Category: Religion
Those new service sector jobs, LDS edition
Bob Sagers was walking around an indie music festival in Salt Lake City when a friendly stranger approached and asked for his number.
“Has anyone ever told you that you have a Jesus look to you?” the man asked, according to Sagers, a 25-year-old who works as a cheesemonger at a grocery store. It wasn’t a pickup line—the man’s wife was an artist looking for religious models.
“I didn’t really get that a lot,” says Sagers, who is 6-foot-5 with dirty-blonde, shoulder-length hair and a beard he says gives Irish and Scandinavian vibes. “I make for a pretty tall Jesus.”
And so it was that Sagers began a side hustle as a savior.
Models who look like Jesus are in high demand in Utah. That’s because for a growing number of people in the state, a picture isn’t complete without Him. They are hiring Jesus look-alikes for family portraits and wedding announcements. Models are showing up to walk with a newly engaged couple through a field, play with young children in the Bonneville Salt Flats, and cram in with the family for the annual Christmas card.
Since being recruited about four years ago, Sagers has posed as Jesus nearly a dozen times. Others have done so far more often, charging about $100 to $200 an hour to pose with children, families and couples at various locations in the Beehive state.
For the newly sought-after models, the job can be freighted with meaning and responsibility. Look-alikes find that people expect them to embody Jesus in more ways than the hair and beard. Some models said they feel like a celebrity when they don the robe—and get treated like one too. (One felt compelled to remind an onlooker he wasn’t the real Jesus.) Others said they’ve had their own semireligious experiences on the job.
And note this:
Finding a model can be difficult. Areas of Utah with high concentrations of Mormons—who also call themselves Latter-day Saints or LDS—tend to lack potential Jesus doppelgängers. Some men who work or volunteer for the church, one of the state’s largest employers, are required to shave every day and keep their hair short.
Here is more from the WSJ. Via The Wisdom of Garett Jones.
Science and religious dogmatism
Today’s leading historians of science have “debunked” the notion that religious dogmatism and science were largely in conflict in Western history: conflict was rare and inconsequential, the relationship between religion and science was constructive overall. This view stands in sharp contrast to that of a group of economists, who are beginning to report empirical evidence suggesting pervasive conflict, either in the present or during various historical settings. Who is right? This article provides quantitative evidence—from the continental level down to the personal one—suggesting that religious dogmatism has been indeed detrimental to science on balance. Beginning with Europe as a whole, it shows that the religious revival associated with the Reformations coincides with scientific deceleration, while the secularization of science during the Enlightenment coincides with scientific re-acceleration. It then discusses how regional- and city-level dynamics further support a causal interpretation running from religious dogmatism to diminished science. Finally, it presents person-level statistical evidence suggesting that—throughout modern Western history, and within a given city and time period—scientists who doubted God and the scriptures have been considerably more productive than those with dogmatic beliefs.
That is from a new paper by Matías Cabello. Of course you can believe those results, and still think Christianity was a necessary institutional background, even if being Christian did not help the individual scientist.
Sales of Bibles are booming
Worries about the economy, conflicts abroad and uncertainty over the election pushed readers toward the publication in droves. Bible sales are up 22% in the U.S. through the end of October, compared with the same period last year, according to book tracker Circana BookScan. By contrast, total U.S. print book sales were up less than 1% in that period.
“People are experiencing anxiety themselves, or they’re worried for their children and grandchildren,” said Jeff Crosby, president of the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association. “It’s related to artificial intelligence, election cycles…and all of that feeds a desire for assurance that we’re going to be OK.”
Here is more from the WSJ, via Anecdotal. And what is up with Netflix Mary?
Should Notre Dame charge admission?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, as the Cathedral is reopening in December. The government wants to charge visitors five euros, but the Church is opposed. Here is part of my proffered solution:
First, charge a fee — but make it €10 rather than €5. If seeing Notre Dame is worth only €7 or €8 to someone, I don’t mind excluding them, for the benefit of those who really want to see the place. The crowds should diminish — and if they don’t, just raise the admission fee. St. Paul’s in London, by the way, charges £25 for adult admission, and Saint-Denis in Paris charges €11. Anyone who can afford to visit Paris can afford to pay more than €5 to see Notre Dame.
Second, assign a priest, nun or other religious counsel to the church, to service any religiously minded visitor who might require assistance in matters of the soul. If need be, that person can walk the God-searching visitor to a nearby church where visits are free. Admission fees will help fund this service, which would be symbolically important even if little used.
Third, set aside further time for Notre Dame to be a quiet and more religious place. Maybe make admission free for one day per week — but only for residents of Paris. Since most visitors stay in Paris for more than a day, the determined tourist still should be able to see the church.
