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Tomorrow’s Gods: What is the future of religion?

DEEP CIVILISATION
RELIGION

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Throughout history, people’s faith and their attachments to religious institutions
have transformed, argues Sumit Paul-Choudhury. So what’s next?

By Sumit Paul-Choudhury
2nd August 2019
* This story is featured in BBC Future’s “Best of 2019” collection. Discover more
of our picks.

Before Mohammed, before Jesus, before Buddha, there was Zoroaster. Some 3,500 years
ago, in Bronze Age Iran, he had a vision of the one supreme God. A thousand years
later, Zoroastrianism, the world’s first great monotheistic religion, was the
official faith of the mighty Persian Empire, its fire temples attended by millions
of adherents. A thousand years after that, the empire collapsed, and the followers
of Zoroaster were persecuted and converted to the new faith of their conquerors,
Islam.

Another 1,500 years later – today – Zoroastrianism is a dying faith, its sacred
flames tended by ever fewer worshippers.

We take it for granted that religions are born, grow and die – but we are also
oddly blind to that reality
We take it for granted that religions are born, grow and die – but we are also
oddly blind to that reality. When someone tries to start a new religion, it is
often dismissed as a cult. When we recognise a faith, we treat its teachings and
traditions as timeless and sacrosanct. And when a religion dies, it becomes a myth,
and its claim to sacred truth expires. Tales of the Egyptian, Greek and Norse
pantheons are now considered legends, not holy writ.

Even today’s dominant religions have continually evolved throughout history. Early
Christianity, for example, was a truly broad church: ancient documents include
yarns about Jesus’ family life and testaments to the nobility of Judas. It took
three centuries for the Christian church to consolidate around a canon of
scriptures – and then in 1054 it split into the Eastern Orthodox and Catholic
churches. Since then, Christianity has continued both to grow and to splinter into
ever more disparate groups, from silent Quakers to snake-handling Pentecostalists.

You might also like:

• How and why did religion evolve?
• Do humans have a religion instinct?
• How long can civilisation survive?

If you believe your faith has arrived at ultimate truth, you might reject the idea
that it will change at all. But if history is any guide, no matter how deeply held
our beliefs may be today, they are likely in time to be transformed or transferred
as they pass to our descendants – or simply to fade away.

If religions have changed so dramatically in the past, how might they change in the
future? Is there any substance to the claim that belief in gods and deities will
die out altogether? And as our civilisation and its technologies become
increasingly complex, could entirely new forms of worship emerge? (Find out what it
would mean if AI developed a "soul".)

A flame burns in a Zoroastrian Fire Temple, possibly for more than a millennium
(Credit: Getty Images)

To answer these questions, a good starting point is to ask: why do we have religion
in the first place?

Reason to believe

One notorious answer comes from Voltaire, the 18th Century French polymath, who
wrote: “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.”Because Voltaire
was a trenchant critic of organised religion, this quip is often quoted cynically.
But in fact, he was being perfectly sincere. He was arguing that belief in God is
necessary for society to function, even if he didn’t approve of the monopoly the
church held over that belief.

Many modern students of religion agree. The broad idea that a shared faith serves
the needs of a society is known as the functionalist view of religion. There are
many functionalist hypotheses, from the idea that religion is the “opium of the
masses”, used by the powerful to control the poor, to the proposal that faith
supports the abstract intellectualism required for science and law. One recurring
theme is social cohesion: religion brings together a community, who might then form
a hunting party, raise a temple or support a political party.

One recurring theme is social cohesion: religion brings together a community

Those faiths that endure are “the long-term products of extraordinarily complex
cultural pressures, selection processes, and evolution”, writes Connor Wood of the
Center for Mind and Culture in Boston, Massachusetts on the religious reference
website Patheos, where he blogs about the scientific study of religion. New
religious movements are born all the time, but most don’t survive long. They must
compete with other faiths for followers and survive potentially hostile social and
political environments.

