The Price of Everything

by Eduardo Porter

  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.

  WHEN BELIEF IS CHEAP

  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.

  But with a flock of about 1.15 billion, the modern Catholic Church has avoided radical strategies to build fervor by toughening up the rules. Perhaps it feared it could lose too many believers. Instead, it has sought to navigate narrow straits between tight strictures, which could turn off marginal believers sitting on the fence between the Church and the secular world, and openness, which would weaken the appeal of the Church for the more committed. By the standards of any secular corporation, the strategy has been wildly successful: Catholicism remains the largest religious institution in the world. Still, its efforts to soften the rules to accommodate modernity have cost it many true believers—who have decamped to the more strict and fervent denominations of evangelical Christianity.

  In the 1960s, t
he Catholic Church struggled to adapt to a world that seemed intent on deviating from the straight and narrow. Wedded to a rigid biblical literalism, the Church seemed increasingly out of touch in this period of enormous social ferment. On April 8, 1966, Time magazine even splashed on its cover the question “Is God Dead?” in bloodred letters against a black background—and achieved its biggest newsstand sales in twenty years. “Secularization, science, urbanization—all have made it comparatively easy for the modern man to ask where God is and hard for the man of faith to give a convincing answer, even to himself,” wrote John T. Elson, the magazine’s religion editor.

  The Church responded with a fateful decision to modernize. During the Second Vatican Council, which ended in 1965, the Church proclaimed religious freedom, embraced people of other Christian faiths, and even acknowledged truth in other religions. To make it easier on members in the pews, it relaxed the rules governing mass, encouraging use of vernacular languages rather than Latin so the faithful could understand what was going on. It even allowed incorporating elements from local customs into the liturgy.

  For conservative Catholics the changes amounted to betrayal. Not only did the erosion of believers continue. It may have intensified. After peaking at 74 percent in 1958, by the end of the Council in 1965 weekly mass attendance among American Catholics had declined to 67 percent. Over the next four decades it plummeted to 45 percent. “Religions are in the unusual situation in which it pays to make gratuitously costly demands,” economist of religion Larry Iannaccone once told me. “When they weaken the demands they make on members, they undermine their credibility.” The Church has suffered similarly across the world. In Italy, its stronghold, only 27 percent of Italians say religion is very important to them. In Spain, the share of Catholics who go to mass every week declined from 44 percent in 1980 to 19 percent today.

  It is unclear whether there is anything the Church can do to stop the bloodletting, as modernity puts pressure on religious dogma across the board. The current pope, Benedict XVI, has been working to undo some of the Second Vatican Council’s reforms. He reintroduced the Latin mass. And he brought back the plenary indulgence, an innovation introduced during the First Crusade in the eleventh century that consisted in a blanket pardon for repentant sinners to skip purgatory in exchange for good works and acts of contrition.

  While the Second Vatican Council was all about adapting the teachings and rituals of the Church to a changing world, Pope Benedict focused on reimposing the primacy of the Church over reality. In an interview with the New York Times, the Reverend Tom Reese, a former editor of the Catholic magazine America, said: “The church wants the idea of personal sin back in the equation.” It felt the need to raise its prices to drive more loyal customers in.

  WHAT THE CHURCH WANTS

  There’s nothing in the most basic tenets of faith that necessitates an institutional church. But churches abound—recording its dogmas, classifying its rituals, and managing its taboos.

  To those who share it, the fundamental appeal of faith derives from the community it creates. If that were religion’s only purpose, churches might not be so ubiquitous. But civilization gave faith another purpose: legitimization of power. For this, churches are indispensable. From pharaonic Egypt to medieval Europe and from Meiji Japan to contemporary Iran, rulers have derived their authority from the divine. Churches harness the beliefs in a spiritual world in the service of earthly power. They set themselves up as the ultimate arbiters of behavior, fitting rewards to virtue and punishments to crime.

  During the high Middle Ages the Catholic Church offered a binary option: salvation or hell. To obtain forgiveness sinners had to submit to extremely difficult trials. But around the eleventh and twelfth century, at the peak of its power in Europe, the Church started relaxing its rules and broadening its offerings. It introduced the concept of purgatory, a halfway house where repentant sinners had to spend time after death before being allowed into heaven. It divided sins into the mortal and the venial, so it could introduce more fine-grained pricing of forgiveness and absolution. A key reform was allowing confession in secret before a priest, rather than in public before the whole town. And it began selling indulgences for money. These innovations reduced the average price of sin. Secret confessions allowed priests to use price discrimination—evaluating the wealth of individual sinners and adjusting monetary punishments according to sinners’ ability to pay. It did wonders for the Church’s finances.

