I hardly ever lock my door—which makes me, I think, a pretty extreme example of a freeloader.
I may be wrong, of course. Perhaps lots of people don’t lock their doors. It can’t be so many that the word gets around. If too many of us didn’t lock our doors, then the criminals would lose their assumption that the average door is locked. But as long as enough people lock their doors, I can ride along on the locked assumption. Even in New York. 
As it happens, even a place like Omaha has a worse crime rate than Manhattan, and I don’t own much worth breaking in for, anyway: just a lot of books (and only your friends steal your books). There’s a risk factor, certainly, but its cost just isn’t high enough for me to go through the bother of carrying keys. And it is thanks to the key-carriers, all those good-hearted people conscientiously locking their slip locks and their deadbolts, that I can get away with it.
Freeloading is a problem that fascinates economists. In a gun-owning culture, are people who don’t own guns freeloading on people who do? It’s absolutely true that people who don’t get vaccinations are freeloading on those who do—and it’s a freeloading that reaches a tipping point very quickly.
People who belong to voluntary organizations are well-aware of freeloaders: all those casual members who just show up for the parades, skipping all the work necessary to keep the organization going. But the freeloading problem may work on a cultural level, as well.
When Alexis de Tocqueville toured America in 1831, he observed with wonder the gentlemen’s clubs, the volunteer fire departments, the aid societies, even the churches—all of what Edmund Burke would call “the little platoons” of society. “Nothing, in my opinion, is more deserving of our attention than the intellectual and moral associations of America,” Alexis de Tocqueville noted. “The political and industrial associations of that country strike us forcibly; but the others elude our observation. . . . It must be acknowledged, however, that they are as necessary to the American people as the former, and perhaps more so.”
If Tocqueville was right about the national culture’s dependence on those voluntary organizations, then everyone who didn’t participate in one was freeloading on the work of those who did. And if too many people freeload on the cultural contributions of the joiners and the organizers, then the tipping point is reached, and they fall into disrepair. Like the boarded-up Odd Fellows hall downtown. And the closed Elks Club along the river. And the shuttered lodge of the Izaak Walton League out by the dam. And without them, American culture ceases to be what Tocqueville perceived it to be.
Churches, like every voluntary organization, are plagued by freeloaders: the people who show up only at Christmas and Easter; the people who want the churches to exist for their baptisms, weddings, and funerals but otherwise ignore them.
Lately, however, I’ve become interested in the question of much freeloading on the churches has cultural consequences. It’s a simple proposition of philosophical ethics that the best of all possible worlds, for me, is a world in which all others are obedient and faithful, while I am free. This is why Socrates tells the story of the Ring of Gyges in the Republic, and it’s why Kant phrases the Categorical Imperative the way he does. When he insists that we must act as though our action could become universal law, what he’s outlawing is Gyges: the man who thinks he gets to be immoral in a world in which everyone else has to be moral.
It may be Montaigne who saw most clearly the Gygian problem of church-going—of belief in God, for that matter. A world in which everyone believes in God and goes to church is a world with the fewest social problems, for only religion can control the mass of men. And thus, for my personal protection, I should desire that world. At the same time, the investment of time, energy, and emotion that religion demands is high. The ideal world for me, then—imagining myself as an urbane sixteenth-century skeptic—would be a world in which everyone else was a God-fearing churchgoer, and I alone was free to sleep in on Sunday mornings.
In fact, as the New Atheists discovered, the best of all possible worlds may be one where I don’t even have to acquiesce in the style of Montaigne. Even better would be the world where I get the moral self-congratulation of being a rebel—without any real dangers for me from my rebellion. Not a quiet Gygian, but a loud one, proclaiming to the heavens my independence while actually depending on the existence of that culture against which I am proudly rebelling.
Freeloading, in other words. How near are we to the tipping point in America these days? In a way, there’s something reassuring about the existence of people loudly declaring their oh-so-dangerous-in-a-not-really-dangerous-way rebellion against Christianity. But, put together, they have reached an enormous mass—enough, maybe, to flop American culture over the tipping point.
