The Authoritarians

I’m going through an excellent book called The Authoritarians by Bob Altemeyer (available for free here online). You could say there are two kinds of people in the world: those who are looking for an authority figure to surrender to, and those who take instructions from their own conscience. Political conservatives are notable for the former tendency, which may also include illogical thinking, failure to integrate contradictory ideas, hypocrisy, and ethnocentrism. Of course, everyone is subject to all of the above unless they’re careful, but right-wing authoritarians (or RWAs) seem to score higher on the scale. You’d have to, wouldn’t you? to think that war is great foreign policy or that doubling the size of Gitmo would bring safety or that immigrants threaten us all. I might add that I’ve never seen an entire political party rely on this kind of thinking for its day-to-day existence like the GOP of today, though I was kind of young during the Nixon years.

The author also investigates why people surrender their rationality to authoritarian (or fundamentalist) religions, and why some people leave them. Chapter 4 described my deconversion quite neatly. You young fundamentalists (and by that I mean anyone who was taught that their religion’s teachings were factually true), see if this resonates for you.

From its earliest days fundamentalism has drawn a line in the sand over scripture versus science, and some of its young people eventually felt they had to step over the line, and then they kept right on going.

Still the decision to leave was almost always wrenching, because it could mean becoming an outcast from one’s family and community. Also, fundamentalists are frequently taught that no one is lower, and will burn more terribly in hell, than a person who abandons their true religion. What then gnawed away so mercilessly at the apostates that they could no longer overpower doubt with faith?

Their families will say it was Satan. But we thought, after interviewing dozens of “amazing apostates,” that (most ironically) their religious training had made them leave. Their church had told them it was God’s true religion. That’s what made it so right, so much better than all the others. It had the truth, it spoke the truth, it was The Truth. But that emphasis can create in some people a tremendous valuing of truth per se, especially among highly intelligent youth who have been rewarded all their lives for getting “the right answer.” So if the religion itself begins making less and less sense, it fails by the very criterion that it set up to show its superiority.

Similarly, pretending to believe the unbelievable violated the integrity that had brought praise to the amazing apostates as children. Their consciences, thoroughly developed by their upbringing, made it hard for them to bear false witness. So again they were essentially trapped by their religious training. It had worked too well for them to stay in the home religion, given the problems they saw with it.

From a child, I was taught that the Book of Mormon was “the most correct book“, and I taught this to others on my mission. It was later that I saw how the Book of Mormon made claims that either failed to be confirmed by evidence, or else contradicted it entirely. As a result, I came to realise that the Book of Mormon was, well, not even a correct book. What then? One agonising deconversion later, I can still appreciate the respect for truth that my religion instilled in me, even as it taught things that were not literally true.

I’d be happy to have a book club sort of discussion in comments. Paste any thought-provoking prose you find and we’ll hash it over.