Photo by Ahna Ziegler on Unsplash

This essay is also available as a podcast on anchor.fm and other platforms.

My partner and I recently watched the movie Behind the Curve, a documentary about modern flat Earth societies. For those who may be unaware, the hypothesis espoused by modern flat Earth societies is that the Earth is not, in fact, an oblate spheroid (i.e. a globe), but rather a flat disk, and that the near-universal acceptance of the globe Earth hypothesis is the result of national and global conspiracies which promote that view for various reasons (for example, to indoctrinate people into a model of the world that does not reflect biblical cosmology, but other reasons are given as well).

Behind the Curve is a brilliant and entertaining documentary, good for an easy laugh at the catastrophically ignorant, also a bit concerning given the apparent prevalence of such people, but nevertheless a fascinating window into the psychology and sociology of belief. What has remained with me most strongly was that the flat Earth hypothesis is not only what the various flat-Earthers documented in the film believe, but also a core component of their identities as persons. After watching Behind the Curve, I wondered how this phenomenon might relate to religious belief, and that’s the question I examine here.

First up, what exactly is belief? After all, we can’t really be doing philosophy if we’re not adding a great deal of complication to terms that most of us already think we understand . This is a question related to the broader question of what is knowledge? (i.e. the epistemological question), which is one of the central questions of philosophy and far too broad a topic to be taken up here. For our purposes it will be sufficient to go forward from the standard model of knowledge: justified, true belief. This helps to clarify what beliefs are. Certain kinds of beliefs are knowledge, and certain kinds aren’t. To use the Google definition, beliefs are things which are accepted as true, but given our definition for knowledge, they may not be (and I’m just going to bypass entirely the quagmire of what truth is). So beliefs are things that we think are true but which may or may not be. And what’s the difference between knowledge and a belief that happens to be true? Justification. One must have valid reasons for believing that something is true for that belief to be knowledge. To take an example, I believe that my cats are, at the moment, downstairs on their cat beds. I have reasons for this belief: that’s where they were when I last saw them, and that’s where they usually are around this time of day (they need their rest for the nocturnal mischief that begins nightly at the exact moment I get comfortable in bed). But in the case that that’s actually where they are right now, I can’t say that I knew that, because I lacked sufficient justification: it was at least possible for them to have moved without me being aware of their having done so.

Getting back to the specifics of the topic, how would my sense of identity change if I believed that my cats were downstairs on their cat beds, but then, upon inspection, found them to be elsewhere? Not in the slightest, so clearly not all of our beliefs comprise our belief-identities . How would my sense of identity change if it were proved that the world was indeed flat? That would be seismic. A great deal of my worldview is grounded in the natural sciences, which would have been proven entirely unreliable. My belief that the world is consistent and coherent is likewise grounded in the natural sciences; I could trust in nothing, not even myself, because even the notion of trust would be suspect. Should such a thing be proven, I do indeed expect that my very identity would be grievously injured. Might it be possible, then, that I cling to a faith in the natural sciences not only because of their inherent validity, but because to do otherwise would threaten my entire reality and my very being? If the natural sciences are indeed a valid means of attaining knowledge, as I believe them to be, does that threat matter?

The linguistic aspect of the problem points toward the psychological substrate at work. No one leads with “I believe in Christianity” but rather “I am a Christian.” This applies to me as well; I don’t think of myself as someone who holds Satanic beliefs; rather, I am a Satanist. While problems may arise from this conflation of belief and identity, it’s clearly unavoidable and actually entirely reasonable. After all, our identities are themselves belief systems which may include non-knowledge belief (i.e. beliefs that are not true or that are true but without sufficient justification for knowledge; for example, I think most of us have met at some point in our lives some liars or thieves who honestly believed themselves to be good, honest people), and our identities, being mental models of who we are, must necessarily be inclusive of what we believe. And from this we get belief-identity, an identity rooted in a belief system.

At this point we might ask the question, where is the line between being a Christian and having some Christian beliefs? I’m certainly curious about that, but of more immediate relevance are the problems that arise from this intermingling of belief and identity, so we’ll put that aside for the moment and take it as established that there may be some line between the two but that at some point along the spectrum people take on belief-identities.

Towards the end of Behind the Curve, the psychologist Dr. Per Espen Stoknes comments:

Say you lose faith in this thing. What then happens to my personal relationships?… Will the mainstream people welcome me back? No. They couldn’t care less. But have I now lost all my friends in this community? Yes. So, suddenly you’re doubly isolated.

Ideally, our beliefs should conform to our best understanding of the world, and should this understanding change, our beliefs should as well. But it is possible that one might be unwilling to allow their beliefs to conform to their best understanding of the world because of the practical implications that such would entail. This is enough of a problem that a non-profit organization, The Clergy Project, was founded in 2011 in order to assist priests who no longer held Christian beliefs but who could not easily extricate themselves from their positions due to societal complications.

Along these lines, Mark Sargent, the flat Earth advocate who is the focus of Behind the Curve, says in the documentary that he couldn’t leave flat Earth even if he wanted to.

This would certainly explain, at least in part, the difficulties of religious dialogue (and dialogue associated with other belief-identities, such as the political). If my partner were to come into my office right now and inform me (for some reason) that the cats are in our bedroom rather than downstairs on the cat beds… well, nothing really to be said about that. I was mistaken but it doesn’t much matter to anyone. If my partner asked me to pick up something important from the store and I, believing that they had asked me to get something different, got the wrong thing, that might have some serious consequences and I would certainly feel badly when the mistake came to light, but I would accept that my belief was mistaken, do what I could to correct it, and move on . But if I were to even just challenge a Christian’s belief in the divinity of Jesus, I expect that I would face some serious backlash. But why should this be the case? Why should “I see you’re wearing a cross but I don’t think that Jesus was the son of God” be any different from “I overheard you saying you need to buy tickets but you’re in the will-call line” ? We all find ourselves mistaken about things from time to time; why would one not look at this as just another potential case of mistaken belief from which one can learn and progress? The reason is that, if it is a belief-identity in question, then it is not just the belief that is being threatened, but the identity as well. An attack on the belief is necessarily perceived as an attack on the person.

