There was a faculty-student happy hour event last week for St. Patrick’s Day, and I spent a bunch of time drinking Irish beer, listening to Irish music (one of the English department faculty is an accomplished piper, and brought a bunch of other local musicians in to play for the party), and talking to some students from one of the local fraternities. Inevitably, one of them asked me what I really think about frats.<\/p>\n
This is a hot topic on campus, because fraternities have historically been huge at Union, but there are a number of people on the faculty who make no secret of their opinion that fraternities and sororities are a blight on the campus. Their feeling is that the only way for the institution to move forward is to get rid of the Greeks, the sooner the better.<\/p>\n
As I told the student who asked me about this, I’m not in that camp. Williams doesn’t have frats (they got rid of them in the mid-60’s), but I’ve always said that the rugby club was about the closest analogue. My dinner talk at ΔKE<\/a> a couple of weeks ago pretty much confirmed it. The WRFC had pretty much all of the same characteristics– the quasi-hierarchical structure (seniors boss everybody else around, freshmen and sophomores fetch and carry), the silly rituals and traditions, the fondness for beer and off-color humor. There were a few differences– we didn’t have a long formal initiation process, we took pretty much all comers, and we didn’t have group housing– but most of the major elements were there. The same was true for a number of other groups on campus– the football team was probably more frat-like than the rugby club, frisbee somewhat less so, and the crew team was like a frat without the booze.<\/p>\n That experience gives me a somewhat different take on the fraternity question than many of my colleagues. I’ve heard lots of stories about the horrible things that they get up to on campus (I try to stay away from campus on Friday and Saturday nights, so I have no first-hand knowledge), but nothing I’ve heard has really shocked me that much. A lot of the stories involve tremendously stupid activities, mind, but none of them are all that much dumber than what we used to get up to in my rugby-playing days.<\/p>\n My opinion, in the end, is that a lot of what people find objectionable about fraternities and sororities is not an inherent property of the organizations, but rather an emergent property of large groups of 18-22 year old Americans. Banning Greeks would make some cosmetic changes in the life of the campus, but most of the objectionable behavior would still crop up, just in a different form. Some other organizations on campus would become more frat-like, or new organizations would appear, and fill the same social role, more or less.<\/p>\n So what’s this got to do with religion? Other than some lame college-preacher “Jesus is the Eternal President of the Universal Chapter of Α Ω” analogy (they throw bitchin’ parties– every time you think they’re out of booze, they find more…), that is? I was reminded of this when I started thinking about how to respond to some of the comments to the church wedding<\/a> post, specifically this one from John Larson:<\/p>\n If you are an atheist being married in a church, with a traditional religious ceremony, you are at least implicitly seeking the approval of God and an institution that exists in his name. Depending on the ceremony, this request may in fact be quite explicit. And you are doing so while privately denying the big guy’s very existence. This is not honest conduct. This is living a lie.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n The thing is, I don’t actually disagree all that strongly with what Johan says. Where I disagree is about the importance of this stuff. I would agree that it was a major problem, if I thought that belief in God was the most important part of church ceremonies. But I don’t.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n My personal inclination, as I’ve said before, is to give much greater weight to the social and communal aspects of religion than the mythological ones. That is, I think that the biggest attraction religion has for a lot of people is not the metaphysical certainty provided by belief in God, but rather the idea of membership in a community. In which case, the important part of a wedding or other ceremony is the public gathering. The private thoughts of the participants really don’t make that much of a difference.<\/p>\n I find support for this view in a lot of things, but nothing is more important than the fact that people shop for churches. As I’ve said before, when I was a kid, and we would go to church with my grandparents, we would drive past two or three Catholic churches on the way to St. Stan’s. If belief in God and doctrine were the most important feature of religion, there was no need for that trip– all of those churches featured the same Mass, with the same readings, celebrated by priests reporting to the same Pope. We made the drive, though, because St. Stan’s was the Polish church, and the center of the community that my grandparents were a part of. It was a matter of community and ethnic identity– they were members of the subset of Catholics who attended St. Stanislaus Kostka Church on Sundays, and that was more important than the content of the Mass.<\/p>\n You see the same thing with other groups as well. every few months, there’s a story about some pastor who made a political statement of some sort, and saw half his congregation disappear. Depressingly, these usually involve preachers saying sane things and seeing their flock flee to churches with crazier views, but there are examples of the opposite, as well. And either way, it points to the supremacy of community over doctrine– if belief in God were the<\/strong> crucial factor, it wouldn’t matter where people went to church. What’s really important, though, is for people to belong to a community of believers, and religious people are more than willing to move from church to church in an effort to find a group that believes the same things they do.