Under this argument, any religion that does endure has to offer its adherents
tangible benefits. Christianity, for example, was just one of many religious
movements that came and mostly went during the course of the Roman Empire.
According to Wood, it was set apart by its ethos of caring for the sick – meaning
more Christians survived outbreaks of disease than pagan Romans. Islam, too,
initially attracted followers by emphasising honour, humility and charity –
qualities which were not endemic in turbulent 7th-Century Arabia. (Read about the
"light triad" traits that can make you a good person.)

Given this, we might expect the form that religion takes to follow the function it
plays in a particular society – or as Voltaire might have put it, that different
societies will invent the particular gods they need. Conversely, we might expect
similar societies to have similar religions, even if they have developed in
isolation. And there is some evidence for that – although when it comes to
religion, there are always exceptions to any rule.

Belief in “Big Gods” allowed the formation of societies made up of strangers

(Credit: Getty Images)

Hunter-gatherers, for example, tend to believe that all objects – whether animal,
vegetable or mineral – have supernatural aspects (animism) and that the world is
imbued with supernatural forces (animatism). These must be understood and
respected; human morality generally doesn’t figure significantly. This worldview
makes sense for groups too small to need abstract codes of conduct, but who must
know their environment intimately. (An exception: Shinto, an ancient animist
religion, is still widely practised in hyper-modern Japan.)

At the other end of the spectrum, the teeming societies of the West are at least
nominally faithful to religions in which a single watchful, all-powerful god lays
down, and sometimes enforces, moral instructions: Yahweh, Christ and Allah. The
psychologist Ara Norenzayan argues it was belief in these “Big Gods” that allowed
the formation of societies made up of large numbers of strangers. Whether that
belief constitutes cause or effect has recently been disputed, but the upshot is
that sharing a faith allows people to co-exist (relatively) peacefully. The
knowledge that Big God is watching makes sure we behave ourselves.

Or at least, it did. Today, many of our societies are huge and multicultural:
adherents of many faiths co-exist with each other – and with a growing number of
people who say they have no religion at all. We obey laws made and enforced by
governments, not by God. Secularism is on the rise, with science providing tools to
understand and shape the world.

Given all that, there’s a growing consensus that the future of religion is that it
has no future.

Imagine there’s no heaven

Powerful intellectual and political currents have driven this proposition since the
early 20th Century. Sociologists argued that the march of science was leading to
the “disenchantment” of society: supernatural answers to the big questions were no
longer felt to be needed. Communist states like Soviet Russia and China adopted
atheism as state policy and frowned on even private religious expression. In 1968,
the eminent sociologist Peter Berger told the New York Times that by “the 21st
Century, religious believers are likely to be found only in small sects, huddled
together to resist a worldwide secular culture”.

Now that we’re actually in the 21st Century, Berger’s view remains an article of
faith for many secularists – although Berger himself recanted in the 1990s. His
successors are emboldened by surveys showing that in many countries, increasing
numbers of people are saying they have no religion. That’s most true in rich,
stable countries like Sweden and Japan, but also, perhaps more surprisingly, in
places like Latin America and the Arab world. Even in the US, long a conspicuous
exception to the axiom that richer countries are more secular, the number of
“nones” has been rising sharply. In the 2018 General Social Survey of US attitudes,
“no religion” became the single largest group, edging out evangelical Christians.

Despite this, religion is not disappearing on a global scale – at least in terms of

numbers. In 2015, the Pew Research Center modelled the future of the world’s great
religions based on demographics, migration and conversion. Far from a precipitous
decline in religiosity, it predicted a modest increase in believers, from 84% of
the world’s population today to 87% in 2050. Muslims would grow in number to match
Christians, while the number unaffiliated with any religion would decline slightly.

Modern societies are multicultural where followers of many different faiths live
side by side (Credit: Getty Images)

The pattern Pew predicted was of “the secularising West and the rapidly growing
rest”. Religion will continue to grow in economically and socially insecure places
like much of sub-Saharan Africa – and to decline where they are stable. That chimes
with what we know about the deep-seated psychological and neurological drivers of
belief. When life is tough or disaster strikes, religion seems to provide a bulwark
of psychological (and sometimes practical) support. In a landmark study, people
directly affected by the 2011 earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand became
significantly more religious than other New Zealanders, who became marginally less
religious.

