The social value of religion, revisited

Christianity is Dying

The prisons have always been full of believers and the hangmen have always been plentifully supplied with religious material on which to exercise their craft.

That has been enough to satisfy some religious skeptics among the learned that Locke, Voltaire, and Gibbon were mistaken in supposing religion has a useful, taming and socializing effect on the human beast.

All the same, the claim has been and still is made that religion is good and even necessary for society because it is a bulwark of morality, itself crucial to the social order.

The popularity of the sexual revolution has thrown a different light on the morals taught by the churches, making religion appear a machine of cruelly intolerant repression, as Hemant Mehta points out.

But, on the other hand, in the modern world children are a burden and an economic liability, with the result that in the presence of lawful contraception and abortion (and, soon, infanticide?) and the absence of socially upheld idealizations of and aspirations for parenthood in a context of morally and legally durable heterosexual nuclear families defined as the only acceptable setting for either sex or parenthood, fertility rates in advanced societies have fallen chronically below replacement level.

Thus it is shown that religious morals are indeed crucial to the survival of social life, though not because they keep us from killing and robbing each other in the war of all against all but because they keep us making families in which to have and raise children.

In brief, the denigration of homosexuality and indeed all sex outside marriage along with the shotgun wedding and many other moral and legal policies totally inimical to the sexual revolution and the personal, sexual freedom it privileges have historically been and continue to be, in the end, crucial to the self-perpetuation of most societies.

The primal horde is the exception, and the matriarchal societies not far removed from it, only because contraception is absent, safe abortion unavailable, infanticide forbidden, economic life simple, and there is so little to culture that it can be reliably passed on even when children are raised, so to speak, in the street, by anybody and nobody.

Hence the increasing reliance of the modern, antinatalist global North on the all-too-natalist global South to keep up population levels.