“So-and-so is just like a religion. It inspires the same sort of blind trust. It encourages tribal loyalty and ‘us against them’ thinking. It places some individuals above others, in a position where their goodness and worth can’t be questioned. It asks people to hang on to ideas and beliefs that are flatly untrue. It’s a hierarchical system of authority and obedience. It’s just like a religion. Heck — it is a religion.”

I’ve seen this argument a lot. When secular institutions come under fire, atheists sometimes argue that the institution in question is really religious. It came up in responses to my piece comparing the Penn State child rape scandal with the Catholic Church child rape scandal: people argued that football and sports get treated like religions, and indeed are religions. It comes up in political arguments: organizations and affiliations from the Libertarian Party to the Green Party get accused of being religions. It comes up a lot when believers make the Stalin argument: believers say “Look at Stalin! Look at what happens when atheists run things!”, and atheists reply (among the many other arguments against this ridiculous canard), “Stalinism was a pseudo-religion!”

I think it’s a bad argument. And I’d like to persuade atheists to stop using it. Here’s why.

Either religion is fundamentally different in some way(s) from other human activities/ institutions/ ideas, or it’s not.

If religion isn’t different — then the things that are bad about it aren’t special or unique. And it’s not accurate or fair to claim that any particular bad thing that anybody does is “just like religion.” You might as well say that any particular bad thing that anybody does is “just like business,” or “just like non-profit political organizing,” or “just like sports.” There’s no reason to single religion out.

And if religion is different — then we need to be very careful, and very rigorous, about what that difference is.

I, for one, do think that religion is different. I even argue that what makes religion unique is exactly what makes it dangerous.

But the thing that makes religion different from other human activities/ institutions/ ideas is not a tendency to blindly follow authority, or a tendency to be loyal to an in-group to the point of stupidity, or a tendency to be unquestioningly devoted to leaders, or a tendency to hold onto beliefs and ideas we’re attached to long after they’ve been shown to make no sense. Those are common human tendencies. Atheists engage in them; agnostics engage in them; lukewarm “spiritual but not religious” believers engage in them; fervent believers engage in them. These are not religious behaviors. These are human behaviors. We all do them, and we do them in just about every conceivable context.

The thing that makes religion different from other human activities/ institutions/ ideas is the belief in the supernatural. That is its defining characteristic. Religion, for the overwhelming majority of people who believe in it/ practice it/ use the word, is a belief in supernatural entities or forces with an effect on the natural world: invisible beings, inaudible voices, intangible entities, undetectable forces, and/or events and judgments that happen after we die.

So it doesn’t make any sense to say that a secular institution — such as Penn State, or the Tea Party, or Stalinist Russia — is “just like a religion,” or is a “pseudo-religion.” As much as you may dislike Penn State or the Libertarian Party or Stalinist Russia, they did not and do not promote belief in the supernatural. (Or if they do, they do so only as an ancillary activity: it’s not their mission statement.) They may promote authoritarianism, tribalism, stubborn attachment to irrational ideas, blind loyalty, unquestioning devotion to leaders, and/or any combination of one or all of the above. But they do not promote belief in the supernatural.

And that means that they’re not a religion. It means that they’re not like a religion — except insofar as many human activities/ institutions/ ideas, including religion, have some or all of these dangerous tendencies in common.

Now. I do think that religion, and the stuff about religion that’s unique, has a strong tendency to amplify these dangerous tendencies and make them worse. As I’ve written before: Religion is a belief in invisible beings, inaudible voices, intangible entities, undetectable forces, and events and judgments that happen after we die. It therefore has no reality check. And it is therefore uniquely armored against criticism, questioning, and self- correction. It is uniquely armored against anything that might stop it from spinning into extreme absurdity, extreme denial of reality… and extreme, grotesque immorality. So I do think that, in religion, the tendencies towards authoritarianism, tribalism, stubborn attachment to irrational ideas, blind loyalty, unquestioning devotion to leaders, etc. are far more likely to be cranked up to an alarmingly high degree. The lack of a reality check dials this bad shit up to eleven.

But that doesn’t make these tendencies unique to religion. And it doesn’t turn an activity/ institution/ idea into a religion, just because it shares these tendencies.

We don’t get to have it both ways. We don’t get to say that religion is unique — and uniquely harmful, and uniquely deserving of our efforts to persuade people out of it — and then, whenever anyone does anything stupid or harmful for any secular reason, turn around and say, “It’s just like religion!” It’s not. If it’s not a belief in supernatural entities or forces with an effect on the natural world, then it’s not religion. Let’s please stop saying that it is.