And note this:
The commercialization of churches has some major downsides — but an admission fee can be a partial antidote to commercialization, not its apogee.
And this:
To put it another way: Extreme crowding is a fee of another sort, even if its nominal price remains at zero.
Let’s hope they do it.
*Conclave*
I would say this was a good not great movie, but I pass along word because it is rare to have a movie so exclusively devoted to both public choice and social choice theory, and realistically so. (Thomas Reese said in an interview that the details on the conclave were pretty realistic too; if you don’t know of Reese his book Inside the Vatican is perhaps the best book on bureaucracy ever.)
I cannot say much more without spoiling the plot. Needless to say, Richard McKelvey would not have walked away from this one feeling refuted…
The film also takes itself seriously in a good way, which these days in Hollywood is increasingly rare.
My Conversation with Musa al-Gharbi
I am a big fan of Musa’s work, most of all his new book We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. As for the podcast, here is the video, audio, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Tyler and Musa explore the rise and fall of the “Great Awokening” and more, including how elite overproduction fuels social movements, why wokeness tends to fizzle out, whether future waves of wokeness will ratchet up in intensity, why neuroticism seems to be higher on the political Left, how a great awokening would manifest in a Muslim society, Black Muslims and the Nation of Islam, why Musa left Catholicism, who the greatest sociologist of Islam is, Muslim immigration and assimilation in Europe, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: Let me give you an alternate theory of the Great Awokening, and tell me what’s wrong with it. It’s not really my view, but I hear it a lot.
So on the Left, there’s some long-term investment in teaching in America’s top universities. You produce a lot of troops who could become journalists, and they’re mostly left-leaning. Then 2011, 2012 — there’s something about the interaction of social media and, say, The New York Times and other major outlets, where all of a sudden they have a much bigger incentive to have a lot of articles about race, gender, Black Lives Matter, whatever. When those two things come together, wokeness takes off based on a background in Christianity and growing feminization of society.
By the time you get to something like 2021, enough of mainstream media has broken down that it’s simply social media out there going crazy. That just gives us a lot of diversity of bizarre views rather than just sheer wokeness — and besides, Elon is owning Twitter, so wokeness ends.
What’s wrong with that account?
AL-GHARBI: For one, I do think that some of the factors that you identified are important for contextualizing the current moment. For instance, a lot of the symbolic professions, like law and consulting, academia, journalism — they are being feminized. I do talk a bit in the book about how this matters for understanding the dynamics in a lot of these institutions. Not just over the last 10 years, but over the last several decades, in part because women and men tend to engage in very different forms of status-seeking and competition and things like that. So that does matter.
Things like social media obviously do change the way interactions play out. But you can see, actually, that things like social media or changes in the media landscape after 2010 — one limitation for using those kinds of explanations to explain the current moment is that it becomes hard, then, to understand how or why it was the case that . . .
There were three previous episodes like this, one in the 1920s through the early ’30s, one in the mid-1960s to the late ’70s, and then one in the late ’80s through early ’90s. In all cases where we didn’t have social media, where the structure of media enterprises was importantly different than it is today, and before you had Gen Z “kids these days” with their idiosyncratic attitudes, or before a lot of these professions were as feminized as they were today.
I think all of those factors you said actually do matter, and they matter in the sense — because each of these episodes, there’s so much in common, an insane amount. When you read the book and I walk through some of these — I think a lot of readers will be troubled, maybe, by how similar these episodes are. But they’re also importantly different. They don’t play out identically. They are importantly different: The role that symbolic capitalists occupy in society changed immensely over the last century. The constitution of these fields has changed immensely. There are a lot more women; there are a lot more nonwhite people in these professions than there were in the past, and so on and so forth.
All of those factors you described: I think they actually do matter, especially for understanding the ways in which this period of awokening might differ from previous episodes, but I don’t think they explain why awokenings happen at all.
COWEN: If “woke” recurs, do you think there’s a ratchet effect where it comes back bigger and stronger each time, a bit like the destructiveness of war? Or is it more of a random walk? Like, the next wave of woke in 37 years might be half as strong as the one we just had. What’s your model?
AL-GHARBI: I think it’s random; that depends a little bit on . . .
What I argue in the book is that the — for instance, when we look at the last period of awokening in the late ’80s and early ’90s, it was much less — that was the last time we had these struggles over what they call political correctness, or the PC culture, which we call wokeness today. As I argue in the book, it didn’t last as long, that awokening. It was shorter than most of the others, actually. Shorter than the one in the ’60s, shorter than the one after 2010. It was a little shorter, and it also wasn’t quite as dramatic.
I think there are these kind of contextual factors that significantly inform how severe it is or how long it lasts, how long it’s able to sustain itself or how long it is until the frustrated elites get — enough of them get satisfied that they disengage. My guess is that it’s more of a random walk, but I’m open to persuasion.
