“Give me that old-time religion,
Give me that old-time religion
Give me that old-time religion
It's good enough for me” - Song Lyric
“One basic reason for tiredness of mind is the conflict in all of us between ideal and achievement, between what we ought to be and what we are, between our longing and our having.” - Bishop Fulton J Sheen, Way to Happiness, 1954
It's no surprise to anyone in the West that adherence to traditional Christianity has declined precipitously since the mid 20th century.
“In 2000, nearly a million people went to a Church of England service on a Sunday; by 2022, that figure fell to 549,000.” - Giles Fraser, unherd
Talk of Religion however is apt to raise extreme emotions and is definitely to be avoided in polite society. It's a bit like being a vaccine sceptic on Twitter back in 2021.
But let's not allow the prospect of unpopularity to stop us! Faint heart never won fair lady.
Traditional religious belief has always been a source of comfort and joy to many people. Such people (and I'm not one of them) are on board with the explanation that good and bad are God's will expressed through imperfect humans; they are comfortable with the notion of prayer to resolve problems; they may well believe in an afterlife – and that it is lived in Heaven or Hell depending on their behaviour in this life; they may believe that they are already 'saved'.
Musician Sam Robson's Glad About It is an example of modern Gospel singing that exhibits the passions and pleasures of religious belief:
Some, like French 'public intellectual' Emmanuel Todd, think that the loss of Protestant religious values in the Anglosphere have caused the breakdown.
Much of what Todd says sounds like fantasy but his assertions that “the positive values of Protestantism, its educational effectiveness, its relationship to work, its capacity for integrating the individual into the community” are core reasons for the success of the West sound plausible.
Others blame it on 'managerialism': the centralisation and bureaucratisation (is that even a word?) of religious affairs.
Managing the affairs of an organisation that's nearly 2000 years old and has millions of adherents can't be that different from running the Post Office, can it?
New Gods and Old
Everyone believes in something. For myself, I believe that only reason and diligent, open-minded enquiry will reveal the truth. And that even that revealed truth, like Newtonian physics, will be subject to refinement in future: the truth is a 'best we can do at the moment' thing.
This is in contrast to the religious approach where enquiry is made through prayer or sacrifice and answers are unquestioned.
Bishop Sheen again (writing shortly after WW2): “Once, not so long ago, men put their hope of happiness in material advance. Now that mood of shallow optimism has ended”. I fear the good Bishop was premature in his assessment and again people have put their hopes of happiness in material advance. It used to be industry and commerce, now it's dotcoms and green energy.
New gods have sprung up to replace the old. Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), health and safety, climate change. These new cults offer similar boons to their followers – the means to appear virtuous in the daylight whilst sinning in the dark.
Any system of government, such as panocracy, must take account of religious belief. Whether it's traditional or modern, ideological thinking pervades and invades our daily lives.
While the traditional Christian church struggles with modernisation, and our modern technocracies edge more and more towards totaitarianism, the Amish have been quietly getting on with their static community for centuries.
“The Pennsylvania Amish believe that community harmony is threatened by secular values such as individualism and pride, which permeate the modern world. Thus, the Amish of Pennsylvania curb interaction with outsiders and insulate themselves from modern technology and mass media. They also prohibit habits that feed individualism and greed, as displayed through their plain dress style and prohibition of personal photographs.”
“There is no single governing body for the entire Old Order Amish population; rather, each church district decides for itself what it will and will not accept. However, all districts base their regulations on a literal interpretation of the Bible and an unwritten set of rules called the Ordnung. And the population as a whole stresses humility, family, community and separation from the modern world.”
We're in no way suggesting that everyone trashes their phones, scraps their cars, or burns the family photo albums but there are certainly some things the 'plain folk' can teach us about decentralisation, community life and systems of government based on moral principle.
Religion and Panocracy
“Our deepest wish may be that someone would come along and save us from ourselves” - Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists, Penguin, 2012
Even a lifelong atheist like me has felt uncomfortable with the demise of the established church. Perhaps it's the suddenness of it or maybe my inability to properly understand the causes but philosopher Alain de Botton has laid out in his book exactly what our society has lost.
The problem in understanding religion lies in separating the spiritual from the moral and social aspects. Religious adherents may claim they're inseparable. We beg to differ.
In rejecting religious ritual our secular society has thrown out the baby of community consolation with the bathwater of cultish compliance.
Our contemporary culture has it exactly wrong.
Like today's pop singers, we have autotuned out our imperfections so as to appear admirable. No one may now publicly admit to error, weakness or dissenting opinion as to do so will bring a firestorm of outrage and recrimination (the hallmarks of religious belief).
According to de Botton, seeing others apparently doing better than us – an untruth promoted through social media - is the opposite of what we humans need.
We need to see that everyone else is in the same boat, beset by the same headwinds, heavy seas, leaky rivets - and the odd iceberg.
It's only when we don't feel alone in our failings that we can freely acknowledge them. Organised religions deliberately provide ritual gatherings for this purpose and the public and private confession of inadequacy and sin has a redemptive effect.
In contrast, we conceal rather than confront our faults. With the loss of regular public gatherings in which to expiate our sins we have turned to blaming and shaming strangers for our own failings.
We certainly seem to need saving from ourselves but who can we trust to do it: our elected representatives? big business? Bill Gates? critical race theory? mum and dad? Athena (goddess of wisdom)? God?
Maybe we can trust our credentialed experts whose authority is vested in The Science™?
I Don't Recall
In the UK the Covid enquiry rumbles on to its predetermined outcome while burning its way through an estimated £200m of taxpayer money. In the USA, Dr Fauci has been giving evidence to a Senate subcommittee on the coronavirus pandemic. “I don't recall ...” was possibly his most frequent response.
“Dr. Fauci’s transcribed interview revealed systemic failures in our public health system and shed light on serious procedural concerns with our public health authority. It is clear that dissenting opinions were often not considered or suppressed completely. Should a future pandemic arise, America’s response must be guided by scientific facts and conclusive data.” - Representative Brad Wenstrup, Chairman of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic
In our panocracy dissenting opinions are exactly what will keep the lid on the irresponsibility and ambition of technocrats like Dr. Fauci. If it's decided to have an agency of State that handles public health then it will subject to the same rules as other agencies: candour and openness of all internal and external communications. “I don't recall ...” will no longer be an acceptable answer.
Our panocracy must tolerate religious and ideological belief, although it need not accept the views of religious organisations.
Panocracy is, after all, grounded in the belief that democracy is the most desirable form of government.
It wasn't so long ago that religion performed the role of government. Roads, parish relief, tithing for taxes, even justice were all done by the church. That stopped around 1700's maybe and then we gradually have more and more state interventions to perform these roles. Maybe they did perform for a while but they shit sure stopped doing that by at least the 1980's. Now we have government giving us our religion. Convid or climate change or safe spaces. We need something as people and without it we fall for the scams. I don't have much but my dads advice from 50 years back. "Only two reasons to ever go into debt, education and housing." Teach the children, not indoctrinate them with politics or religion.