Dynamic Secularization

If the situation were not already confusing enough, some of the social sciences that study religion seem to have entered extended periods of crisis. For example, as measured by references in historical newspapers available online, in the period 1840–1919, psychology rose from nowhere to overshadow both religion and the pseudoscience of phrenology. Today, however, social psychology, that gave us valuable conceptual frameworks like the Lofland-Stark model of recruitment to religious movements, is losing credibility. George Homans and Satoshi Kanazawa theorized that humanity already understood everything there is to learn about human interaction in the prehistoric state of nature, which would imply that social psychology could at best formalize folk wisdom. New social realities may emerge, such as those caused by communication technologies, but they may be too varied to be studied with small, non-random samples in brief laboratory experiments. In August 2015, the journal Science reported that only a quarter of studies in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology could be replicated, and those that did give reliable results may merely have reproduced traditional findings couched in new terminology. Leading social psychologists like James House and William Sewell have expressed concern over the years that their field has not achieved the progress they had expected. Organizational fragmentation is another sign of chaos, such as the gap between sociological and psychological social psychology, or within psychology the schism of the Association for Psychological Science from the American Psychological Association, or the schism between psychology more generally and cognitive science. Computer-based cultural phenomena like Netflix movies, videogames, and Facebook groups now promulgate countercultures critical of both religion and science.

This chapter explores some of the alternative online pathways for religious innovation in a time of sacred disintegration, using the example of the Process Church of the Final Judgement, which the author studied ethnographically during its period of popular visibility, 1970–1976. Originally a British deviant psychotherapy growing out of Scientology and Psychoanalysis, the Process became a communal, polytheistic religion in the US and Canada. Its theology was a social psychology theory, postulating four gods that defined the variety of human personalities and interaction issues: Lucifer, Jehovah, Christ and Satan. The result was fragmentation. One faction became monotheistic, and then withdrew from public activity for two decades, before morphing into a very successful animal rescue non-profit corporation, collecting tens of millions of dollars per year through online blogs and videos, thereby illustrating extreme specialization in which a small sector of a radical culture survived. The other faction retained its radical polytheism but could not hold members, and apparently vanished. A few members kept in touch over the years, and when Internet blossomed into the World Wide Web, the original Processean culture revived but in the absence of formal organization. Most strikingly, a number of musical bands either revived the music of the original Process, or more often were inspired by its intellectually rich counterculture in creating their own music. Several of the original Processeans began copying and sharing their scriptures online, and a few commercial publishers began promoting them. After two decades of communication via email, Processean Facebook groups were formed, with the apparent potential to expand and diversify even further. Interacting with larger quasi-Satanic and Ritual Magick groups in Facebook, the Process contributed to a growing radical religious subculture. Some members describe it as the left-hand path, implying not evil in comparison with the Judeo-Christian-Islamic right-hand-path, but individualism and dynamism, rejecting orthodoxy enshrined in formal organizations, and using Internet rather than local congregations to unite members.

Using information obtained online, this chapter considers how some rather well-known religious traditions of the past have given birth to genres of secular culture, and how online communications can accelerate the decline of controversial religions. The title “residualism” refers to the fact that the disintegration of a religion does not necessary lead to the death of all its features, because some residue of its culture may persist, even become cherished within the wider culture. Brief consideration of Transcendental Meditation notes how this Hindu practice was able to migrate to the United States and survive, despite separation from Hinduism and the collapse of popularity of the organization that popularized it. A more extensive section documents the scandals that devastated the Children of God, in the modern context when journalists exploit religious conflict, and anyone may post disparaging information about a group online. We cannot be sure how much the CoG was responsible for its own decline, but insightful member Claire Borowik believes Internet renders religious experimentation even more risky than in earlier days. The next case considered is the Shakers, noting that beginning two centuries ago Mary Marshall Dyer had great difficulty battling this communal Christian group that she felt had stolen her family, and the remarkable fact that some elements of Shaker culture, like the hymn “Simple Gifts,” have become popular among people who today have not a clue what the Shakers really were, such as the performers and audience of Lord of the Dance. The most striking example of quasi-survival of religious residue is Richard Wagner’s Ring operas, which retold the ancient myths of Nordic polytheism, now constantly reinterpreted by performances that can be viewed in YouTube. The chapter concludes with the case of biorhythm pseudoscience, a secularized form of astrology that first spread through specialized calculating devices, and now offers automatic readings from websites with specialized computing programs.

Jedi religion is a perplexing cultural phenomenon, based on the Jedi Master mythology of the Star Wars movies, which drew heavily upon westernized visions of Zen Buddhism. In official government censuses held in 2001 there were 70,509 Jedis in Australia, 21,000 in Canada, 53,000 in New Zealand, 390,127 in England and Wales, and 14,052 in Scotland. It seems likely that most of these people were secularists who merely used a Jedi campaign to complain against any connections between church and state, yet within these larger numbers there were smaller groups that seriously proclaimed themselves adherents to the new Jedi religion. This chapter closely examines the online presence of the Temple of the Jedi Order and the Jedi Church, and considers more briefly several competing groups including the Institute for Jedi Realist Studies, the Church of Jediism, and the Temple of the Jedi Force. These groups occasionally hold local meetings or conventions, but most often communicate actively through website-based forums and Facebook groups. Thousands of other would-be Jedis interact within an online virtual world named Star Wars: The Old Republic, which is called a multi-player game but actually is more like a living novel or movie series in which the user becomes one of the characters having somewhat realistic adventures on a galaxy of planets that are caught in a cold war between two factions, each of which has a religion: Jedi for the Republic, and Sith for the Empire. Three censuses – of 2000 and 3082 and 1424 avatars – document that supernatural Jedi and Sith roles are more popular. These virtual Jedi and Sith may not “really believe” in the divine Force or possess real magical powers, and yet for hundreds and even thousands of hours of their lives they experience transcendent roles by means of information and communication technology. Whether experienced as faith or fantasy, Jediism encourages meditation, martial arts, and completion of quest dreams. To at least some degree it confers meaning upon the universe, and asserts that humans have cosmic significance.

