Interesting stats on Religiosity from Pew, published in October, 2019.
In my view, there are also many other forms of groupishness that I see as religious or quasi religious that are not considered by these surveys. I also suspect that as traditional religions melt away, other groups that don't look like traditional religions at first glance, but which have similar functions, take their place.
I've closely followed the writings of Jonathan Haidt. His conclusions are closely tied to scientific findings. He crosscuts the current American political divide. He is hopeful that we will find our way as a country.
In this recent article at The Atlantic, "Jonathan Haidt Is Trying to Heal America’s Divisions: The psychologist shares his thoughts on the pandemic, polarization, and politics," Haidt explains what has gone wrong with many of those who consider themselves to be liberals and conservatives. What they have in common is authoritarianism populism:
Haidt laments the state of contemporary American politics, believing that on both the right and the left we’re seeing populism that responds to real problems but in illiberal ways. “On the right,” he said, “the populism there is really explicitly xenophobic and often explicitly racist … I think we see strands of populism on the right that are authoritarian, that I would say are incompatible with a tolerant, pluralistic, open democracy.”
Looking in the other direction, Haidt says, “we’ve messed up the word liberal and we’ve used it to just mean ‘left.’ I’ve always thought of myself as a liberal, in the John Stuart Mill sense. I believe in a society that is structured to give individuals the maximum freedom to construct lives that they want to live. We use a minimum of constraint, we value openness, creativity, individual rights. We try hard to maximize religious liberty, economic liberty, liberty of conscience, freedom of speech. That’s my ideal of a society, and that’s why I call myself a liberal.”
But on the left, Haidt said, “there’s been a movement that has made something else sacred, that has not focused on liberty, but that is focused instead on oppression and victimhood and victimization. And once you get into a framework of seeing your fellow citizens as good versus evil based on their group, it’s kind of a mirror image of the authoritarian populism on the right. Any movement that is assigning moral value to people just by looking at them is a movement I want no part of.”
Haidt went on: “I think this is a very important point for us to all keep in mind, that left and right in this country are not necessarily liberal and conservative anymore. On the left, it’s really clear that there are elements that many of us consider to be very illiberal; and on the right, it’s hard to see how Trump and many of his supporters are conservatives who have any link whatsoever to Edmund Burke. It’s very hard for me to see that. You know, I would love to live in a country with true liberals and true conservatives that engage with each other. That, I think, is a very productive disagreement. But it’s the illiberalism on each side that is making our politics so ugly, I believe.”
The key quote from the passage above: "Any movement that is assigning moral value to people just by looking at them is a movement I want no part of.” This is a modern version of MLK's classic advice that is scorned by many modern day "liberals": "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. Why has this beautiful sentiment become so difficult today?
Check out this cool infographic at the Visual Capitalist. Here is what is at stake, according to the website: "[T]hird parties can also take advantage of these biases to influence our thinking." These should be memorized and sent as reminders to all of your half-crazed friends on social media.
Think carefully about who you will spend time with, because you tend to imitate the people around you. That is the message from this article from BBC, "How Your Friends Change Your Habits - For Better or Worse." Excerpt:
“There is good reason to believe that when we use normative behaviour it makes us feel good because we’re connecting with a social group,” says Higgs. “If you are with a new social group, you are more likely to imitate behaviours.”
At The Atlantic, Jay Van Bavel discusses recent experiments showing that we are not permanently polarized with regard to our political positions. The article is titled, How Political Opinions Change.
In a recent experiment, we showed it is possible to trick people into changing their political views. In fact, we could get some people to adopt opinions that were directly opposite of their original ones. . . . A powerful shaping factor about our social and political worlds is how they are structured by group belonging and identities... We are also far more motivated to reason and argue to protect our own or our group’s views. Indeed, some researchers argue that our reasoning capabilities evolved to serve that very function.People tend to take more extreme positions of their same viewpoint when challenged with information supporting the opposite view. The trick is to suggest to the person that they actually held the opposite view through false-feedback. The take-away: "people have a pretty high degree of flexibility about their political views once you strip away the things that normally make them defensive."