Over in Twitter-land, Zach Weinersmith asks a weird but interesting question about the apparent lack of modern religions:
He later goes on to clarify (in a different Twitter thread) that for something to count as a religion, he’s looking for an explicit element of the supernatural, attributing power and intention to forces that go beyond merely human agency. It’s kind of an interesting thread, though, in prompting me to think a bit about the spectrum of things that get classed as “religion,” which leads down the road to the physicist-with-a-liberal-arts-background noodling that you’re about to read. (Or close the tab on and get on with your day, whatever works for you…)
Most current attempts to describe something as “a new religion” are using it in an accusatory manner, using one of two ancillary features (or maybe groups of features) associated with long-established religions. One line of attack is to invoke a kind of cranky dogmatism— people in the “anti-woke” camp will accuse their nemeses in the social justice sphere of treating a bunch of dubious propositions as articles of faith that cannot be questioned for fear of excommunication. The other is to invoke a kind of unquestioning obedience to a charismatic figure— Weinersmith is nodding to that by citing Jordan Peterson; Joe Rogan and Donald Trump are other regularly cited examples (though in the case of Trump things get complicated by the involvement of established Christian sects) of people whose followers are accused of behaving like adherents to a new religion. (Or cultists, depending on how insulting the speaker wants to be…)
It is striking, though, that none of these attacks involve any supernatural element. Charismatic figures like Peterson and Rogan don’t claim to have any mystical powers, and the occasional attempts to associate them with Trump are mostly Christianity by proxy, things like awful paintings of Trump with Jesus. And both sides of the “woke” argument tend to treat the controversial points as features subject to proof by empirical means (they just disagree about what the evidence says regarding the disputed propositions).
I’m not sure what the last “new religion” with an explicit supernatural aspect would be; probably Scientology? I don’t really know (or, honestly, care) enough about their beliefs to say. If not them, it’s the Latter-Day Saints, but that’s an offshoot of Christianity; then again Christianity was initially associated with Judaism, so maybe turnabout’s fair play. I guess you could argue about whether the various neo-pagan approaches should count as rediscoveries of genuinely ancient practices, or are mostly modern inventions, but either way they’re not especially numerous or influential.
That got me wondering whether this might just be a kind of evolution in belief systems, though. If you look at the candidates for “last new religion,” it’s striking that they’re basically monotheistic. Even when people were more comfortable with supernaturalism more broadly, systems with multiple gods seems to have fallen out of fashion. So maybe we’ve seen a new replacement of supernaturalism with a kind of empiricism in the same way that polytheism was replaced by monotheism in previous centuries. In which case, we’d be highly unlikely to see anything that would meet Weinersmith’s standard for a real religious movement.
There is another feature common to both old religions and new that I think gets skipped over, though, one that in some sense is shared by both the Peterson/Rogan camp on the right (-ish) and the “woke” on the left (-ish), namely a focus on personal action. Peterson and Rogan are very much pushing a kind of “up by your bootstraps” message, urging people to pursue success through a kind of self-discipline. And there’s a similar element of individual responsibility in a lot of modern social-justice movements— an emphasis on getting privileged individuals to acknowledge their own complicity in ways that sometimes seem counter-productive to their political goals. You could also bring a lot of modern environmentalism in the same way, particularly the vehement rejection of nuclear power and geoengineering and insistence on personal sacrifices as the primary tool for reducing environmental harm. Both privilege-checking and “degrowth” have a strong “expiation of sin” feel to me in a way that’s reminiscent of my long-lapsed Catholic upbringing.
That thought, in turn, makes me think again that there ought to be some opportunity here to reconcile these different elements— the “get your shit together” aspect of Peterson/Rogan seems like exactly what one ought to say to people from privileged backgrounds. But then, this whole thing has gotten bound up in Culture War partisanship in a way that probably makes that a futile hope.
Anyway, as I said at the top, that’s a little noodle-y (you were warned…), but it’s been running around in my head since Weinersmith’s tweet, and typing this will hopefully get it out of my system and let me go back to focusing more on book promotion and cross-country skiing. Here are some buttons:
and if you want to call me a heretic, you can do that in the comments.
I've thought for a while now that lots of these (nominally) leftist social movements seem to equate self-flagellation with moral goodness, instead of, y'know, doing good with moral goodness.
But on religion: Are we restricting this discussion to Murica? Because I know South Korea has plenty of Christian cults, and Taiwan is also infamous for cults (e.g. the Falun Gong). You could also argue that there are plenty of martial arts schools in China that claim some sort of supernatural ability, though whether you'd count that as just a rehash of the old concepts of Chi and the five elements, or whether it's even properly religious, is debatable.
I found McWhorter’s new book persuasive. But could it count wholly as “new”? I dunno. There are some in the woke camp who still ascribe to the Christian god, others are atheists who ascribe an almost supernatural (certainly overwhelming) power to an invisible social force.