Of all the sciences, the one with the most dubious implications is nuclear physics, which explains the nature of physical matter without need for God in its equations, at the same time it permits nuclear weapons of unparalleled destructiveness. Of great cultural significance, the Fallout series of solo-player role-playing computer games produced by several different teams deeply examines the alternative human responses to tragedy, including religion but unsympathetic to it. In the year 2077, a nuclear war between China and the United States caused the collapse of civilization. But that is not a prediction, because it occurs in a different timeline than ours, assuming that American culture remained frozen in the 1950s, as some technologies advanced beyond what was actually achieved. Thus, Fallout is far more than a game, more comparable to great literature, and can be considered either a virtual experience of an alternate reality, or a philosophical analysis of modern civilization. Three of the five versions take place on the west coast, in California, Oregon, and Nevada, while two take place on the east coast, around Washington DC and Boston, including real locations of historical significance, from the Lincoln Memorial, that has become the headquarters for slavers, to the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, that has become the ruined façade of a hidden scientific conspiracy. Very little evidence of traditional religion survived the nuclear holocaust, one being a fictional religion that was clearly based on Scientology, and a pathetic Catholic church in a ruined aircraft carrier that does not even possess a cross. Most significant are the Children of Atom who believe that any nuclear explosion produces a new universe of worlds, unseen but offering homes for millions of new intelligent species. Drawing upon the extensive YouTube community of players, who post videos of their own experiences in the Fallout wasteland, this chapter explores virtual environments that stimulate meditation on the limitations of both religion and science.

The complex online multi-player game WildStar provides a good context for considering excessive optimism concerning space technology, because it imagines several interstellar species converging on the planet Nexus. But it also offers a laboratory for experiencing cultural anthropological notions of religion, in a futuristic context, documented by a study requiring 350 hours of participant observation. A user’s avatar must belong to one or the other of two factions, the imperial Dominion or the rebellious Exiles. Each is an alliance of four different intelligent species, some of which possess distinctive religions. The religion of the Cassians who lead the Dominion is the Vigilant Church, an established denomination that claims its elite is half-divine and worships the sacred Eldan who seem to have withdrawn from the universe. One species conquered by the Cassians, the Draken, was allowed to retain its tribal religion in order to remain bloodthirsty warriors, worshiping five deities representing strength, wisdom, courage, loyalty and spirit. But for the Dominion, religion is a tool of domination. Religion is weak within the Exiles, but one of its species, the Aurin, is nature-loving and very ambivalent about belonging to any faction, because it might prefer to abandon advanced technology to live within a spiritual forest. As we explore Nexus, we discover that the Eldan were an earlier intelligent species that sought to create God through technology and unfortunately succeeded, being destroyed by their deity. WildStar draws upon a wide range of cultural inspirations, to offer both a parody and a revelation about the possible future relationships between religion and science, experienced through information technology.

Transhumanism is a serious intellectual movement, focused on the revolutionary potential of technology to transform humanity, which functions as an online network of organizations, operating through websites, forums, and Facebook groups with thousands of members. They debate whether it is a religious movement, but it does contain the Turing Church, named after the Church-Turing thesis in physics, and a Cyborg Buddha Project. Its fundamental principle is that technological progress is capable of achieving the Singularity at which everything becomes possible including human immortality. One prominent organization is the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, which chiefly seeks to develop an ethical system for managing technological innovation for human benefit. Another is Terasem which describes itself as “a transreligion that includes all religions the way a forest includes its trees.” In addition, the Mormon Transhumanist Association believes that Mormonism naturally advocates the use of advanced technology to achieve transcendence from the human condition. Among the movement’s influential leaders is Max More, who adopted this name as part of a rational conversion experience, organized a branch called Extropianism for a number of years, and now heads the Alcor Institute that freezes humans at death and preserves them in “cryonic suspension” until such time as medical science can hopefully revive them and cure them of all defects. Transhumanism is the most respectable and influential social movement today that specifically advocates replacement of traditional religions with a science-based alternative that could achieve all the traditional supernatural goals.

Information technology helps us consider the possible limitations of humans in understanding their own nature and the nature of the universe that surrounds them. A key belief among Transhumanists is that it will soon be possible to upload human personalities to computers, as one form of technological immortality. This chapter places that claim in a skeptical context, based on familiarity with the current state of artificial intelligence in computer science. One section considers the historical background of robotics, and another the limited understanding of human personality within social psychology, employing a 200-item questionnaire dataset from online software designed to measure the controversial but standard Big Five personality dimensions, with fully 3267 respondents. A third section considers the subjective experience that many more thousands of people have had online, interacting with simulated gods and friends. The conclusion considers the respectable but unconventional perspective in cosmological science known as the Anthropic Principle, which directly contradicts a traditional philosophical argument for the existence of God, the Argument from Design, but also implies a near-term end to scientific progress. This suggests that perhaps there have been three dynamic stages of secularization, separating four cultural perspectives in human history, believing: (1) The universe is the chaotic result of conflict between multiple gods who personify competing cosmic principles. (2) The universe was intentionally created by one, supernaturally intelligent God. (3) The universe is the inexorable result of mathematical logic, in which each force and phenomenon has a precise, undeniable relationship to every other one. (4) The universe is infinite randomness, within which our environment was naturally selected because it alone could support the evolution of intelligence.