<\/p>\n (For that matter, if doctrine and belief were everything, there wouldn’t be any need to go to church at all– it’s right there in the Bible, Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 6<\/a>. “But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.”)<\/p>\n So, that’s why I’m not particularly bothered about having a church wedding, and my reasons for it (as explained in the earlier post). The tribute to the group identity is the important thing, and God is secondary. (For the record, my personal beliefs are probably best described as Apathetic Agnostic– I don’t really care whether there’s a God or not. If there is, I figure he’s busy hiding evidence of the Higgs Boson, and has better things to worry about than my state of belief.)<\/p>\n This is also where the fraternity connection comes in. In the same way that I think frat-like behavior is an emergent property of large groups of 18-22 year olds, I think religious behavior is an emergent property of humans in large groups. People in general feel a need to be a part of some sort of community, and religions grow out of that need. Belief in a particular form of God and a particular set of rituals is more about membership than metaphysics. They’re the secret handshakes of the religious fraternity.<\/p>\n (This is about the point where some Pharynguloid usually pops up and announces that they feel no such communal need, so let me step aside to speak to that person for a moment: I’m not talking about you. You are a strong, vibrant individual who needs nobody else. Your intellect, strength of will, and enormous genitalia are an inspiration to us all. A shiny gold star for you!)<\/p>\n This is why I find the endless online discussions of religion so incredibly frustrating. As I see it, the whole argument is about something that’s just a few steps above a sideshow– they go round and round about the irrationality of belief, and the stupidity of various elements of doctrine, and never touch the community stuff. Which, to my mind, is the most important aspect of the whole thing<\/p>\n Trying to get rid of religion by telling believers that their beliefs are stupid is like trying to get rid of fraternities by telling frat boys that the whole enterprise is silly. The smarter ones will shrug and say “Yeah, so?” or invent endless arguments as to why they’re not silly. The less-smart ones will bristle and bluster and tell you to fuck off, and draw into a seige mentality that will make it almost impossible to effect any kind of useful change.<\/p>\n When colleges want to change the worst aspects of fraternity and sorority culture– and there are things about Greek organizations that I agree are pretty unsavory and ought to be changed– the way to do it is not by attacking the trappings, but by working on the environment. These organizations exist because they fill a social need, and if you want them to change, you need to approach the problem with an awareness of that.<\/p>\n If your objection is to big keg parties with unsafe drinking behavior, the solution is not to ban large parties outright– for whatever reason, college students are happiest when they congregate in enormous groups. The way to deal with the unsafe behavior is to encourage and empower students to fill that need in less objectionable ways– create new organizations that throw big parties in a manner more to your liking. That will provide an outlet for the students who weren’t totally invested in the status quo, and over time, it will drag the original organizations in the direction you want. <\/p>\n This is the element that I think is missing from the whole atheist project online. Religion exists in large part because it fills a social need for believers, and attacking the silly and objectionable beliefs directly isn’t going to change things. What you need to do is to encourage or create new communities that fill the same social needs without<\/strong> the objectionable beliefs. If you do that, you’ll provide an outlet for people who aren’t entirely happy with their current church, but who don’t see any alternative that provides similar community benefits. <\/p>\n There is a little of that going on on-line, in the form of the comment sections at Pharyngula and elsewhere, which have turned into communities in their own right, with in-jokes and rituals, and even occasional get-togethers. That’s been almost entirely accidental, though, and is far too limited in scope to do much good. I’d love to see what could be accomplished with a concerted effort in that direction, with a broader appeal.<\/p>\n As it is, though, I think the vast majority of the effort that goes into the atheist project online is misspent, if not actively counterproductive. And that’s a shame.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There was a faculty-student happy hour event last week for St. Patrick’s Day, and I spent a bunch of time drinking Irish beer, listening to Irish music (one of the English department faculty is an accomplished piper, and brought a bunch of other local musicians in to play for the party), and talking to some… Continue reading God and Fraternities<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2407","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-religion","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2407","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2407"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2407\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2407"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2407"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2407"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n