Christianity’s decline in America is a major win for social engineers

The decline of Christianity and its corresponding ethics will leave Americans more exposed than ever to one of the most effective and well-worn tools in the social engineer’s kit: directed social norming.

Social norming is a process in which individuals adjust their thinking and behavior on the basis of perceptions about what other people are doing. The trouble with perceptions is that they're very often wrong. Even more troubling is that outside forces can introduce false perceptions in the absence of the insinuated norms in order to normalize what was previously beyond the pale.

Statists, marketers, ideologues, and others of a procrustean stripe frequently rely on directed social norming as a means of controlling the masses without resorting to physical coercion.

Take, for example, makeup for men. Industrialists realized they were limiting themselves just peddling their chemicals to women. A concerted social norming campaign resulted in a male-facing market projected to be worth at least $115 billion by 2028.

Directed social norming is not all cosmetic, however. It can also ramify for mores.

There are relatively benign cases like the CDC-supported effort to change "social norms about youth violence." Then there are the consequential efforts by progressives to alter civilization-grounding norms.

Alfred Kinsey, dubbed the “father of the sexual revolution,” passed off the behaviors of prostitutes, pedophiles, and other sexual degenerates as representative of the general population. These distortions were well trafficked throughout the 20th century to great effect: Untold millions of Americans ultimately bought Kinsey’s lies and relaxed their sexual mores. We are still reeling from the consequences of his wicked deceit. For example, the percentage of the population identifying as non-straight doubled over a 10-year period.

Directed social norming was especially successful during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the usual suspects went to great lengths to manufacture a “new normal.” By the end, 600 million novel mRNA shots had found willing arms and every city had its share of people masking alone in their cars. Extra to victims, the curated social norms won villains to their cause: 59% of Democratic voters supported imprisoning the unvaccinated, and 45% supported the state putting the unvaccinated into camps.

Propagandization of the masses with a false sense of normal can clearly be used for nefarious purposes. This exploitable relativism is, however, less effective on those with a strong moral compass.

Christianity, still the dominant religion in the United States, provides the compass best calibrated to true north, affording — at least in its orthodox forms — adherents a rigid understanding of what is right and wrong regardless of the whims, criticisms, and values of the age.

As G.K. Chesterton noted in "The Everlasting Man":

Church is from the first a thing holding its own position and point of view, quite apart from the accidents and anarchies of its age. That is why it deals blows impartially right and left, at the pessimism of the Manichean or the optimism of the Pelagian. It was not a Manichean movement because it was not a movement at all. It was not an official fashion because it was not a fashion at all. It was something that could coincide with movements and fashions, could control them and could survive them.

The orthodox Christian position on abortion has, for instance, not changed since the first century. Why? The truth‚ in this case about the sanctity of life, is unalterable. Just as the truth is unalterable, those who hold it dear are, by extension, harder to alter through herdist appeals.

The compass Christian orthodoxy affords the individual helps him avoid getting lost in the prescribed norms of the day. But it is ultimately the true north this compass is calibrated to that best thwarts the social engineer's attempts at directed social norming. After all, social norming relies upon a trust that the masses are exemplary, but the Christian knows there is only one exemplar truly warranting emulation — the same he kneels before every Sunday.

The trouble nowadays is that fewer and fewer people are acquainting themselves with the perfect exemplar on Sundays or at all.

In 1972, 92% of Americans claimed to be Christian. Only 64% said so in 2020. That number is expected to drop to 50% in 2070. When polled in May, only 31% of Americans indicated they attended church in the past week. Less than half of Americans described themselves as religious.

The situation appears especially bleak among young people, whose faith is slipping or was never there to begin with.

The normative power social engineers have wielded in the face of a Christian majority with calibrated compasses will pale in comparison to what they will enjoy over a population of deracinated “nones,” which now account for 30% of the adult U.S. population. Just because they won't follow the man from Galilee doesn't mean they won't fall in line with the man from Washington or the man from Silicon Valley or the norm-setter from virtually anywhere else. Chances are they will, especially if their compass lacks a stable point of reference.

Social engineers are getting increasingly brazen, knowing full well that every new norm has at least one beneficiary and at least one loser. In a post-Christian America, there will be a handful of very powerful beneficiaries and a whole lot of losers.

It's time we check our compasses and pray that the norms ahead will be informed from above, not from below.