Definitely interesting.
U.S.A. facts of the day
The U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation minority staff (Committee), which oversees federal science agencies including NSF, analyzed 32,198 Prime Award grants NSF awarded to 2,443 different entities with project start dates between January 2021 and April 2024.
Committee analysis found 3,483 grants, more than ten percent of all NSF grants and totaling over $2.05 billion in federal dollars, went to questionable projects that promoted diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) tenets or pushed onto science neo-Marxist perspectives about enduring class struggle. The Committee grouped these grants into five categories: Status, Social Justice, Gender, Race, and Environmental Justice. For the purposes for this report, “DEI funding,” a “DEI grant,” or “DEI research” refers to taxpayer dollars NSF provided to a research or engagement program that fell into one of these five groups.
Here is the full report. Note that by early 2024, that figure had risen to 27 percent.
My excellent Conversation with Tom Tugendhat
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Tom Tugendhat has served as a Member of Parliament since 2015, holding roles such as Security Minister and chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee. Before entering Parliament, Tom served in in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also worked for the Foreign Office, helped establish the National Security Council of Afghanistan, and served as military assistant and principal adviser to the Chief of the Defense Staff.
Tyler and Tom examine the evolving landscape of governance and leadership in the UK today, touching on the challenges of managing London under the UK’s centralized system, why England remains economically unbalanced, his most controversial view on London’s architecture, whether YIMBYism in England can succeed, the unique politics and history of Kent, whether the system of private schools needs reform, his pick for the greatest unselected prime minister, whether Brexit revealed a defect in the parliamentary system, whether the House of Lords should be abolished, why the British monarchy continues to captivate the world, devolution in Scotland and Northern Ireland, how learning Arabic in Yemen affected his life trajectory, his read on the Middle East and Russia, the Tom Tugendhat production function, his pitch for why a talented young person should work in the British Civil Service, and more.
And here is an excerpt:
COWEN: Okay. First question, what is your favorite walk around London, and what does it show about the city that outsiders might not understand?
TUGENDHAT: Oh, my favorite walk is down the river. A lot of people walk down the river. One of the best things about walking down the river in London is, first of all, it shows two things. One, that London is actually an incredibly private place. You can be completely on your own in the center of one of the biggest cities in the world within seconds, just by walking down the river. Very often, even in the middle of the day, there’s nobody there. You walk past things that are just extraordinary. You walk past a customs house. It’s not used anymore, but it was the customs house for 300, 400, 500 years. You walk past, obviously, the Tower of London. You walk past Tower Bridge. You walk past many things like that.
Actually, you’re walking past a lot of modern London as well, and you see the reality of London, which is — the truth is, London isn’t a single city. It’s many, many different villages, all cobbled together in various different ways. I think outsiders miss the fact that there’s a real intimacy to London that you miss if all you’re doing is you’re going on the Tube, or if you’re going on the bus. If you walk down that river, you see a very, very different kind of London. You see real communities and real smaller communities.
And:
COWEN: Can the British system of government in its current parliamentary form — how well can that work without broadly liberal individualistic foundations in public opinion?
TUGENDHAT: I think it works extremely well at ensuring that truly liberal foundations are maintained. I mean that not in the American sense; I mean in a genuine, the old liberal tradition that emerges from the UK in the 1700s, 1800s, where freedom of thought, freedom of assembly, the right to own property, and all those principles that then became embedded in various different constitutions around the world, including your own. I think it does very well at doing that because it forces you, our system forces you, into partnership. There are 650 people who you have to work with in some way in Parliament over the next four or five years.
And there’s four of us currently going for leadership at the Conservative Party. There’s one reason why, despite the fact that we’re competing almost in a US primary system, the way in which we are dealing with each other is very different, is because we’re all going to have to work together for the next four years. Whoever wins is going to have to work with the other three, and the idea that you can simply ignore each other isn’t true. There’s only 121 of us Conservative MPs in Parliament, and what this system forces on us is the need to deal with each other in a way that you have to deal with somebody if you’re going to deal with them tomorrow. I think that’s one of the reasons why the British political system has endured because it forces you to remember that there’s a long-term interest, not an immediate one, not just a short-term one.
Recommended, highly intelligent throughout, including on China, Russia, and Yemen.
USA religion fact of the day
For the first time in modern American history, young men are now more religious than their female peers. They attend services more often and are more likely to identify as religious.
“We’ve never seen it before,” Ryan Burge, an associate professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, said of the flip.
Among Generation Z Christians, this dynamic is playing out in a stark way: The men are staying in church, while the women are leaving at a remarkable clip.
Church membership has been dropping in the United States for years. But within Gen Z, almost 40 percent of women now describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated, compared with 34 percent of men, according to a survey last year of more than 5,000 Americans by the Survey Center on American Life at the American Enterprise Institute.
