Pre-modern values, religion and culture
Many people outside the USA have watched with astonishment as fundamentalist Christians have aligned themselves with a serial adulterer and rapist who lost the 2020 election, encouraged an insurrection to prevent the transfer of power, and called for the suspension of the Constitution. But this alignment is not as bizarre as it seems on the surface. Trump and fundamentalists are both authoritarian, demonizing and seeking to punish those they see as “other”, one of the key characteristics of fascism, as I discussed in an earlier article. Both want to restore society to a mythical former golden age. Trump wants to Make America Great Again. Fundamentalists want to return to the pre-modern origins of their faith as prescribed by their sacred books.
What is fundamentalism?
Most religions developed in the pre-modern era and their sacred texts and teachings incorporate pre-modern culture and values to varying extents. Peter Herriot has written extensively on fundamentalist religious beliefs, characterized these movements as attempts to return to the pre-modern origins of their faith as prescribed by their sacred books. He identifies five main general characteristics of fundamentalist religious movements:
- Reactivity: hostility towards the secular modern world
- Dualism: the tendency to evaluate in starkly binary terms, as good or bad
- Authority: the willingness to believe and obey the sacred book of the movement and/or its leaders
- Selectivity: the choice, from the sacred book or the tradition, of certain beliefs and practices in preference to others
- Millennialism: the belief that God will triumph in the end and establish his kingdom on earth.
Other common characteristics include prejudice towards minorities and authoritarian aggression — in some cases resorting to violence. Fundamentalist groups may be mainly religious in focus, or the religious element may be strongly associated with nationalism or ethnic identity. Fundamentalists seek to erase the distinction between secular and sacred and impose their form of religious beliefs on all through political action or authoritarian control. In the 21st century, the mobilization of the fundamentalist vote in the USA has been an important contributor to the election of the two most recent Republican presidents, and a driving factor has been their wish to impose their moral values on others who do not share then, particularly in relation to abortion, homosexuality and, most recently, transgender identity.
Herriot perceives fundamentalist movements around the world and in all major religions as having arisen relatively recently in the twentieth century as a reaction to modernity and sees them largely as subgroups within the overall religion. As religious institutions have evolved along with modern science, technology, culture and moral values, subgroups have rejected this evolution as going further than their moral comfort zone.
I has assumed that Moslem fundamentalism was different, as Islam has not gone through a Reformation process separating “church and state”. However, I recently came across an excellent article on Muslim fundamentalism which describes in some detail how Muslim fundamentalism has grown substantially in countries of the Middle East in recent decades and in fact, like fundamentalism in the West, has risen as a political phenomenon in the entire Muslim world, and as a driver of terrorist attacks on civilians in Muslim and non-Muslim countries. The authors define Muslim fundamentalism in essentially the same terms as Herriot, as “a reactionary, non-scientific movement aimed at returning society to a centuries-old social set-up, defying all material and historical factors. It is an attempt to roll back the wheel of history. Fundamentalism finds its roots in the low levels of education, social deprivation, a low level of moral development (discussed below), poverty, and ignorance.”
Conceptualizing modern and pre-modern values
What are “pre-modern” and modern values? I’ve conceptualized pre-modern values as those associated with earlier stages of moral development (as defined by the work of Piaget, Kohlberg and Gilligan). Gebser and Wilber have elaborated the link between these stages of individual development and the broad evolution of cultures over the course of human evolution through magic, mythic, rational, to integral stages. Wilber also refers to the mindsets associated with the three broad stages of moral values as egocentric, ethnocentric and worldcentric. Earlier stages of moral development are thus those also associated with pre-modern stages of human history.
Pre-modern moral values and related religious values focus on absolute rules, obedience and punishment and a stage 1 individual is good in order to avoid being punished. In stage 2, the individual internalizes the moral standards of the culture and is good in order to be seen as a good person by oneself and others. Moral reasoning is based on the culture’s standards, individual rights and justice. In stage 3, the individual becomes aware that while rules and laws may exist for the greater good, they may not be applicable in specific circumstances. Issues are not black and white, and the individual develops their own set of moral standards based in universal rights and responsibilities. Wilber relates these stages also to Maslow’s hierarchy of need, with stage 1 being common where survival and safety issues are dominant, and increasing movement towards higher stages as self-actualization becomes more important than survival and safety.
