The Internet: Bad for Institutional Religion

Over at Civil Commotion Bob Felton raises an interesting question:

I’ve wondered through the years if the clergy’s hostility to the Internet was really about porn and online-dating and -gaming, or if they sensed the danger to them of easy information sharing — about their own misbehaviors, about life outside the church bubble.

A new study described in MIT Technology Review suggests that thatthe answer is the latter.  The that more information is available through a medium that the"godly folk" cannot censor or restrict, the harder it is to maintain religious based myths and outright untruths.  Here are highlights from the review:

Back in 1990, about 8 percent of the U.S. population had no religious preference. By 2010, this percentage had more than doubled to 18 percent. That’s a difference of about 25 million people, all of whom have somehow lost their religion.

That raises an obvious question: how come? Why are Americans losing their faith?

Today, we get a possible answer thanks to the work of Allen Downey, a computer scientist at the Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts, who has analyzed the data in detail. He says that the demise is the result of several factors but the most controversial of these is the rise of the Internet. He concludes that the increase in Internet use in the last two decades has caused a significant drop in religious affiliation.

Downey’s data comes from the General Social Survey, a widely respected sociological survey carried out by the University of Chicago, that has regularly measure people’s attitudes and demographics since 1972.

He finds that the biggest influence on religious affiliation is religious upbringing—people who are brought up in a religion are more likely to be affiliated to that religion later.

However, the number of people with a religious upbringing has dropped since 1990. It’s easy to imagine how this inevitably leads to a fall in the number who are religious later in life. In fact, Downey’s analysis shows that this is an important factor. However, it cannot account for all of the fall or anywhere near it. In fact, that data indicates that it only explains about 25 percent of the drop.

He goes on to show that college-level education also correlates with the drop. Once it again, it’s easy to imagine how contact with a wider group of people at college might contribute to a loss of religion. . . . . But although the correlation is statistically significant, it can only account for about 5 percent of the drop, so some other factor must also be involved.

That’s where the Internet comes in.  In the 1980s, Internet use was essentially zero, but in 2010, 53 percent of the population spent two hours per week online and 25 percent surfed for more than 7 hours.

This increase closely matches the decrease in religious affiliation. In fact, Downey calculates that it can account for about 25 percent of the drop.

That’s a fascinating result. It implies that since 1990, the increase in Internet use has had as powerful an influence on religious affiliation as the drop in religious upbringing.

“For people living in homogeneous communities, the Internet provides opportunities to find information about people of other religions (and none), and to interact with them personally,” says Downey.

I have long maintained that ignorance and lack of education (and perhaps psychological problems) are prerequisites for adherence to fundamentalist religious belief.   Now, it seems that lack of access to uncensored information provided via the Internet is another prerequisite.  Knowledge and access to information are mutually exclusive with fundamentalist belief.  No wonder the "godly folk" hate the Internet and easy access to the truth.  Interestingly, the decline of religion mirrors what happened in the former Soviet Union: once information and other views became increasingly available, it became harder and harder to maintain the lie that communism was working.  So too with fundamentalist religion.