Here is the full story (NYT).
*Religious Influences on Economic Thinking*
The subtitle is The Origins of Modern Economics, and the author is Benjamin M. Friedman. Here is the book’s home page, you can order here. I very much look forward to reading this one. Here is my earlier CWT with Ben Friedman.
What should I ask Musa al-Gharbi?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him.
Musa al-Gharbi is a sociologist and assistant professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University. He is a columnist for The Guardian and his writing has also appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Atlantic, among other publications.
I am a big fan of his forthcoming book We Have Never Been Woke, which I have blurbed. Here is Musa’s home page, do read his bio. Here is Musa on Twitter.
So what should I ask?
Jake Seliger is Dead
We all knew it was coming but it’s no less painful to learn that Jake Seliger has died. I never met Jake in person but we were pen pals? email pals? blog friends? for well over a decade. We shared an interest in speeding up drug research and development, including FDA deregulation, an interest which long preceded Jake’s cancer diagnosis. But mostly I thought he was a great writer and human being. His essays were always thoughtful and without pretense or sentimentality.
Jake’s wife, Bess Stillman is now 7 months pregnant with their daughter. Bess is an ER physician and a remarkable woman. Here is an interview with her on the infuriating difficulty of getting a patient enrolled in a clinical trial in the United States. Here is How to Say It, her gripping telling on the Moth Radio hour of how she tells people their loved ones have died. If you wonder about the title of this post, that is why. Do read How to Let Go on her last days with Jake. Sigh.
Here is Jake:
One virtue of a prolonged end is that I feel like I’ve said everything I have to say. I don’ t know that I have a favorite, but I’m fond of “I know what happens to me after I die, but what about those left behind?” Same with “How do we evaluate our lives, at the end? What counts, what matters?” I’m tempted to keep citing others, but if you scroll down into the archives you will find them. I meant to turn these essays into a memoir, but that is a project never to be completed by me. Bess assures me that she’s going to complete the project and do her best to get it published. We’ve created so much together in the process of building our life, and Bess says that doesn’t need to stop just because I’m not physically here, and that putting both our baby and our book into the world gives her immediate future the purpose that she’ll badly need.
Though having my life cut short by cancer is horrible, I’ve still in many ways been lucky. Most people never find the person who completes them, I think, and I have. I’ve been helped so much. Numerous oncologists have gone above and beyond. Many people, friends and strangers, have asked if there is anything they can do to help. The #1 thing is to support Bess and our soon-to-be-born daughter, Athena, whatever “support” may mean—the most obvious way is the Go Fund Me, as any remaining funds will go to Athena. I wish she could grow up with her father, but that is not an option. Being a single mom is hard;[1] growing up without a parent is hard; I cannot see what Athena’s future holds, except that I think and hope it will be bright, even though I will not be in it, save for the ways in which friends and family promise to keep me alive for her.
Tyler Cowen playlist for Rick Rubin
This one is for religious music, taken from various religions around the world, including yes Sikhs too. Here are Rick Rubin playlists from other people, including Carlos Santana.
Narco-pentcostalism in Brazil?
Reports that a powerful Rio drug lord known for his extremist religious beliefs ordered Catholic churches near his stronghold to close have spooked worshipers and security experts and exposed the advent of a “narco-pentecostal” movement made up of heavily armed evangelical drug traffickers.
Claims emerged in the Brazilian press over the weekend that Álvaro Malaquias Santa Rosa – a notorious gang boss known as Peixão (Big Fish) – had determined that three places of worship should shut down in and around the agglomeration of favelas that he controls in northern Rio.
Since Peixão – whose nickname comes from the ichthys “Jesus” fish – took power in 2016 of five favelas that have become known as the Complexo de Israel, an allusion to the evangelical belief that the return of Jews to the Holy Land is a step towards the second coming of Christ and Armageddon.
A neon Star of David has been erected at the top of the complex and at night can be seen for miles around – an unmissable symbol of Peixão’s force and his faith. The roofs of the favelas’ redbrick houses are dotted with blue and white Israel flags demarcating the territory the gangster controls [emphasis added]. When police raided one of his hideouts in 2021 they found a swimming pool framed by a mural of the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem and the words: “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.”
In the past, Peixão’s troops have been accused of ransacking Afro-Brazilian temples and banning Afro-Brazilian celebrations in the Complex of Israel, where more than 100,000 people live. But this week’s reports were the first relating to Catholic places of worship.
Here is the full story.
New Ross Douthat book
Believe: Why Everyone Should be Religious, pre-order here. Self-recommending, some would say God recommends it too. Here is the chain of links to my earlier exchange with Ross on whether one should believe in God.