Have I already posted about this, or do I just think about it often?
I just looked, and I have sorta written about this, though the substance was fundamentally different. Please allow me to opine on other aspects of money superseding religiosity.
Here’s my hypothesis: money has taken the place of religiosity in the US.
When I was a kid, church was a cultural phenomenon: not only did I have “church friends,” which I’m sure I’ve written about🤔, but churches had numerous activities: pot-luck meals, social activities for different age groups, garage sales, youth camps, and the list goes on. If you went to church in the 1980s, 1990s, or 2000s, the church was assiduously offering social groups and activities such that church was a broadly encompassing aspect of people’s lives. And that makes intuitive sense: for the 1980s and 1990s, the turn of the millennium was approaching, and churchgoers are a paranoid bunch, particularly concerned about things like numerology (never mind that when you dig into it, year numbers ain’t an exact science).
Yet, as the role of the church seems to recede in prominence, that recession is happening alongside another, very powerful phenomenon. Specifically, the fall of religiosity in American life is happening alongside the increasing ubiquity of the internet.
Whereas thirty years ago, when the church was a significant aspect of American life, the www was mostly a curiosity for dorks. In the late 1990s, I’d download guitar tabs (sheet music) from OLGA (On-Line Guitar Archive), but it was very rudimentary by contemporary standards. Actually, I’ll be more specific: at home, we had (natually) dial-up internet, so I’d go to the elementary school where my mom taught to go to OLGA to download tabs cuz the internet there was way faster. Then, I’d save songs to a 3.5” floppy disk and print them at home. I know a few websites played MIDI tracks, but streaming music was a fantasy. I think I originally got internet access (dial-up, of course) in 1995, which was four years before I ever heard of Napster. During this time, the church continued to serve as a major hub of social life. The prospect of meeting someone at church, marrying em, and having a kid who’d get baptized in that same church was totally normal.
That is increasingly unlikely, as the role of the www in daily life has led to huge social changes. The predictable stability of the time before widespread digital devices is gone. Which is a bit ironic: before digital devices, when everything was analog, the difference between “yes” and “no” was less stark, yet people were heavily invested in discernment. Nowadays, computers sort out state, and people seem much less willing or able to distinguish between the poles.
But I digress. Or do I?
Perhaps it’s really not a digression. Rather, perhaps people are continuously citing greater levels because they’ve lost the ability to discern. Rather than finding this obnoxious, I can certainly make the case for it being sad. I mean, it’s obnoxious, too, of course. But it’s sad.
I think I felt better about civilization when outcasts were online, and regular people were out in the world (or at church). This paradigm of everyone being an “indoor kid” has clearly failed.
I once read or heard a joke about the public intellectual, George W. Bush, that goes like this: George Bush’s chief of staff (or something) tells him 3 Brazilian soldiers were killed in Iraq. Bush, visibly downtrodden, asks, “How many is a brazillion?”
Good stuff.
I mention that because I keep reading about billions and trillions and what not. And it’s a bit ironic because the average American citizen has nowhere near these amounts. I have mentioned that I am on a lot of newsletters, and those have got to be like ground zero for this stuff. Basic success is now insufficient. Rather, you need superlatives!
When I had just gotten to college, I had a girlfriend who would often say “like 80,000” as a superlative. It was both a large number before the comma: 80, and it had a comma. To stay current, she’d have to update her superlatives. Today, she’d have to say “80,000,000,000.” And let’s be real, that’s like hyperinflation numbers.
Ultimately, this is a multi-faceted issue: on one hand, people have largely stopped worshipping religious deities. Simultaneously, people are talking as if they have and need ever more money. Of course, the vast majority of people have no particular purpose for the money they want more of, but the money is a proxy for the eternal life they once found promised at church. Which, let’s be real about that, too. Is eternal life really the type of thing you want?