The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture (21 page)

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See our discussion of cultural coupling in Chapter 3.

Those who left Europe to found the Colonies were highly communal in their outlook. They were NOT looking for religious freedom, as the myths of U.S. history would have us believe. They were looking for religious purity and exclusivity in a religious community. The proof is in the original charters ….”and constitutions of those pre-revolutionary colonies.

Immediately after colonization, restrictive religious laws and customs were quickly established in the first six colonies: Plymouth (1620), Massachusetts (1630), New Haven (1638), Connecticut (1639), Maryland (1633), Pennsylvania (1682). Only Rhode Island (1635) practiced separation of church and state from its founding. Established by Roger Williams (1603-1683), who was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for his insistence on religious tolerance, Rhode Island had no established religion at the time of its founding and rapidly became a haven for numerous groups who were persecuted in other colonies – especially Massachusetts – including Baptists, Quakers, Jews and others. Roger Williams was the first to use the term “wall of separation” between the church and state, later made famous by Thomas Jefferson.
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By 1702, all 13 colonies had some form of state support or religious requirements for office. The support came in the form of tax benefits or religious requirements for voting or serving in the legislature.

Until 1844, only Protestants were allowed to hold office in New Jersey. Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin or Abraham Lincoln would not have qualified to hold the office of governor in Massachusetts as late as 1833 since all were required to say this oath, “I____do declare that I believe the Christian religion …”. In the Georgia constitution of 1789, only Protestants could hold office. The Anglican Church was the state church until as late
as 1875, and only Protestants had full citizenship rights. South Carolina included the following article in its constitution until 1878, “The Christian Protestant religion shall be deemed, and is hereby constituted and declared to be, the established religion of this State.” In Massachusetts, Catholics could not hold public office. In New York Jews were given full political rights but not Catholics.

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Roger Williams was also the founder of either the first or second Baptist church in America (it is somewhat uncertain). It is ironic that today’s Baptists are so adamant in rejoining religion to the state when one of their founders in the United States was so adamant about separation of church and state.

Thus, this country was not established on religious tolerance. The colonists were themselves victims of persecution in England and came to establish a “New Jerusalem” in America. This theme continues to haunt us today.

With the American Revolution, the 13 states came into much closer contact and alliance. With greater economic and political cooperation came the potential for religious conflicts – European style. The founding fathers, with a sense of perspective on the religious history of Europe, had the wisdom to try to tame the more virulent religious tendencies in the constitutional separation of church and state that Roger Williams had pioneered.

Three conditions have merged to create individualistic protestant evangelism out of the old communal Christianity: Emergence of the protestant virus, increased literacy of the population and communities being founded on economic needs rather than religious affiliation. The American frontier was the nexus of these three trends, and they continue to evolve today.

As groups immigrated to the United States, they tended to establish religious communities wherever possible. Lutherans established Lutheran communities, Quakers established Quaker communities, Catholics created pure Catholic communities, and
Dutch Reformed kept to themselves. With movement west, this arrangement became less tenable. Purity became difficult to maintain.
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With people moving west to mine or make land claims, religion was not at the top of their list. If they worked a gold claim next to a Catholic or Lutheran, so be it. The Wild West was a chaotic environment for all god viruses. In order to survive, religion had to mutate into something viable in the individualistic and isolated world of the American West. The one obvious exception to this trend were the Mormons, who were successful in creating a pure religious community in isolated Utah during the 1870s.

With increasingly mobile populations and little to hold communities together, the virus gained the capacity to infect individuals independently of their communities. This was a major change. Living on the frontier, a farmer, miner or cowboy could get Jesus just by reading the Scriptures, with no qualified minister nearby. This led to many a self-proclaimed prophet and minister. Indeed, hundreds of cults started on the new frontier in the 1800s and early 1900s. Most died out, but a few gained a foothold, Mormonism (1830) and the Church of Christ Scientists (1879), Seventh Day Adventists (1863) and Jehovah’s Witnesses (1872), several different Pentecostal groups (1901-06) and The Four Square Gospel Church (1918) being among the most successful.

The major evolution of American evangelism came after WWI. Mutations began springing up with evangelicals like Billy Sunday and Aimee Semple McPherson in the 1920s
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and Billy Graham in the mid-20th century. Mass media and large venues with electronic amplification made the tent meetings and revivals in the 1800s obsolete. It also allowed people to get religion no matter where they lived and to take it with them if they
moved away. The highly mobile population in the United States allowed this virus to evolve from community or denomination-based to individual and charismatic-focused.

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A classic work by D. Elton Trueblood,
The People Called Quakers
(Friends United Press, July 1985) is a virtual case study of religious change as Quakers moved west. He traces the changes in organization and theology as Quakers adapted to the frontier environment. Many Quaker groups abandoned long-held beliefs and customs and took on elements of other frontier churches. In the quest to adapt and infect new members, some Quakers became as evangelical as many of the Baptist churches in the same community.

