What if more people actually made a choice regarding their religion?
One measure of human development is the possibility for people to make their own choices. Yet still today, not many people in the world make any choice when it comes to their religion.
Do you have a religion? If so, have you ever wondered why you have that one instead of another? Most people don’t ask themselves that kind of stuff, but when they do, they generally come to the same conclusion wherever they are in the world: because it was their parents’ religion.
The complexity of heritage
I was born of a Roman Catholic father and a WASP mother. Though neither of them were churchgoers, my de facto religious heritage had one foot in European bourgeois tradition and the other in New World Protestantism. Provincial conservatism tinged with institutional Anti-Semitism on one side (not my dad himself, but the overall cultural heritage he grew up in), and Calvinistic zero-fun severity on the other. Or on the positive side: an easy-going tolerance for hedonism vs. a strong sense of duty and morality. All these things were, consciously or not, passed on to me.
One thing wasn’t, though. Having different religions (and neither of them feeling strongly enough about the importance of that religion to impose it on their family), my parents decided to let my sister and I figure out which one we liked best when we would be old enough to choose, and to not give us any religion at all in the meantime. My mom felt a little guilty — she sometimes read us children’s books about the Bible, and we went to church most Christmases — but all in all, life was just fine without a religious label on our little heads.
Years went by and, surprise surprise, I never did choose to adhere to a religion. Which is actually nothing surprising when you’re brought up in the type of liberal, higher-education-mandatory, citizen-of-the-world background I was. It’s just the way it works: the more educated your context, the less inclined you’re likely to be towards religion (for example in Europe) — a simple fact that speaks volumes in itself, but that’s another story.
Not choosing is a choice
But still, in retrospect, my absence of choice was a choice in itself, in a domain where choice is a rare thing.
When you think of it, the only people who really choose their religion are converts. So good for them. Then there’s a large chunk of the population, mostly in places like Western Europe, that decide to not decide at all. They don’t challenge their religious heritage, but they don’t put it into practice either. And this is not only true of Christians. Jewish and Muslim communities in European nations are comprised for the most part of people for whom religion doesn’t play a very important role in their daily lives, their attitudes or their decision-making. Which demonstrates the predominance of environment over culture in determining how important religion is to you: whatever religious culture your parents passed on to you, what you make of it will be highly influenced by the context you live in.
In some cases, the reduction of the importance of religion in one’s life goes beyond just no longer practicing it. Probably the most significant example of such a trend is the apostasy movement in Quebec. For decades, small but consistent numbers of (mostly young) people in the traditionally very Catholic Canadian province have been engaging in the process of writing to their diocese to ask to be de-baptized in order to put their religious status in line with their absence of faith and/or desire to no longer belong to an organized religion.
Speaking of the importance of context in determining your religious stance, the movement began during Quebec’s 1960s political and cultural shift towards secularization known as the “Quiet Revolution”, and has remained a marginal but continuous movement ever since, with spikes during periods of scandals in the Catholic church. It’s an interesting fact that switching to a secular society generally doesn’t push people towards religion by reaction, but on the contrary encourages them to veer away from their religious heritage on a personal level, while the society that surrounds them does the same.
Making peaceful coexistence possible
And that’s true in all secularized cultures around the world. The principle of separation of Church and State scandalized many people, even more so when it became the law in some nations in the late 19th — early 20th century, but it eventually led to creating the possibility for people to opt in or out of religion more freely than ever before in human history, which allowed heated heads to cool off over time, and society as a whole to relax when it comes to religion. From that perspective, the ideal goal would be to establish a society where no one gives a damn what your religion is or whether you have one at all. But today, even the most advanced nations such as Northern European countries haven’t quite gotten there yet.
Notice my initial question wasn’t ‘do you believe in God?’ because that’s not the point here. Having faith and belonging to a religion are two connected but very different things. As societies become secularized, and people with them, some stick to their inherited beliefs and traditions, others slowly take their distances, and others still — like the Quebecois apostates — adamantly shun them altogether… Every possible configuration exists, because in a secularized society, they all can coexist.
Let’s imagine for a minute a world where people aren’t automatically given their parents’ religion at birth. When you reach a certain age, you would gain religious rights, just like voting, working or driving rights. What would people do with all that free will? We won’t be able to answer that question any time soon of course, but given the state of bigotry and intolerance the world is in still today, more free will all around sounds like a pretty sweet dream if you ask me.