People affected by the 2011 earthquake in New Zealand became significantly more
religious than other New Zealanders
We also need to be careful when interpreting what people mean by “no religion”.
“Nones” may be disinterested in organised religion, but that doesn’t mean they are
militantly atheist. In 1994, the sociologist Grace Davie classified people
according to whether they belonged to a religious group and/or believed in a
religious position. The traditionally religious both belonged and believed;
hardcore atheists did neither. Then there are those who belong but don’t believe –
parents attending church to get a place for their child at a faith school, perhaps.
And, finally, there are those who believe in something, but don’t belong to any
group.

The research suggests that the last two groups are significant. The Understanding
Unbelief project at the University of Kent in the UK is conducting a three-year,
six-nation survey of attitudes among those who say they don’t believe God exists
(“atheists”) and those who don’t think it’s possible to know if God exists
(“agnostics”). In interim results released in May 2019, the researchers found that
few unbelievers actually identify themselves by these labels, with significant
minorities opting for a religious identity.

What’s more, around three-quarters of atheists and nine out of 10 agnostics are
open to the existence of supernatural phenomena, including everything from
astrology to supernatural beings and life after death. Unbelievers “exhibit
significant diversity both within, and between, different countries.

Accordingly, there are very many ways of being an unbeliever”, the report concluded
– including, notably, the dating-website cliche “spiritual, but not religious”.
Like many cliches, it’s rooted in truth. But what does it actually mean?

The old gods return

In 2005, Linda Woodhead wrote The Spiritual Revolution, in which she described an
intensive study of belief in the British town of Kendal. Woodhead and her co-author
found that people were rapidly turning away from organised religion, with its
emphasis on fitting into an established order of things, towards practices designed
to accentuate and foster individuals’ own sense of who they are. If the town’s
Christian churches did not embrace this shift, they concluded, congregations would
dwindle into irrelevance while self-guided practices would become the mainstream in
a “spiritual revolution”.

Today, Woodhead says that revolution has taken place – and not just in Kendal.
Organised religion is waning in the UK, with no real end in sight. “Religions do
well, and always have done, when they are subjectively convincing – when you have
the sense that God is working for you,” says Woodhead, now professor of sociology
of religion at the University of Lancaster in the UK.

US megachurches bring in thousands of worshippers (Credit: Getty Images)

In poorer societies, you might pray for good fortune or a stable job. The
“prosperity gospel” is central to several of America’s megachurches, whose
congregations are often dominated by economically insecure congregations. But if
your basic needs are well catered for, you are more likely to be seeking fulfilment
and meaning. Traditional religion is failing to deliver on this, particularly where
doctrine clashes with moral convictions that arise from secular society – on gender
equality, say.

In response, people have started constructing faiths of their own.

What do these self-directed religions look like? One approach is syncretism, the
“pick and mix” approach of combining traditions and practices that often results
from the mixing of cultures. Many religions have syncretistic elements, although
over time they are assimilated and become unremarkable. Festivals like Christmas
and Easter, for example, have archaic pagan elements, while daily practice for many
people in China involves a mixture of Mahayana Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism.
The joins are easier to see in relatively young religions, such as Vodoun or
Rastafarianism.

Syncretism is the “pick and mix” approach of combining religious traditions and
practices
An alternative is to streamline. New religious movements often seek to preserve the
central tenets of an older religion while stripping it of trappings that may have
become stifling or old-fashioned. In the West, one form this takes is for humanists
to rework religious motifs: there have been attempts to rewrite the Bible without
any supernatural elements, calls for the construction of “atheist temples”
dedicated to contemplation. And the “Sunday Assembly” aims to recreate the
atmosphere of a lively church service without reference to God. But without the
deep roots of traditional religions, these can struggle: the Sunday Assembly, after
initial rapid expansion, is now reportedly struggling to keep up its momentum.

