Belief in the unbelievable

I was struck this week by the contrast between two stories. One is a Gallup poll released last month that measured American belief in what the organisation coyly calls “spiritual entities”: god, angels, heaven, hell and the devil. A narrow majority (51%) say that they believe in all five; another 31% say they believe in some but not others.

Those numbers may seem extraordinarily high, but in fact they represent a steady decline over the two decades that Gallup has been polling this topic. Back in 2001, 90% claimed to believe in god; that’s now down to 74%. Belief in the devil, the least popular of the five, has fallen from 68% to 58%.

There’s a few interesting things about surveys like this, some of which we talked about in a 2015 post about a Pew Centre report on religious identification. I suggested then that there was social change involved as well as changes in personal belief:

As being non-religious becomes more socially acceptable – helped of course by reports like this and the publicity that they get – people feel less need to profess an affiliation that doesn’t accord with their actual beliefs. It’s not a collapse in religious belief, but a collapse in the status of religion as a social norm, for which loss of belief is perhaps a necessary but certainly not a sufficient condition.

The Gallup poll also confirms the sometimes nominal character of religious identification. As it reports, “Protestants are more likely than Catholics to believe in each of the five entities” (90% versus 80%, for example, in the case of belief in god) – not because god is somehow less central to one religion than the other, but because “Catholic”, somewhat more than “Protestant”, works as a cultural rather than a religious identifier.

There’s also the slippery nature of that word “belief”, something that philosophers have long been conscious of. I thought it was interesting that Gallup phrased its questions as “whether it is something you believe in,” rather than “… believe in the existence of.” In principle, someone could believe that (some particular) god exists without “believing in” that god, in the sense of being a religious adherent. And though it defies easy analysis, I suspect that the reverse is also possible, perhaps even common.

But that brings us to the second story, this week by James Ball in the Guardian, on the spread of conspiracy theories and far-right politics in what he calls the “wellness community”. Unlike Gallup, Ball doesn’t quantify the trend, but he gives us a clear sense of the alarming and appalling things that some people claim to believe in, and he contrasts it with traditional religion:

In a strange way, the idea that a malign cabal is running the world – while far more worrying than a benevolent God – is less scary than the idea that no one is in charge and everything is chaos.

Once again there’s the uncertainty about “belief”: some conspiracy theorists, when pressed, will claim to be engaging in a sort of ironic performance art rather than accurately describing facts. Some of Gallup’s respondents too may have been expressing emotions rather than factual beliefs, or may just have been pulling the pollster’s leg.

Perhaps it’s true, as some would suggest, that the amount of superstition in a society is roughly constant, so that a decline in traditional religious belief is naturally associated with a rise in some other (possibly more dangerous) weirdness. But I find this hard to believe. And it doesn’t really seem to fit the facts: conspiracy theories today are flourishing not so much in places where religious belief has declined most steeply, but in those – such as the United States – where it remains relatively strong.

Nonetheless, one can’t help wondering whether there was a time when monotheistic religion appeared to the majority of respectable, educated people in much the same way that conspiracy theories do today: as a strange mix of the comic and the deeply scary. Did people in, say, the Roman Empire look at emerging Christianity as the sort of QAnon of its time – something that was just too absurd to take seriously?

We know how that turned out. We know that unbelievable beliefs, of which Christianity is by no means the worst, can take hold of a society. What we don’t know is how our end of the story plays out; that remains in our hands.