Because pre-modern religious teaching is expressed and interpreted in mythic terms, it may appear to conflict with scientific understanding of the natural world. A person with pre-modern values may thus reject scientific findings, whereas another with modern values will understand that the myths relate to aspects of the human condition, but are not to be interpreted literally, and that the domain of religion relates to meaning, values, ethics, and does not generally conflict with the domain of science.
As moral values evolve through the three broad stages, the size of the in-group (“us”) with which an individual identifies typically expands from tribe to ethnic group or nation to all humanity. At lower stages of moral development, the “other” group is not seen to deserve the same rights as “us” and tends to be scapegoated as the cause of the problems that prevent the society returning to its ideal state. The “other” is seen as not deserving of humane treatment or even life. The “other” might be infidels, Jews, migrants, homosexuals, socialists, women, intellectuals…depending on time and place.
Finally, enforcement of social norms governing human fertility have been a major factor in pre-modern religions. For thousands of years, very high levels of child mortality and other survival pressures meant that most societies sought to ensure that women produced as many children as possible and discouraged divorce, abortion, homosexuality and contraception. Additionally sexual behaviour, particularly that of women and that not linked to reproduction, was strongly socially controlled to minimise uncertainty about paternity. Religion was the primary method of social control. Pre-modern values with respect to women’s rights, reproduction and sexuality are still dominant in most of the major religions.
Using a global survey program to identify pre-modern values
The World Values Survey and the European Values Study have carried out seven waves of surveys in over 100 countries, spanning the period 1981 to 2021. I have analysed combined data from these two surveys, referred to as the Integrated Values Survey (IVS), for earlier articles on atheism and belief in hell (see here and here).
In this article, I examine the extent of religious fundamentalism and pre-modern values in the world today using IVS data. I reviewed questions widely available in the IVS surveys to identify those most relevant to distinguishing pre-modern and modern moral values. The selected questions are listed below. For more details on these questions and their analysis, see here.
The question on belief in hell address two aspects of fundamentalism, namely the literal interpretation of mythic elements of the sacred literature and also the exclusion of others such as nonbelievers or homosexuals who will supposedly go to hell for eternal torment. Belief in a real hell tends to be much more common for fundamentalists, who are a relatively small proportion of Christians outside the USA and some other countries. I have examined levels of belief in hell in detail in a previous article. Globally, only a minority of Christians believe in hell (45%), and in developed countries excluding the USA, the proportion of Christians who believe in hell drops to 42% compared to 80% in the USA.
I think that for religious people focused on the message of the New Testament, rather than Old, it is usually clearer that hell is a mythological concept dating from primitive times and literally believing your God would torture people for eternity marks you out as having pre-modern values. I still have trouble getting my head around the idea that there are large numbers of people who appear to genuinely believe that people who don’t accept their beliefs will be tortured forever by an all-powerful and apparently psychopathic god. And it’s not too much of an ethical step to decide to start the torture before they get to hell, or to fire up the gas chambers.
Global variations in prevalence of selected pre-modern values
Here are some graphs showing how responses to four of these questions vary across culture zones for practicing religious people compared to others (non-practicing religious, non-religious and atheists). The grouping of countries into culture zones is described elsewhere. The Reformed West includes European countries strongly affected by the Reformation. Because values and beliefs in Australia, New Zealand and Canada are much closer to the countries of the Reformed West than to those of the USA, I have included them in that group. The Old West includes the mostly Catholic countries of Western Europe, the Returned West those former Soviet bloc countries who have joined the EU, and the Orthodox East includes the Christian Orthodox or Islamic parts of the former Soviet bloc countries.
Development of a pre-modern/modern religious values index
To examine variations in pre-modern versus modern values across countries and time, I have assumed there is an unobserved underlying continuous variable that describes the individual’s level of modernity of values and predicts (or correlates with) their answers to specific values questions. I used general linear modelling methods to estimate a continuous latent variable “modernity” from the responses to the 11 selected values questions. See here for more details. The following plot shows how the responses for these questions line up with the latent variable (shown on the horizontal axis).