But Woodhead thinks the religions that might emerge from the current turmoil will
have much deeper roots. The first generation of spiritual revolutionaries, coming
of age in the 1960s and 1970s, were optimistic and universalist in outlook, happy
to take inspiration from faiths around the world. Their grandchildren, however, are
growing up in a world of geopolitical stresses and socioeconomic angst; they are
more likely to hark back to supposedly simpler times. “There is a pull away from
global universality to local identities,” says Woodhead.

“It’s really important that they’re your gods, they weren’t just made up.”
In the European context, this sets the stage for a resurgence of interest in
paganism. Reinventing half-forgotten “native” traditions allows the expression of
modern concerns while retaining the patina of age. Paganism also often features
divinities that are more like diffuse forces than anthropomorphic gods; that allows
people to focus on issues they feel sympathetic towards without having to make a
leap of faith to supernatural deities.

In Iceland, for example, the small but fast-growing Ásatrú faith has no particular
doctrine beyond somewhat arch celebrations of Old Norse customs and mythology, but
has been active on social and ecological issues. Similar movements exist across
Europe, such as Druidry in the UK. Not all are liberally inclined. Some are
motivated by a desire to return to what they see as conservative “traditional”
values – leading in some cases to clashes over the validity of opposing beliefs.

These are niche activities at the moment, and might sometimes be more about playing
with symbolism than heartfelt spiritual practice. But over time, they canevolve
into more heartfelt and coherent belief systems: Woodhead points to the robust
adoption of Rodnovery – an often conservative and patriarchal pagan faith based
around the reconstructed beliefs and traditions of the ancient Slavs – in the
former Soviet Union as a potential exemplar of things to come.

A woman dances as druids, pagans and revellers gather at Stonehenge (Credit: Getty
Images)

So the nones mostly represent not atheists, nor even secularists, but a mixture of
“apatheists” – people who simply don’t care about religion – and practitioners of
what you might call “disorganised religion”. While the world religions are likely
to persist and evolve for the foreseeable future, we might for the rest of this
century see an efflorescence of relatively small religions jostling to break out
among these groups. But if Big Gods and shared faiths are key to social cohesion,
what happens without them?

One nation under Mammon

One answer, of course, is that we
economies, good government, solid
that we rub along happily without
of the societies with the highest
secure and harmonious on Earth.
simply get on with our lives. Munificent
education and effective rule of law can ensure
any kind of religious framework. And indeed, some
proportions of non-believers are among the most

The ‘invisible hand’ of the market almost seems like a supernatural entity – Connor
Wood
What remains debatable, however, is whether they can afford to be irreligious
because they have strong secular institutions – or whether being secular has helped
them achieve social stability. Religionists say even secular institutions have
religious roots: civil legal systems, for example, codify ideas about justice based
on social norms established by religions. The likes of the New Atheists, on the
other hand, argue that religion amounts to little more than superstition, and
abandoning it will enable societies to improve their lot more effectively.

Connor Wood is not so sure. He contends that a strong, stable society like Sweden’s
is both extremely complex and very expensive to run in terms of labour, money and
energy – and that might not be sustainable even in the short term. “I think it’s
pretty clear that we’re entering into a period of non-linear change in social
systems,” he says. “The Western consensus on a combination of market capitalism and
democracy can’t be taken for granted.”

That’s a problem, since that combination has radically transformed the social
environment from the one in which the world religions evolved – and has to some
extent supplanted them.

“I’d be careful about calling capitalism a religion, but a lot of its institutions
have religious elements, as in all spheres of human institutional life,” says Wood.
“The ‘invisible hand’ of the market almost seems like a supernatural entity.”

Financial exchanges, where people meet to conduct highly ritualised trading

activity, seem quite like temples to Mammon, too. In fact, religions, even the
defunct ones, can provide uncannily appropriate metaphors for many of the more
intractable features of modern life.
A Roman Catholic priest officiates mass on the first day of trading at the
Philippine Stock Exchange in Manila (Credit: Getty Images)

The pseudo-religious social order might work well when times are good. But when the
social contract becomes stressed – through identity politics, culture wars or
economic instability – Wood suggests the consequence is what we see today: the rise
of authoritarians in country after country. He cites research showing that people
ignore authoritarian pitches until they sense a deterioration of social norms.

