The BWAIN

I came across this opin­ion piece excerp­ted from Richard Dawkins’ latest book, The God Delu­sion. It’s a good piece, how­ever there’s one niggle that I have.

I’m of the firm opin­ion that the more nig­gly the com­plaint about some­thing, the more it shows that you don’t dis­agree with any­thing sub­stan­tial. That’s true here.

So, anti­cip­at­ing the objec­tion that he is ignor­ing the best of reli­gion, Dawkins writes:

The mel­an­choly truth is that decent, under­stated reli­gion is numer­ic­ally neg­li­gible. Most believ­ers echo Robertson, Fal­well or Hag­gard, Osama bin Laden or Ayatol­lah Khomeini. These are not straw men. The world needs to face them, and my book does so.

I would like to know where he got his num­bers from, and I’d like to see the evid­ence that they are, indeed, “negligible”.

Where I live, in Aus­tralia, 68% of people claim to be some sort of Chris­tian. Yet only 19% of people reg­u­larly (once a month or more) turn up to a Chris­tian place of wor­ship. That’s almost half the pop­u­la­tion of the coun­try who claim to fol­low some sort of Chris­tian reli­gion (whether or not they count as “believ­ers” is a whole other ques­tion that I won’t get into right now), but stay away from the organisation.

In the UK, nom­in­al­ism is even stronger. Over 71% of people self-identify as Chris­tian, but only 6.3% turn up on Sunday. (Note: This fig­ure does ignore denom­in­a­tions and churches which have exper­i­enced increased num­bers mid-week, but it’s still the right order of mag­nitude.) That’s way more than half.

In the US, attend­ance is higher; one slightly biassed source that I have says 44%. How­ever, even in this case, Robertson, Fal­well and Hag­gard are not in the major­ity. Approx­im­ately 85% of people self-identify as some kind of Chris­tian, but fewer than 20% are in the Robertson/Falwell/Haggard groups: Baptist and new-wave Evan­gel­ical. Twice that num­ber are Roman Cath­olic, Meth­od­ist, Lutheran, Pres­by­terian and Epis­co­palian. When’s the last time you met a Meth­od­ist who had any time for Pat Robertson?

Moreover, in all three coun­tries, church mem­ber­ship is get­ting older.

I think that Richard Dawkins has misid­en­ti­fied the prob­lem, here. The prob­lem is not that fun­da­ment­al­ists are the major­ity of “believ­ers”, because they’re not. The prob­lem is that their lead­ers are dis­pro­por­tion­ally loud and influ­en­tial. This is espe­cially true in coun­tries with non-compulsory vot­ing, like the US. Fun­da­ment­al­ist lead­ers can mobil­ise voters bet­ter than oth­ers, and espe­cially bet­ter than those denom­in­a­tions who are, for the most part, apolitical.

Yes, some of these fun­da­ment­al­ist denom­in­a­tions are grow­ing faster than non-fundamentalist ones. But the one group that’s grow­ing even faster is the reli­gious unchurched.

The reli­gious unchurched is, I think, a fas­cin­at­ing phe­nomenon, espe­cially in an age when there’s an under­stand­able fear of fun­da­ment­al­ism. It’s some­thing that could only hap­pen in a post­mod­ern age. And I’ll be talk­ing about it more later.

As an aside, the only defence of Dawkins’ asser­tion that I’ve seen (and it wasn’t from Dawkins him­self) was that it says that the major­ity “echo”, rather than fol­low­ing or emu­lat­ing them. If this is true, then Dawkins was really arguing that almost all reli­gious beliefs “echo” the worst elements.

He is on the record as assert­ing that more mod­er­ate believ­ers “prop up” the sys­tem that sup­ports Ted Hag­gard et al. I’m not sure what “sys­tem” he’s refer­ring to, but how could this pos­sibly be true of appar­ent major­ity (in the English-speaking world, at least) of believ­ers who have “dropped out” of institutions?