For ease of presentation, I rescaled the latent variable so that average values for countries ranged from just above zero to slightly below 10. Country averages for the most recent IVS wave for 2017–2020 ranged from 0.3 for Pakistan to 9.5 for Sweden and Denmark, followed by 9.0 for Norway. Note that higher values denote higher prevalence of modern values.
A map of levels of religiosity and modernity for 104 countries
The following map plots a country average religiosity latent variable against the country average pre-modern/modern values latent variable for the 104 countries in waves 5–7 of the IVS (spanning years 2004–2020). Religiosity measures level of religious engagement ranging from close to zero for non-religious atheists, through non-practicing religious people to regularly practicing religious people (high scores). The coloured zones represent the culture zones used in this article to classify countries.
In every culture zone, practicing religious people have the lowest score for modern values, i.e. the most pre-modern values) and modern values increase with decreasing levels of religiosity. The variation across culture zones is approximately as substantial as the variation across religiosity categories. This is not surprising, the values of non-religious people are influenced by the culture in which they live, whose values have been substantially shaped by the dominant religions in the history of that culture.
Are modern values becoming more prevalent?
It is tricky to estimate broad time trends from the IVS as not every country has a survey in each wave, and not every country in a given wave has included all the values questions I’ve used. However, I’ve imputed missing wave values where possible, and estimated broad trends in the modernity latent variable over four decades from 1980 to 2020. There is a general trend of increasing modernity in the culture zones associated with Western Europe, the Americas, Australia, New Zealand and former Soviet regions, excluding the Orthodox East. I have grouped these together as a single larger zone labelled “West” and the other regions are grouped as “East”. Yes, I know that this is a very crude grouping, and Africa is included in the East (because there were relatively few surveys for Africa compared to other regions).
The following plot shows the trend in modernity (population average) for West and East from 1980 to 2020. There is a sustained increase in modernity in the West at a close to linear rate of increase over time. Despite the flat trend in the Sinic East and Orthodox East, the overall trend in the East is that modernity is decreasing with a somewhat faster decline during the years 2005–2010. These two trends largely cancel each other out, so that at the global level there has been little change in the average level of modern versus pre-modern values over the forty year period.
Note that these broad averages conceal significant differences in trends for some countries. In a following article, I will look more closely at the USA and the divide between progressives and conservatives.
Understanding the evolution of values at individual and societal levels
Looking back at the cultures and civilizations of the pre-modern eras, it seems clear that the boundaries defining “us” versus “them” were substantially narrower, whether to ethnic group, kingdom or tribe, and that authoritarian rule backed by brutal punishments and intolerance of dissent were the norm. All the major religions were formed during the pre-modern period and their sacred literatures account of their gods reflects often reflect similar values. The Buddha and Jesus are two notable exceptions who proposed ways of living life that reduce suffering. Jesus in particular spoke of a God of love and acceptance rather than the Old Testament God of wrath and fear.
For people at Stage 1 and for many at stage 2 of Kohlberg’s levels of moral development, what appeals in their religion are the pre-modern values of past forms of religion and the authoritarianism of imposing absolute values and threatening and punishing those who don’t conform to them. The characteristics of the fundamentalist program are very similar to key features of fascism (the myth of current degeneracy, the wish to revert to a previous golden age, the authoritarian imposition of beliefs and values, the demonization and rejection of “others”). This is not news, many others have made the same connection. See, for example, here and here and here.
For people approaching Kohlberg stage 3, religion and spirituality become paths for expanding the boundaries of love, acceptance and inclusion as “us”, and for addressing and transcending our limitations and suffering. In contrast, those at Kohlberg stage 1 and some at stage 2 are much more likely to worship the God of Fear, the God of punishment and reward. The religion of fear drives the need for fundamentalists to seek to impose their beliefs on the whole of society. This makes them natural allies of fascists seeking to replace democracy with an authoritarianism. In their different ways, and not so different beliefs, Christian and Muslim fundamentalists (and those of other religions also) pose a real threat to democracy, human rights and our ability to use our science to address pandemics, global warming and other major issues for the human race and our planet.