“This is the human animal looking around and saying we don’t agree how we should
behave,” Wood says. “And we need authority to tell us.” It’s suggestive that
political strongmen are often hand in glove with religious fundamentalists: Hindu
nationalists in India, say, or Christian evangelicals in the US. That’s a potent
combination for believers and an unsettling one for secularists: can anything
bridge the gap between them?

Mind the gap

Perhaps one of the major religions might change its form enough to win back non-
believers in significant numbers. There is precedent for this: in the 1700s,
Christianity was ailing in the US, having become dull and formal even as the Age of
Reason saw secular rationalism in the ascendant. A new guard of travelling fire-
and-brimstone preachers successfully reinvigorated the faith, setting the tone for
centuries to come – an event called the “Great Awakenings”.

The parallels with today are easy to draw, but Woodhead is sceptical that
Christianity or other world religions can make up the ground they have lost, in the
long term. Once the founders of libraries and universities, they are no longer the
key sponsors of intellectual thought. Social change undermines religions which
don’t accommodate it: earlier this year, Pope Francis warned that if the Catholic
Church didn’t acknowledge its history of male domination and sexual abuse it risked
becoming “a museum”. And their tendency to claim we sit at the pinnacle of creation
is undermined by a growing sense that humans are not so very significant in the
grand scheme of things.

Historically, what makes religions rise or fall is political support – Linda

Woodhead
Perhaps a new religion will emerge to fill the void? Again, Woodhead is sceptical.
“Historically, what makes religions rise or fall is political support,” she says,
“and all religions are transient unless they get imperial support.” Zoroastrianism
benefited from its adoption by the successive Persian dynasties; the turning point
for Christianity came when it was adopted by the Roman Empire. In the secular West,
such support is unlikely to be forthcoming, with the possible exception of the US.
In Russia, by contrast, the nationalistic overtones of both Rodnovery and the
Orthodox church wins them tacit political backing.

But today, there’s another possible source of support: the internet.

Online movements gain followers at rates unimaginable in the past. The Silicon
Valley mantra of “move fast and break things” has become a self-evident truth for
many technologists and plutocrats. #MeToo started out as a hashtag expressing anger
and solidarity but now stands for real changes to long-standing social norms. And
Extinction Rebellion has striven, with considerable success, to trigger a radical
shift in attitudes to the crises in climate change and biodiversity.

None of these are religions, of course, but they do share parallels with nascent
belief systems – particularly that key functionalist objective of fostering a sense
of community and shared purpose. Some have confessional and sacrificial elements,
too. So, given time and motivation, could something more explicitly religious grow
out of an online community? What new forms of religion might these online
“congregations” come up with?

We already have some idea.

Deus ex machina

A few years ago, members of the self-declared “Rationalist” community website

LessWrong began discussing a thought experiment about an omnipotent, super-
intelligent machine – with many of the qualities of a deity and something of the
Old Testament God’s vengeful nature.

It was called Roko’s Basilisk. The full proposition is a complicated logic puzzle,
but crudely put, it goes that when a benevolent super-intelligence emerges, it will
want to do as much good as possible – and the earlier it comes into existence, the
more good it will be able to do. So to encourage everyone to do everything possible
to help to bring into existence, it will perpetually and retroactively torture
those who don’t – including anyone who so much as learns of its potential
existence. (If this is the first you’ve heard of it: sorry!)

An artificial super-intelligence could have some of the qualities of a deity

(Credit: Getty Images)

Outlandish though it might seem, Roko’s Basilisk caused quite a stir when it was
first suggested on LessWrong – enough for discussion of it to be banned by the
site’s creator. Predictably, that only made the idea explode across the internet –
or at least the geekier parts of it – with references to the Basilisk popping up
everywhere from news sites to Doctor Who, despite protestations from some
Rationalists that no-one really took it seriously. Their case was not helped by the
fact that many Rationalists are strongly committed to other startling ideas about
artificial intelligence, ranging from AIs that destroy the world by accident to
human-machine hybrids that would transcend all mortal limitations.

