Amerika

America suffered greatly from its fractured origins. Withdrawing from England, and taking in immigrants from Western Europe, the country never had an ethnic identity that was explicitly stated, although the general idea was, as Western European immigration went in the UK, that English culture would stand.

That meant that immigrants from Western Europe, who were viewed as the same type of person as the average Norman-Anglo-Saxon Englishman since all of Western Europe has Nordid-Cro-Magnid roots, would be similar enough in genetics and inclinations to coexist, formalized in the Naturalization Act of 1790:

This 1790 act set the new nation’s naturalization procedures. It limited access to U.S. citizenship to white immigrants — in effect, to people from Western Europe — who had resided in the U.S. at least two years and their children under 21 years of age. It also granted citizenship to children born abroad to U.S. citizens.

To an Englishman, especially of that era, “White” means people from Western Europe: England, Scotland, northern France, The Netherlands, Scandinavia, and northern Germany. These were the people who descended unmixed from our root in the Hallstatt people and their precursors.

Over time, this became fractured, mainly because the usual Utopians wanted to bring in cheap labor in order to spread prosperity. Everybody just wants what they want and they are happy to externalize the cost to civilization.

Within two generations, this early diversity problem presented itself as a challenge, causing conservatives to give ground and fall back on the idea of civic nationalism as expressed by George Washington, which refuses to mention ethnicity but instead lists proxies for it:

The name of American, which belongs to you in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of patriotism more than any appellation derived from local discriminations. With slight shades of difference, you have the same religion, manners, habits, and political principles. You have in a common cause fought and triumphed together; the independence and liberty you possess are the work of joint counsels, and joint efforts of common dangers, sufferings, and successes.

Conservatives fell back on “religion, manners, habits, and political principles” because ethnicity became too controversial, starting with Irish immigration and only getting worse as the funnel expanded to take in people from all over the world.

However, now they are finally seeing that this strategy has failed them. Without ethnicity, there is no tie to religion; even more, religion becomes divisive because not everyone shares it. Lacking a culture that supports its values, religion seems like an alien and demanding ideology.

It becomes hard to argue for going to church when your neighbors are going to synagogue, mosque, mandir, yurt, and forest altar. At that point, religion emphasizes difference and not unity, and you will be judged by your religion as possibly hostile to other religions.

Consequently, religious attendance is declining across all religions as people find that multiculture demands irreligiosity:

Americans’ membership in houses of worship continued to decline last year, dropping below 50% for the first time in Gallup’s eight-decade trend. In 2020, 47% of Americans said they belonged to a church, synagogue or mosque, down from 50% in 2018 and 70% in 1999.

U.S. church membership was 73% when Gallup first measured it in 1937 and remained near 70% for the next six decades, before beginning a steady decline around the turn of the 21st century.

This parallels the introduction of diversity in our society. Previously, outsider groups were kept outside mainstream society in ethnic communities or reservations, which meant that until the late 1950s their presence was minimal for most Americans.

With the rise of civil rights laws following WW2, the diversity quickly became mainstreamed, and during the Clinton years it became a focus, leading to just a few years later the crash in religious attendance as people began to see religion as more divisive than uniting.

Much as dualistic religions, by separating themselves from the physical world, eventually make themselves irrelevant because people need religion only to deal with the physical world, diversity by rejecting ethnicity and culture also made religion irrelevant.

As a consequence, people are leaving churches because of lack of usefulness in a diverse multiculture:

The Great Dechurching finds that religious abuse and more general moral corruption in churches have driven people away. This is, of course, an indictment of the failures of many leaders who did not address abuse in their church. But Davis and Graham also find that a much larger share of those who have left church have done so for more banal reasons. The book suggests that the defining problem driving out most people who leave is…just how American life works in the 21st century. Contemporary America simply isn’t set up to promote mutuality, care, or common life. Rather, it is designed to maximize individual accomplishment as defined by professional and financial success. Such a system leaves precious little time or energy for forms of community that don’t contribute to one’s own professional life or, as one ages, the professional prospects of one’s children.

Without ethnicity, there is no culture. Without culture, there is no “mutuality, care, or common life” as Robert Putnam‘s research into the effects of diversity on a heterogenous population revealed. With that, there is no need for religion.

As Putnam detailed, in a heterogenous society, people distrust each other because they have nothing in common, leading to a malignant individualism because of a lack of culture, which is rooted in ethnicity:

Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam — famous for “Bowling Alone,” his 2000 book on declining civic engagement — has found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings.

Recent research confirms his basic idea: without culture to bind them together, the twine that holds civilization together is untied, and people revert to a “me first” mentality (commonly blamed on capitalism or Jews). This is what happens when you lose culture.

Just like when we lost hierarchy — aristocrats and social class — our society fell into constant infighting, with the loss of culture the infighting has reached new levels to the point where people are actually fleeing their own ethnic groups to become rootless individuals with no loyalties except status, wealth, and power.

As the researchers found, heterogenous societies reduce any advantage to having group membership, and so people abandon their roots in favor of me-first strategies:

Generalizing the standard models of the multi-player Prisoner’s Dilemma and the Public Goods games for heterogeneous populations, we study the effects of genetic relatedness on cooperation in the context of repeated interactions. Two sets of interrelated results are established: a set of analytical results focusing on the subgame perfect equilibrium and a set of agent-based simulation results based on an evolutionary game model. We show that in both cases increasing genetic relatedness does not always facilitate cooperation. Specifically, kinship can hinder the effectiveness of reciprocity in two ways. First, the condition for sustaining cooperation through direct reciprocity is harder to satisfy when relatedness increases in an intermediate range. Second, full cooperation is impossible to sustain for a medium-high range of relatedness values. Moreover, individuals with low cost-benefit ratios can end up with lower payoffs than their groupmates with high cost-benefit ratios. Our results point to the importance of explicitly accounting for within-population heterogeneity when studying the evolution of cooperation.

In homogenous populations, group membership is rewarded and therefore people obey the rules and work toward the goals of the culture. Once a diversity tipping point is reached, they give up on this and culture evaporates, replaced by government, television, and commerce.

As it turns out, one of the first things to go is religion. Joining a church signals hard that you are part of a group, but people in diverse societies seek to erase their own identities, so eventually they see church as more divisive than unifying and stop attending.

Tags: christianity, diversity, george washington, heterogeneity, naturalization act of 1790, naturalization act of 1795, prisoner's dilemma, public goods, religion