The New Religiosity

---

The ruling ideology is the ideology of the ruling class, said Marx.

The ruling ideology of capitalism has many attributes, but one of its most fundamental is cognitivism: the recasting of consciousness and interpersonal relationships in terms of rationalism; the distrust, downplaying and ironisation of emotion.

The reasons for this are not hard to find. Emotions evolved to catalyse behaviour in small group situations: interpersonal, subjective, in-the-moment. The challenge and retreat, the grief and sympathy, the overture and the acceptance. By contrast, capitalism is a society of strangers interacting via transactional processes extended in space and time. Spontaneous emotions seriously get in the way; a vague generic prosociality is much to be preferred.

Bourgeois intellectuals theorise this as the ideal-type of human relationships: with each other and with nature. The scientific attitude: everything cool, detached and ironic; everything controlled. Not much room there for untrammelled awe or anything else from the heart.

The new atheists supposed that religion was a cognitive phenomenon: easy to shoot down the sky-fairy buttressed by literalist readings of absurdist texts. Not hard to critique the idiocy of the faithful.

I was in Mass, participating in the rituals, feeling relaxed, part of a community of people I knew and worked with. We were not in conflict and were not transactional; we were volunteers in the service of the transcendental. It spoke to the emotions, to social solidarity, not the detached intellect.

Why?

How do you get a collection of independent primates to group together beyond family and friends? It can’t be a purely intellectual idea - those don’t stick, don't motivate behaviour. It has to be an attachment to some greater good, something ethically worth supporting, something beyond the human and petty. We can and should all line up to follow the Good and Benevolent.

I think there must have been strong evolutionary selection for such adaptations to cultural groupishness: the feelings of social solidarity with comparative strangers (‘us’ not ‘them’), the feelings of awe at the common projection of our altruistic impulses, coalescing around collective symbology. At the dawn of the axial age I imagine that cynical heretics were culled. Religiosity evolved.

Now we have that feeling described amongst the secular by that ugly phrase: ‘a God-shaped hole’.

We’ve tried being atomised and alone: identikit cogs in the global machine, moveable and replaceable, cash in hand, nowhere to go, no-one to go with. And yet the ‘idiocy of village life’ which Marx remarked upon still casts its shadow: we don’t want to go back to the stultifying small-scale traditional community, dominated by its petty jealousies and mindless conformity.

And yet we have a real choice, here in modernity: we can join clubs, societies, the military - almost anything with a higher, purer purpose. And one of our choices - perhaps the purest and most ethical - is organised religion.

Perhaps that’s why - as the ludicrous ideologies of the failed global utopia decay and collapse - that traditional religion is making a comeback, with its true social-emotional significance newly-discerned beneath its heavily symbolic self-presentation: "Ad maiorem Dei gloriam".