Such esoteric beliefs have arisen throughout history, but the ease with which we
can now build a community around them is new. “We’ve always had new forms of
religiosity, but we haven’t always had enabling spaces for them,” says Beth
Singler, who studies the social, philosophical and religious implications of AI at
the University of Cambridge. “Going out into a medieval town square and shouting
out your unorthodox beliefs was going to get you labelled a heretic, not win
converts to your cause.”

The mechanism may be new, but the message isn’t. The Basilisk argumentis in much
the same spirit as Pascal’s Wager. The 17th-Century French mathematician suggested
non-believers should nonetheless go through the motions of religious observance,
just in case a vengeful God does turn out to exist. The idea of punishment as an
imperative to cooperate is reminiscent of Norenzayan’s “Big Gods”. And arguments
over ways to evade the Basilisk’s gaze are every bit as convoluted as the medieval
Scholastics’ attempts to square human freedom with divine oversight.

A supercomputer is turned on and asked: is there a God? Now there is, comes the
reply
Even the technological trappings aren’t new. In 1954, Fredric Brown wrote a (very)
short story called “Answer”, in which a galaxy-spanning supercomputer is turned on
and asked: is there a God? Now there is, comes the reply.

And some people, like AI entrepreneur Anthony Levandowski, think their holy
objective is to build a super-machine that will one day answer just as Brown’s
fictional machine did. Levandowski, who made a fortune through self-driving cars,
hit the headlines in 2017 when it became public knowledge that he had founded a
church, Way of the Future, dedicated to bringing about a peaceful transition to a
world mostly run by super-intelligent machines. While his vision sounds more
benevolent than Roko’s Basilisk, the church’s creed still includes the ominous
lines: “We believe it may be important for machines to see who is friendly to their
cause and who is not. We plan on doing so by keeping track of who has done what
(and for how long) to help the peaceful and respectful transition.”

“There are many ways people think of God, and thousands of flavours of
Christianity, Judaism, Islam,” Levandowski told Wired. “But they’re always looking
at something that’s not measurable or you can’t really see or control. This time
it’s different. This time you will be able to talk to God, literally, and know that
it’s listening.”

Reality bites

Levandowski is not alone. In his bestselling book Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari
argues that the foundations of modern civilisation are eroding in the face of an
emergent religion he calls “dataism”, which holds that by giving ourselves over to
information flows, we can transcend our earthly concerns and ties. Other fledgling
transhumanist religious movements focus on immortality – a new spin on the promise
of eternal life. Still others ally themselves with older faiths, notably Mormonism.

A church service in Berlin uses Star Wars to engage the congregation (Credit: Getty
Images)

Are these movements for real? Some groups are performing or “hacking” religion to
win support for transhumanist ideas, says Singler. “Unreligions” seek to dispense
with the supposedly unpopular strictures or irrational doctrines of conventional
religion, and so might appeal to the irreligious. The Turing Church, founded in
2011, has a range of cosmic tenets – “We will go to the stars and find Gods, build
Gods, become Gods, and resurrect the dead” – but no hierarchy, rituals or
proscribed activities and only one ethical maxim: “Try to act with love and
compassion toward other sentient beings.”

But as missionary religions know, what begins as a mere flirtation or idle

curiosity – perhaps piqued by a resonant statement or appealing ceremony – can end
in a sincere search for truth.

The 2001 UK census found that Jediism, the fictional faith observed by the good
guys in Star Wars, was the fourth largest religion: nearly 400,000 people had been
inspired to claim it, initially by a tongue-in-cheek online campaign. Ten years
later, it had dropped to seventh place, leading many to dismiss it as a prank. But
as Singler notes, that is still an awful lot of people – and a lot longer than most
viral campaigns endure.