Joseph Bottum is editor of First Things.
Comments:
"then the criminals would *loose* their assumption that the average door is locked"
The criminals would LOSE their assumption. Please do not loose any further clangers like this one upon us!
You have to be flexible in a weblog like First Thoughts. There's so serious editing. This is one of the least offensive grammatical mistakes I've seen in weblogs lately.
To point out the benefits the New Atheists derive at the expense of others may be right in principle but unfortunately counter-productive if it leads them to become more “authentic” atheists. Shaming, in other words, sometimes encourages rethinking and renewed commitment and participation on the part of free riders but it can also provoke more principled opposition.
And in partial defense of at least a moderate free-loading attitude one can cite the benefits of apathy in modern electorates. When everyone is mobilized a regime is imperiled, highly unstable at the least. At a small group level when everyone helps to prepare a meal, “too many cooks spoil the broth.” And at an organizational level when many former freeloaders begin to participate leadership frequently must change and the nature or character of organizations may have to change as well, not always for the better.
But of course in these defenses I may only be deceiving myself to justify my role as an “authentic” free rider.
But freeloaders only think their "cheating" is beneficial. In fact we do not only cheat our Neighbors. We ourselves are the biggest losers when we disobey God's commands, including that we love our Neighbors. When we indulge in pornography, we lose interest in our own spouse. When we drive recklessly, we risk our own life more than those of our fellow drivers. When we guzzle beer and watch TV, rather than pray, we lose peace, that most precious commodity.
And when put to the final test, as most of us will be, the chickens will come home to roost when we find that a life of "Christianity lite" has deprived us of access to the Consoler.
Plato wrote it; according to his text in The Republic (Book II, near the beginning) it is Glaucon, not Socrates, who tells the story.
Even Christians depend for much of their civilization, and its prosperity, for example, on the logicality and rationalism established by the Greek philosophers; like Socrates and Aristotle. For that matter, this very day, every time you type a word into your computer, you depend on modern scientists, even atheists. And the useful things they have contributed to civilization.
It is furthermore, extremely important for Christians to more clearly see and more openly acknowledge their debts to others. Because only when Christians acknowlege the full scope of what they owe, even to their rational/non-religious "enemies," will they see the fuller scope of what is "Good." And thus be made honest, and whole, at last.
I can't resist elucidating one point merely implicit in Mr. Bottum's essay. The "loud Gygian" phenomenon is not found exclusively among the New Atheists, but also among parallel freeloaders---e.g., those who decline vaccinations. One frequently encounters entirely irrational arguments against vaccinations that portray the freeloaders as brave resisters of sundry conspiracies.
But perhaps, as Davie suggests, "vicarious believing" only occurs when there is a clear establishment that functions as a public utility for the majority (the "freeloaders"). And perhaps, with the decline of the religious stability in the America of the 1950s - Herberg's "Protestant-Catholic-Jew," there is no longer a clear religious establishment in the United States to which Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish "freeloaders" can reconnect at times of need.
I suspect that, in American Christianity, a sort of "vicarious believing" still exists among Catholics. A minority presumably keeps up the church buildings and rituals for a larger number of Catholics who attend Mass more sporadically (but still very sincerely) and give little money, but take care to baptize their children, get ashes on Ash Wednesday, and pay some attention to media coverage of the Pope. But I suspect that it has disappeared among most Protestants, for a variety of reasons.
There is a book published by the Marians called 'Consoling The Heart of Jesus ' ; it is in an appealingly readable style esp. for the young ; we forget that our Lord , having assumed human nature has a heart that can feel our indifrrence ..our choosing of Barabbas ..our hardness that does not care to use occasions to be warriors, to free those who have fallen into enemy hands ..