  THE CATHOLIC CHURCH ultimately paid a price for these tweaks, as it battled to keep control over the market of medieval faith. It got greedy—collecting levies associated with a widening array of rules to fund a lavish existence. In 1501, during the reign of Henry VII, a papal bull established a price list of indulgences whereby the English could purchase absolution of all sins. Landed lay individuals with income exceeding £2,000 a year had to pay £3 plus 6 sovereigns and 8 dinars. At the other end of the income scale, people making between £20 and £40 a year only had to pay 16 dinars. People could pay to have the souls of relatives extricated from purgatory. Bishops regularly had to pay for their office. And royalty paid to get married.

  The Church frowned on intermarriage within families as far back as the fourth century. The policy stemmed, in part, from concerns over interbreeding within families, which posed risks of having children with genetic malformations. But it had other objectives: nobles favored marriage between relatives because it worked to maintain property within the family. The Church feared this would lead to powerful dynasties that could rival its power. Moreover, a ban on intermarriage allowed it to charge rich families for “dispensations” from the rule.

  The bans got progressively tighter. In the fourth century the Church banned marriage between first cousins. In the sixth century it extended the prohibition to fifth cousins and in the ninth century to sixth cousins. The bans were lucrative. In the eleventh century, the Duke of Normandy, who would come to be known as William the Conqueror, had to build two churches in Caen—the Abbaye aux Hommes and the Abbaye aux Dames—so Pope Leo IX would undo his excommunication after William married a distant cousin, Mathilda of Flanders, against the will of the Church.

  THE CHURCH’S MANAGEMENT of the behavioral price list might have sowed the seeds of its demise. There are several competing explanations of the Protestant Reformation that swept Europe in the sixteenth century. Martin Luther, the priest who led the attack, accused the Church of becoming corrupt and morally weak. Historians have argued that the Church allied itself with the losing side in the many wars that raged in Northern Europe. But to me the most compelling hypothesis is that believers were no longer getting value for money. The prices charged by the Church—which by the logic of faith are designed to tighten the bonds among the faithful—had lost their purpose.

  The Church stopped working to inspire the faithful and focused instead on collecting rents. By adding sophisticated new ways to raise money from its followers, the Church became too expensive for believers and provided too little of its core services in return. This encouraged the entry of a rival into the market: Protestant Christianity, which came to offer believers direct access to God at a better price. It eliminated the rents and recovered the traditional link between costly sacrifice and religious rewards that had characterized faith since its earliest times.

  This approach proved particularly fitting for the emergent capitalist economies that were beginning to develop in Northern European cities, where wealth was inherently less stable than among the landed feudal aristocracy. The Church never established the same alliances with entrepreneurs that it had developed with European nobility. Rather, entrepreneurs resisted its rent seeking and opposed its meddling in economic enterprise. So they chose the competing product.

  SIN VS. THE SECULAR WORLD

  Belief in a divine origin of the world has suffered a battering over the past few centuries. In the West, science has gradually replaced God in the schema of the physical world since Nicolaus Copernicus proved the ear
th was not at the center of everything in the sixteenth century, raising the question of why an omnipresent, omniscient God of everything would care so much about events on a little planet in some corner of the universe.

  Since then the Big Bang proposed an alternative to God for the origin of the universe and Darwin’s theory of natural selection proposed an alternative explanation to the Bible’s for the origin of man. Neuroscience cut the soul out of the picture by equating mind and brain, and modern psychology even challenged religion as a path to happiness.

  European sociologists from the eighteenth century onward, from Karl Marx to Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, argued that secular progress killed faith off. It undermined religion’s main precepts by providing believers with an alternative explanation of the world that didn’t rely on angels. And the edifice of costly rules and sacrifices that defined religious communities, providing them with a collective purpose that helped them succeed over the course of human evolution, was taken over by a secular framework of law. Democratic procedure has replaced religion’s menu of norms and taboos, encouraging solidarity through other means.

  Secular states gradually took over the provision of education, medical care, and other elements of social insurance like pensions and support for the unemployed. As people became richer, more educated, more socially tolerant, and more politically free, religion lost its purpose. Belief in God declined during the second half of the twentieth century in virtually every Western European country, Japan, and even India. The percentage of Irish who go to church at least once a week fell from 82 percent in 1981 to 65 percent two decades later. In the Netherlands it fell from 26 percent to 14 percent.