And it’s not just a function of whether our beliefs are structurally incorporated into our identities, but also of how our beliefs are so incorporated. In A Thousand Plateaus (1980), the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychotherapist Félix Guattari propose the notion of the rhizome as a model for knowledge (and potentially for society as well). What is rhizomatic is decentralized; all the parts connect to each other without any sort of hierarchy between them. This notion is contrasted with the arborescent, where, like a tree, “roots” and “branches” of knowledge are connected in hierarchies to a core “trunk.” In The Nationalist Revival (2018), John B. Judis proposes a model of nationalism and cosmopolitanism that makes Deleuze and Guattari’s theory manifest (though I don’t think that Judis was drawing from Deleuze and Guattari in any way): nationalism is an arborescent model in which certain facets of identity (nationality, religion, race, language, social class) are coextensive with each other, forming a “trunk” of self; whereas those who are more cosmopolitan are more rhizomatic, lacking central structures of identity that would alone primarily define their identities. As Judis describes, religion and nationalism are deeply intertwined (“For many people, the most important gateway to nationalist sentiment is through religious belief and observance”), and given an arborescent belief structure, we have a situation in which an attack on one’s religious belief is simultaneously an attack on one’s national identity and vice versa, both of which being as well an attack on the person . And so meaningful dialogue becomes even more difficult.

A further complicating factor is that people may indeed have mistaken beliefs about their own beliefs. For an example of this, consider the data from the eminent Baylor Religion Survey, from 2014 , one of the most comprehensive surveys of American religiosity ever attempted. In a question in which options for a more cosmic, pantheist, impersonal conception of God were available, 62.7% of participants stated that they had no doubt that God exists. In a separate study conducted by Newberg and Waldman and detailed in their book How God Changes Your Brain (a much better book than the title would indicate; it deals with religion and neurology without making any realist metaphysical claims), 75% of the participants drew and then described God in entirely pantheist, impersonal terms. Such a remarkable discrepancy wants for an explanation; either one or the other survey exhibited some sort of significant bias (and I have no reason to believe that that’s the case), or a substantial portion of the population does not fully understand their own beliefs about God. So now we have the plausibility of people identifying as a particular belief-identity while not actually holding the core requisite beliefs!

Similarly, while I don’t have any hard data on the matter, I think it’s likely that most Christians believe that they are following the religion established by Jesus of Nazareth and believe that, indeed, that’s what Christianity is. But this is not quite true. As I’ve written before, Jesus preached an apocalyptic Judaism to the Jewish people, and the doctrine of his having been crucified so that people might attain justification with God, which I would argue is in fact the core belief of Christianity, was not part of his message. What became the Christian religion was founded by Paul the Apostle as a religion about Jesus and his crucifixion; Paul himself admitted that he was entirely unfamiliar with Jesus’ actual teachings. And even the religion of Paul was oriented towards an apocalypse which he expected in the near future. The religion that Christianity is today is not something that was established by Jesus, but rather something that it became in the centuries following his death. And this is not to say that modern Christianity has no potential viability as a religion, but only to demonstrate again that what people think they believe and what they actually believe may be two entirely different things.

The two cases presented above are distinct but related. In the first case, people are aware of their beliefs but interpret them in an inaccurate way. In the second case, people believe things about their beliefs that are simply inaccurate on a factual level. But in both cases we have systems of belief, and thus systems of identity, that are predicated on error.

But what about me? Is it possible that I do, or may at some point in the future, hold to Satanism more out of habit and security of identity than out of actual belief? My religion as a Satanist is almost entirely non-realist, so I’m not making any ontological claims that could be disproven. Largely, it’s a way of framing within a particular symbolic context what it is that I know and believe. So the religious claim that I am making is that Satanism is a valid and useful way of framing the world in a religious context. But what if that should be proven false? The circumstance I described above in which it were proven that the flat Earth hypothesis is true would accomplish exactly that. The notion that science is a means of gaining an accurate understanding of the world is central to my Satanic outlook, so such a confirmation would indeed threaten my religion and my belief-identity as a Satanist. It is my hope and intention that I would face up to that even in the face of total disintegration of my identity rather than continue to cling to false belief out of a need for security of identity.

So then what is to be done about this problem in general? I think that the first step is that we no longer pretend that we can criticize ideas without simultaneously criticizing people. Maybe, in an ideal world, belief and identity would be non-overlapping magisteria, but that is not the world we live in and people are their beliefs, whether we like it or not, though it remains necessary that all ideas be subject to criticism. The corollary to this is that people be aware that they may be attacked on a personal level, albeit unintentionally, should ideas with which they choose to identify fall under attack, and my hope is that they would, paradoxically, not take it personally.

Thanks much for reading. I hope you’ve found this piece interesting and informative. If you’ve enjoyed it, I encourage you to look at some of my other essays, and to sign up for my mailing list (form on the sidebar) so you can stay current on my latest work. And if you find my approach to philosophy and religion at all valuable, I hope that you’ll stop in at my Patreon page, which features bonus content for patrons, and that you’ll stop back by to check on my new content. I’ll be publishing new work every Friday evening. I also have a reading list, which contains links to the books I used to research this and all of my other stories. Clicking through and buying books is a great, easy way to support my work.