously. As for the supposed implausibility of the statements of Joseph Smith and his 11 witnesses about divine revelations via the golden plates—what, really, is the difference between those statements and the biblical accounts of divine revelations to Jesus and to Moses, except for millennia of elapsed time and our differing skepticisms derived from our different upbringings?