The Price of Everything (29 page)

People can pay for afterlife benefits with their time—in church, praying, etc.—or with their money. The rich, who have lots of money, yet little time, donate more; the poor, who have more time on their hands, go to church more often. This is not unlike shopping—the poor spend more time at it and typically find more bargains than the rich, who can’t bother to go bargain hunting.

And taxes that change the relative value of time and money can alter the composition of religious investment. In the United States, when the government increased tax breaks for charitable contributions, people reacted by increasing their donations but going less often to church. Each 1 percent increase in religious charity was accompanied by an average decline of 0.92 percent in church attendance, as people who contributed more money felt less of an urge to spend their Sundays on a hard wooden pew.

People select their very flavor of faith through cost-benefit calculations of the most mercenary kind. People with more opportunities in the secular world, those with higher wages and a higher cost of time, will choose less demanding faiths as they will have more to lose from strict moral codes. In the United States, France, and Britain, highly educated people go more often to church than those with less education. But they tend to disbelieve the more extreme religious propositions, such as the reality of miracles.

In the United States, educated Christians choose relatively mild mainstream Protestant denominations, like Presbyterianism. Jews, the best-educated believers, are the least likely to buy the literal truth of the Bible. They go to the synagogue for the social rewards.

By contrast, the most fervent and strict religions tend to be popular among the least educated, which have fewer options elsewhere and are thus most willing to invest the time, energy, and commitment. Evangelicals, Mormons, and Baptists, the Christian denominations with highest church attendance in the United States, are also those whose congregations are the least educated and are the most likely to believe in the devil and heaven.

The individual process of acquiring a religion evidently depends on many factors. Believers are often unaware of the trade-offs of their faith. Parents tend to make the choice for their kids. Most people conform to the religious beliefs of the communities into which they were born. Religious benefits do not come for free, though. Insurance costs money. The benefits of religious organizations depend on their members’ contributions of time, money, and effort. Churches—which can exert substantial moral pressure on their donors—are particularly good at extracting dues.

But money isn’t the most important of religion’s levies. The most significant costs of faith are the sacrifices it imposes on believers and the constraints with which it shackles their lives. From Judaism to Hinduism, religion carries an additional price in the form of a set of rules on dress, diet, grooming, sexual conduct, and even entertainment and social interactions. These rules are not incidental. They are essential to the survival of the faith. Onerous moral strictures weed out the uncommitted and guarantee a minimum level of solidarity and trust within the group.

Herein resides the core proposition of religion. The benefits of belonging depend on the zeal and intensity of every one of its believers, who donate time and money, buttress behavioral rules, provide moral support, and reinforce the mythical narratives that organize their world. The tougher the rules of admittance, the more committed members will be. This zeal is what gives value to membership in a religion for those who believe.

Rules banning secular activities serve to make sure that the faithful commit time and effort to the faith, spending little time enjoying themselves outside the fold. But sacrifices and behavioral constraints also discourage free riders—the nonbelievers and soft-core sympathizers who are unwilling to commit themselves entirely and whose presence would dilute the benefits for all.

This approach explains why radical religious groups are more proficient at terrorism than their secular peers—engaging in more extreme actions up to and including suicide. The sacrifices required to belong to the faith select those most likely to be good terrorists, naturally screening out the weaker members who would be most prone to defect and endanger the group. Suicide bombing is a service: it signals the intensity of the commitment to the faith and strengthens bonds inside the group. This is on top of any political agenda it may have.

In religious communities, dietary restrictions, tattoos, clipped foreskins, and other rules of behavior help the committed recognize one another, assist one another, and isolate themselves from the rest. Anybody who has ever belonged to a street gang that resorts to hazing rituals and demands a conspicuous patchwork of tattoos will understand how clubs set rules and demand sacrifices to segregate members from those outside. Muslims are expected to pray five times a day, donate a chunk of their income to charity, avoid eating food that is not halal, and participate in dozens of other rituals. Anybody who will subject him or herself to the full ritual treatment is unlikely to be faking it, and can thus be trusted as loyal and committed.

The twelfth-century Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides wrote that circumcision is not only mandated by God “to limit sexual intercourse, and to weaken the organ of generation as far as possible, and thus cause man to be moderate.” It is also supposed to give “to all members of the same faith, i.e., to all believers in the Unity of God, a common bodily sign, so that it is impossible for any one that is a stranger, to say that he belongs to them. For sometimes people say so for the purpose of obtaining some advantage.”

The precise content of religious rules is incidental. They just have to be costly to obey. In the sixth century before the Christian era, the philosopher Pythagoras founded a mystic religion heavily influenced by mathematics that proposed the transmutation of souls. Its prohibitions included eating beans, picking up what was fallen, touching a white cock, stepping over a crossbar, stirring a fire with iron, eating from a whole loaf, plucking a garland, sitting on a quart measure, eating the heart, walking on highways, letting swallows share one’s roof, and looking in a mirror beside a light.