And at the end of our lives when we see in a flash , all of life , to turn in disgust and despair at the recognition of how hardheartened we have been ..
what could have been ..the participation in heavenly Liturgy and worship at every Holy Mass , to bring down enemy holds , with power stronger than any atomic bomb ...to call down The Spirit , to undo the ground gained by the evil one that gets called in when the freeloading gets to be its workshop somehow or other ...and so easy too these days when its voice/noise and images so easily accessible , in so many formats .. to lead any who so choose , to glorify its pomp and works ..to dull the sword of The Spirit ..
May there be enough warriors to rebuke the spirit of pride ..lust .. lukewarmness..( there are good warfare sites on the internet )
to turn hearts to become loaded with fervor and zeal , trsuting that there is One who awaits eagerly for His children, to bring to Him , the very cancer of lukewarmness and any other weakness too ..
to find help in friends , powerful saints who still act in affairs of the world after having been on sickbeds most of their lives ..for they knew that their free time was for warfare and for praise and gratitude that comes with it and to continue to gain whole kingdoms of such for their friends too !
Today, we rely more and more on what you might call modern "known knowledge": science and technology. In light of their growing effectiveness, Religion today in contrast, has increasingly become merely the marker or repository for what we traditionally guessed, when Reason and firmer scientific knowledge ran out. Especially, religion has persisted in the areas most resistent to science: metaphysics and ethics.
When Reason and Science began to become so successful, even in the time of early Greco-Roman civilization, increasingly all that was left for the churches, has been a "God of gaps"; "God" who was primarily a marker to denote the few remaining grey areas (in Metaphysics; Morality) that our Reason could not as yet adequately penetrate.
And indeed for some time, Religion has been invoked only in the those extreme moments when reason and the economy utterly fail. That is especially: when we get married, or die. So that as a matter of fact, often when we hear one young priest ask another what he's doing today, the answer is often something like "two marriages, and a funeral."
But if our Religion has shrunk to this sphere, then after all, maybe that is about where Religion should be. This might be where it serves its most acceptable function: to simply mark the place where hard knowledge fails; and to issue the traditional guesses about what to do, in that desperate situation. When firm knowledge fails, religion gives us a few traditional guesses, and prayers - and a traditional default - in lieu of something more solid.
Still, as our factual, scientific knowledge continually grows, that does leave the grey realm, growing smaller and smaller, every day.
In my part of the world the priests are busy with two funerals and a marriage.
Life in Techopolis is comfortable I must admit; no freeloading in this area for we pay an arm and a leg for it. But until science and technology efficiently "fill the gap" of moral evil and mortality, religion is here to stay. And even if we are to imagine, or perhaps even hope, that somehow these brave Japanese geneticists will master the gene responsible with our biological deterioration so that we can live forever young and beautiful in this terrestrial world, it still looks pretty gloomy. I highly recommend for your sheer entertainment a dark comedy: Death Becomes Her, starring Meryl Streep, Goldie Hawn and Bruce Willis. The technological advances for the special effects in conveying a clear message and the humorous presentation are delicious indeed.
And this quote, in a nutshell, is exactly why people like Christopher Hitchens exist. Even if it was true, note the authoritarian implication: people need to be "controlled" as they are incapable of freely associating amongst each other to secure their individual rights.
Moreover, once we get outside the Christian world, the choice is not between secular, irreligious society and Christian society: it is between the secular and whatever dominant religions exist in that society. Is Islam needed to "control" people in Malaysia or Indian Kashmir?
The broader point is that religion excites rather than controls the passions for many people. Whatever social problems existed in the Southern U.S. up until 1964, I don't think lack of church-going was among them. Religion tends to reflect the dominant culture rather than the other way around. The Gods declare an act to be wrong because it is wrong and because we can use our own reason and intuition to determine it is wrong.
Not really. Only if they believe in the same god.
And that god doesn't require some to be humiliated and/or sacrificed for the sake of others.
Perhaps what we tend to see as the moral splendor of pacifism is, the real world, a vanity totally dependent on the safety provided by others.