Some branches of Jediism remain jokey, but others take themselves more seriously:
the Temple of the Jedi Order claims its members are “real people that live or lived
their lives according to the principles of Jediism” – inspired by the fiction, but
based on the real-life philosophies that informed it.

With those sorts of numbers, Jediism “should” have been recognised as a religion in
the UK. But officials who apparently assumed it was not a genuine census answer did
not record it as such. “A lot is measured against the Western Anglophone tradition
of religion,” says Singler. Scientology was barred from recognition as a religion
for many years in the UK because it did not have a Supreme Being – something that
could also be said of Buddhism.
In fact, recognition is a complex issue worldwide, particularly since that there is
no widely accepted definition of religion even in academic circles. Communist
Vietnam, for example, is officially atheist and often cited as one of the world’s
most irreligious countries – but sceptics say this is really because official
surveys don’t capture the huge proportion of the population who practice folk
religion. On the other hand, official recognition of Ásatrú, the Icelandic pagan
faith, meant it was entitled to its share of a “faith tax”; as a result, it is
building the country’s first pagan temple for nearly 1,000 years.

Scepticism about practitioners’ motives impedes many new movements from being
recognised as genuine religions, whether by officialdom or by the public at large.
But ultimately the question of sincerity is a red herring, Singler says: “Whenever
someone tells you their worldview, you have to take them at face value”. The acid
test, as true for neopagans as for transhumanists, is whether people make
significant changes to their lives consistent with their stated faith.

And such changes are exactly what the founders of some new religious movements
want. Official status is irrelevant if you can win thousands or even millions of
followers to your cause.

A Russian church in Antarctica, where climate change is playing out (Credit: Getty
Images)

Consider the “Witnesses of Climatology”, a fledgling “religion” invented to foster

greater commitment to action on climate change. After a decade spent working on
engineering solutions to climate change, its founder Olya Irzak came to the
conclusion that the real problem lay not some much in finding technical solutions,
but in winning social support for them. “What’s a multi-generational social
construct that organises people around shared morals?” she asks. “The stickiest is
religion.”

So three years ago, Irzak and some friends set about building one. They didn’t see
any need to bring God into it – Irzak was brought up an atheist – but did start
running regular “services”, including introductions, a sermon eulogising the
awesomeness of nature and education on aspects of environmentalism. Periodically
they include rituals, particularly at traditional holidays. At Reverse Christmas,
the Witnesses plant a tree rather than cutting one down; on Glacier Memorial Day,
they watch blocks of ice melt in the California sun.

As these examples suggest, Witnesses of Climatology has a parodic feel to it –

light-heartedness helps novices get over any initial awkwardness – but Irzak’s
underlying intent is quite serious.

“We hope people get real value from this and are encouraged to work on climate
change,” she says, rather than despairing about the state of the world. The
congregation numbers a few hundred, but Irzak, as a good engineer, is committed to
testing out ways to grow that number. Among other things, she is considering a
Sunday School to teach children ways of thinking about how complex systems work.

Recently, the Witnesses have been looking further afield, including to a ceremony
conducted across the Middle East and central Asia just before the spring equinox:
purification by throwing something unwanted into a fire – a written wish, or an
actual object – and then jumping over it. Recast as an effort to rid the world of
environmental ills, it proved a popular addition to the liturgy. This might have
been expected, because it’s been practised for thousands of years as part of
Nowruz, the Iranian New Year – whose origins lie in part with the Zoroastrians.
Transhumanism, Jediism, the Witnesses of Climatology and the myriad of other new
religious movements may never amount to much. But perhaps the same could have been
said for the small groups of believers who gathered around a sacred flame in
ancient Iran, three millennia ago, and whose fledgling belief grew into one of the
largest, most powerful and enduring religions the world has ever seen – and which
is still inspiring people today.

Perhaps religions never do really die. Perhaps the religions that span the world
today are less durable than we think. And perhaps the next great faith is just
getting started.

--

Sumit Paul-Choudhury is a freelance writer and former editor-in-chief of New

Scientist. He tweets @sumit.

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