Valerie Tarico

In what looks to be a declining market, the guardians of traditional religion are ramping up efforts to keep their flocks—or, in crass economic terms, to retain market share. Some Christians have turned to soul searching while others have turned to marketing. Last fall, the LDS church spent millions on billboards, bus banners, and Facebook ads touting “I’m a Mormon.” In Canada, the Catholic Church has launched a “Come Home” marketing campaign. The Southern Baptists Convention voted to rebrand themselves. A hipster mega-church in Seattle combines smart advertising with sales force training for members and a strategy the Catholics have emphasized for centuries: competitive breeding.

In October of 2012 the Pew Research Center announced that for the first time ever Protestant Christians had fallen below 50 percent of the American population. Atheists cheered and evangelicals beat their breasts and lamented the end of the world as we know it. Historian of religion, Molly Worthen, has since offered big picture insights that may dampen the most extreme hopes and fears. Anthropologist Jennifer James, on the other hand, has called fundamentalism the “death rattle” of the Abrahamic traditions.

In all of the frenzy, few seem to give any recognition to the player that I see as the primary hero, or, if you prefer, culprit—and I’m not talking about science populizer and atheist superstar Neil deGrasse Tyson. Then again, maybe I am talking about Tyson in a sense, because in his various viral guises—as a talk show host and tweeter and as the face on scores of smartass Facebook memes—Tyson is an incarnation of the biggest threat that organized religion has ever faced: the internet....

Americans are leaving their religions at a faster rate than ever before, and that means more are looking for help with the transition. People who are casually religious may walk away and not look back. But for others religion is at the very heart of their identity, worldview and community, and having a safe place to process doubts can be a metaphorical godsend.

“Reclaimers,” people who are actively working to rebuild their lives after a period of religious immersion, may struggle with harmful ideas and emotions from the beliefs they once held or the behavior of fellow believers. Alternately, they may find that leaving is lonely and disorienting. Marlene Winell, a human development consultant who assists people leaving their religion, coined the term Religious Trauma Syndrome to describe a pattern she saw in some clients, in particular those leaving closed, authoritarian, fear-based communities. But even doubters who don’t experience this level of distress may find themselves feeling confused, afraid, self-doubting or overwhelmed.

Since 2009, a small nonprofit called Recovering From Religion, has worked to serve this population by establishing peer support groups, organizing “Recovering Your Sexuality” classes, and providing a matchmaking service for clients seeking therapists who are committed to a secular approach. In March, Recovering From Religion launched a hotline, 1-84-I-DoubtIt, staffed by a cadre of volunteers trained in listening and crisis triage techniques. From years of daily emails and calls to their office, the staff knew there was an unmet need. Even so, they were caught off guard by the response—over 1,000 calls in the first six weeks. ...

When Hillary Clinton made the comment that took her down, she was trying to say that most Americans on the right half of the political spectrum aren’t deplorable. Right-wing media edited and spun it the other way—with enormous impact—because people hate being sneered at. We hate, hate, hate it! Having someone see you as deplorable is a deal breaker. It creates a rift that may never be bridged. Marital researchers at the Gottman Institute discovered that even subtle expressions of contempt can predict which relationships will end badly. How is it, then, that activists who claim to be invested in the future, who think our causes are worthy, who say people should donate and volunteer and vote our way, have adopted the posture of denigrating, deriding, and even dehumanizing anyone who doesn’t think exactly like us? As a recruiting tactic, telling people they are stupid and immoral is an epic fail. A mean-girls strategy may pull people into line if they are already in your orbit, but from the outside it is repellant.

Let’s be honest.
Since the time that Clinton’s words were twisted so effectively to foster resentment and deepen America’s political divide, things have gotten only more fractious. Fox-clone media and self-interested politicians own the bulk of the blame for this. But while I find right-wing postures and priorities and lying and the whole MAGA phenomenon to be horrifying, we progressives often make things worse instead of better. We pretend, when they sneer and call us woke, that they are just hating our awareness, compassion and diversity. We pretend not to know that with good reason the word woke now connotes—even among many on the left—smugness, sanctimony, an attitude of intellectual superiority, and an eagerness to impute the worst possible motive to anyone who disagrees. We pretend not to recognize that we regularly use words like white and Christian and male and straight as slurs, as ways of conveying that a person is less of a person to us, and more of a symbol, and that we aren’t really interested in their thoughts or fears or pain or dreams. We spend time in activist spaces and online forums trash-talking and othering whoever isn’t in the room. And then we say they should join our movement.

No thanks.
It shouldn’t take a psychologist to say this, but few people, regardless of race or sex, have so much spare mental health and resilience that they can afford to join clubs that shit on them. Any cadre of Mormon or Evangelical missionaries could tell you that’s not the way to win converts. Wait a minute, you might say. Don’t Christian missionaries tell prospective converts that they are sinners from birth, “utterly depraved” in the words of John Calvin, and in need of salvation? Yes, they do. But they also pair that with instant absolution....

Christianity’s recently launched He Gets US campaign—millions of people got a dose during the Superbowl—tells us two things: 1. Conservative Evangelical Christians care about their brand problem. 2. Some major Christian donors have decided, to the tune of $100 million apparently, to go with the greenwashing strategy rather than substantive change. And that combination provides a possible avenue for fighting back against some of the ugly objectives and tactics of the Religious Right.

The people paying for this ad campaign are the same ones promoting homophobia, advocating against reproductive healthcare for women, and funding politicians to protect the good old pecking orders: rich over poor, men over women, white people over everyone with more melanin.

Losing customers
Back when the world and I were young, Evangelical Christians were a politically diverse group. But Republican strategists recognized them as a potential political voting block. Hierarchical social structures within churches meant the strategists had to recruit only Church leaders, and those leaders would bring along their congregations. It worked for the Republican party, but at an enormous cost to Christianity as an institution. That is because right wing operatives were spending down Christianity’s good name by merging its brand with their own. The more Christianity came to be associated with ugly political priorities—and then crass power grab-‘em-by-the-pussies—the more young people fled the Church. By the millions. (Tangentially, Islam faces a similar brand problem and deconversion pattern wherever the Mullahs wield political force. Almost half of Iranians say they used to be religious.)...

See Part One of this series here.

We all know that gods don’t actually have to exist for religions to spring up around them, so mostly we filter out the miracles and god-talk as mere mythology and tend to think of any so-called “prophets” as simply human beings who were unusually wise, unusually deluded, or excellent liars. That said, we often accept that the biographical stories about these extraordinary personages are largely true. We credit religious patriarchs and prophets like Buddha, LaoTse, Abraham, Jesus or Muhammad, with outsized roles in human history, much as we might credit Napoleon or Thomas Jefferson, or modern cultural icons like Elon Musk.

It turns out that we may be giving them too much credit. Even assuming that most of these iconic figures actually existed in some form in the flesh[1], religions may owe their current (and historic) forms more to social conditions—convergences of culture and technology– than individual founders....