The strength of the social glue confectioned from the strictures of faith helps explain why religion has proved so resilient over the millennia, surviving the rise of science, which has undercut many of its most deeply held dogmas, offering an entirely different explanation of how the world works.

Communes were popular across America in the nineteenth century, a time of great social experimentation. Hundreds were founded around all sorts of ideas, from the beliefs of the French utopian socialist Charles Fourier and the Scottish Robert Owen, father of the cooperative movement, to anarchist groups and dozens of religious sects. Very few survived more than a couple dozen years, driven asunder by the difficulty of ensuring cooperation and avoiding disputes over the allocation of resources, rights, and responsibilities. What is notable is that religious communes were two to four times as likely to survive in any given year as secular groups. The reason seems to be that they imposed hefty requirements on their members—including celibacy and restrictions on communicating with outsiders—that strengthened the bonds.

New Harmony, the commune established by Owen in Indiana in 1825, lasted only four years before falling apart among acrimonious disputes. The Oneida community in New York, by contrast, whose members believed that Christ had returned in the year AD 70 so they could establish His millennial kingdom on earth, lasted for thirty-three years before dissolving in 1881. That’s because their ties were reinforced by restrictive rules—including male continence so as not to waste semen, the collective ownership of children, and group criticism designed to eradicate undesirable character traits. And among the communes set up by religious groups, those with the most costly requirements outlasted those with less stringent bans and rules. In essence, religions that imposed the heftiest prices on the faithful were the best at ensuring communities’—and their own—survival.

Religion encourages segregation by design. In Brooklyn, Orthodox Jews strain to remain apart from secular society and even other Jews. Marriages between Mormons and non-Mormons are three times more likely to end in divorce than Mormon-Mormon pairings. Religion is a finely tuned instrument to segregate societies—encouraging the faithful to fold in upon themselves, to trust one another, help one another, and nurture one another. This naturally entails keeping outsiders out and even going to war with them. The most successful religions in history have been those best equipped to separate the inside from the outside. They were the ones with the strictest rules.

That’s why religions’ most deep-seated fear is that opportunities in the outside world will weaken believers’ fervor. Since fervor ultimately determines the strength of the church and the quality of the religious goods it provides, its erosion amounts to an existential threat. So when faith is assaulted by secular temptation, churches’ first reaction is often to batten down the hatches and raise high the walls, demanding that believers sacrifice more to prove the purity of their belief. Some of the faithful might leave the fold as faith becomes more costly to bear. But for those who stay, the rewards will be correspondingly higher.

The pattern is apparent in the paradoxical emergence of ultra-Orthodox Judaism in the eighteenth century, just as the Enlightenment swept through Europe offering more economic opportunity to European Jews. Most Jews responded as standard economics would suggest. As external opportunities blossomed, their options in the labor market increased, and the value of their time rose, they cut back on religious participation, giving rise to more relaxed forms of Reform and Conservative Judaism. But the ultra-Orthodox sects, like the Hasidim who emerged in Poland and their opponents the Misnagdim, who arose in Lithuania, chose the opposite path—rejecting modernity and demanding even more sacrifice from believers. In 1865, for instance, ultra-Orthodox leaders in Hungary passed a pronouncement called the “Pesach Din,” forbidding their followers from entering a synagogue that had adopted innovations like speaking German during the service, having a structure resembling a steeple, or employing a male choir.

To this day, the ultra-Orthodox maintain the clothes, eating habits, and lifestyle prevalent in the shtetls of Central and Eastern Europe. They reject modernity as corrupt and shun more moderate Jews. In Israel, they have lobbied the government to restrict retailing and traveling on the Sabbath. And despite entrenched poverty, men remain out of the job market into their forties, choosing instead to stay in the yeshiva studying the holy texts. From 1980 to 1996 the share of prime-aged ultra-Orthodox men in yeshiva who did not participate in the labor force increased from 40 percent to 60 percent.

The most successful religions at building enthusiastic flocks are usually the most extreme in their beliefs, like evangelical Christians in the United States or radical Islamists in Central Asia and the Middle East. Even in the face of increasing opportunities in the secular world outside, these churches have developed a growing following of truly fervent believers by closing down their options. They select their members among people with the fewest opportunities outside and erect higher barriers to keep them in. It is a strange strategy: raising prices to keep your customers. But it works.

The experience of the Catholic Church over the past few decades underscores the risk to religion of following the opposite path and trying to accommodate a rising secular world. Over the centuries, the Catholic Church has managed a large and complex list of rules, restrictions, and sacrifices, by pruning, tweaking, and fine-tuning them in order to survive the rise of science and maintain its relevance despite the spread of economic progress around the world.