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A classic novel by Sinclair Lewis,
Elmer Gantry
(Harcourt Brace, January 1, 1927), documented the new evangelical virus in its early stages. Billy Sunday publicly denounced Sinclair from the pulpit as “Satan’s cohort.” Another example of art documenting this phenomenon is Carlisle Floyd’s opera
Susanna
(1955). The opera shows the effects of guilt, shame and self-doubt in many of the characters in a small rural community.

The movement to mega churches addresses the individual while bringing people back into a communal environment where infection of the next generation can be done efficiently. Mega churches are often centered on a single charismatic individual, a “super vector.” In most cases, the church is organized around this person’s personality. His name is always on the marquee and he controls and orchestrates the entire organization often with little accountability. Board members are frequently selected by the minister or manipulated into position by him or her.

The theological training of super vectors is often abysmal, mostly from a narrowly focused Bible College. Most have little exposure to philosophy and even less to the sciences. In both their academic and practical training, these vectors study methods of infection, learning to create a sense of community around the virus. Members of the mega church find the security once felt in the village or in communal religions of the past.

A European Catholic friend of mine who lived in the United States for several years once told me about Protestant evangelical next-door neighbors. One day they asked my friends about churches in the area. They were shopping for a church home that would fit their family. My Catholic friend expressed total disbelief! “You just go to the local parish. There is no shopping as a Catholic.” She could not understand how someone could shop for a church. From her perspective, it was an amazing example of how rootless American Protestantism is.

This is the nature of the new evangelical Protestant religion in America. Rooted in the Wild West’s individualistic past, it seeks to bring people who are highly mobile back into a community, albeit a transient one. This flexibility allows the evangelical virus to perpetuate with few ties to community and get carried along no matter where the individual moves.

In times past, people simply went to the church their parents attended or to the only church in the village. Today people can shop around to find
the church that makes them feel best. Super vectors compete to produce a product that gives people an emotionally satisfying experience. Read the Saturday Church advertisements in your local newspaper and note how many glorify the minister. This is a new phenomenon. The cult of personality has become common among evangelicals and Pentecostals. The Methodist denominational practice of moving ministers every few years was designed over 150 years ago to prevent personality cults from developing around a given minister. But Methodists are at a decided disadvantage when competing with charismatic super vectors if they continue this practice.

Like most major religions, the evangelical virus infects the mind through guilt and self-doubt. Community-based religion had the huge advantage of social sanctions for anyone who strayed. In our mobile society, people can avoid sanctions too easily just by moving or changing churches. Never before have people been able to pick and choose their religion so freely. The evangelical religion mutated to a position where it could create guilt and doubt outside of a given community by using new and more sophisticated hypnotic worship techniques that we will discuss later. This is an entirely new development and is a huge challenge to the older religions. Many have not adapted, losing many members to the evangelical movement.

Today’s vectors like Joel Osteen in Houston (30,000 members), Rick Warren at Saddleback Church in California (22,000 members) and Bill Hybels of Willow Creek Church, Chicago, (19,500 members) have great skill at creating the “feel good” effect paired with guilt and fear that leads to a strong viral bond. It allows for efficient exploitation of resources and infection of children. Most of these churches are non-denominational or are part of more loosely affiliated denominational groups like the Baptists. This lack of denominational affiliation is a major departure from the last four hundred years of Protestantism. The virus has taken on a new form altogether with this historic jump.

Let us now look at the specific methods super vectors use to create emotionally charged worship services that imbed a god virus deeply into individuals while creating a community for support and propagation.

A mega church service has fast or slow-paced music, designed to evoke specific moods and responses. It has charismatic leaders with high energy, and high levels of group participation. The evangelical virus creates a sense of belonging and transcendence through emotional group experiences. Leaders use sophisticated psychological techniques designed to evoke elation, fear and guilt all within the frame of a “praise service.” A significant number of evangelical churches are also Pentecostal. The Pentecostal virus is even more emotional with heavy emphasis on group and individual trance induction. Thus, group hypnosis, trance induction and post-hypnotic suggestion are the art of the modern evangelical preacher.

These techniques tie people to the virus as they seek relief from their self-doubt and guilt through services that resemble rock concerts. Preachers employ the natural power of large-group psychology to create an experience that appears to be transcendent to the participants, using vocal rhythms, body motion, group movement and cadence.

Research in hypnosis and meditation has shown the power of these techniques to reduce pain, create euphoria, or an altered state of consciousness.
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This well-documented effect can be produced by someone with a modest amount of training in meditation or hypnosis. It can also be created at a sporting event, a music concert or a political rally, but in a church setting, it is easily mistaken for a spiritual experience. The greatest evangelical ministers have studied these techniques for decades and perfected the art of mass emotional appeal.

In their constant struggle to propagate, biological viruses use many tools to infect. God viruses are similar. Some tools have proven remarkably effective for thousands of years. These include music, vocal rhythm in preaching, word associations that evoke specific emotions, use of parables and stories, etc. As the surrounding culture evolves, the virus must use these basic tools differently or create new tools.