Next-Gen Atheism

Understanding the Worth of the Soul

What allows churches to behave altruistically? Something remarkable about almost every church is its open-door policy to society—no matter your economic status, your behavioral baggage, or your job prospects, you are (almost always) welcome to join and participate in a church. This is starkly different from most corporate policies—time shares, gym clubs, and hotels wouldn’t even consider it. Why?

Christianity has long held that the human soul is of great worth. Churches expend a great deal of time and money serving the weak and downtrodden—soup kitchens, missionaries, universities, and hospitals to name a few costly expenditures. The soul is an interesting idea—a “longer-lasting” version of you that lives on, even after death. Although God may have value in this longer-lasting you, an earthly church doesn’t directly benefit from your afterlife… or does it?

Typically, the concept of a soul has a 1:1 correspondence with a person, but I believe the worth of the soul is more accurately accounted for when considering it as belonging to many generations. When parents join a church, the family is entering a multi-generational “contract”. It’s an explicit contract—such as is represented by baptism—as well as a tacit one (i.e. children who grow up within the church-family system of controlled information are expected to inherit religious identity form their parents). The “soul” is the key to understanding how churches can afford to behave “altruistically” over a single lifetime, to the benefit of individuals and societies.

Churches, then, have a “long-term greedy” investment strategy over the time scale of human generations. When a financially weak or unstable individual enters a church, the paradigm through which the worth of the person is assessed is one of “the value of this person, and the many generations following”. Because religions have grown up as social constructs spanning millenia, they have the wisdom of ages built in to their memes—the commitment of a financially hopeless drunk is worthy of a great deal of institutional investment when you consider the social and financial value of that (wo)man amortized over the next three generations.

Can a corporation be allowed to think this way? Probably not. There are many short-term legal and financial constraints placed on companies that heavily bias them away from thinking on the scale of multiple generations—the quarterly report, the growth mindset of investors, and the profit-maximization responsibility of the CEO, for instance. In addition, there is no legal basis for a multi-generational contract—something akin to baptism.

That said, it seems there is yet a slim chance that a carefully constructed corporation could meet the multi-generational needs of family lines while also working within the constraints of modern business. There is a growing trend toward for-benefit corporations that loosens the profit-maximization stranglehold. In addition, the “social entrepreneur” space has opened up in both capital and mindshare. And finally, present-day atheism has served the niche needs of individuals but hasn’t yet formed a cohesive product that it offers humanity in place of religion—perhaps it is primed to see its weakness and fill the giant needs of the rising generation.

Part of the reason today’s atheism does not think long-term is that it was born as the exodus of individuals from religions. Very few religions have wholesale abandoned their doctrines when faced with new evidence (although the ones that have, such as the Community of Christ, are intriguing). As a result, present-day atheism is hyper-individualistic. It focuses on the needs of the individual to self-expression and rebellion against the group-think of the past. When we get beyond this stepping stone, the next generation of atheism may be willing to stand on the shoulders of mythical beings of human form but superhuman size.