Firstly, I understand how personal religion is to people and I want to be clear in stating up front that this is not an anti-religion or anti-Church article. It’s merely an outsider’s observations of how religious institutions persuade. And, as much as I realise that the next public statement will make me unelectable as the President of the USA in a few decades’ time, I’m happy to go on record as saying that I’m not religious. Mind you, I do like to think of myself as respectful.

I have, however, been intrigued by religion since I was a kid. I went to Sunday School for a while but the stories didn’t make sense to me as a 5 year old. I simply didn’t believe them. Since then, I have explored different schools of thought – from the religious, to the simply spiritual and have read a lot from the martial arts world and its interpretation of religion and morals (eg Bruce Lee’s The Tao of Jeet Kun Do, Hagakure, The Unfettered Mind).

Over the years, I’ve been fascinated with the Dead Sea Scrolls story and how much of it shows a different perspective to the Biblical version of events, but it was at a funeral in a Greek Orthodox Church a few years ago that I really started to absorb and analyse the physical nature of the Church and its persuasive tactics.

The observations below are from various experiences (weddings and funerals), and several different religions.

1. Religious institutions win through story
Each religion has a ‘big idea’ and that idea is told and reinforced through example after example. Then the stories are compiled to make up a manual. In advertising, there is much interest in the thought that the brands and companies that will win will have the best stories told about them. Religions are the masters of this. They showed their true understanding of the power of story in the first millenium when many actually controlled the flow of knowledge and stories in their societies.

2. Every touchpoint has a story
One of my teachers at school found it funny that kids would actually pay a company like Nike to have their logo on their chests, that we would pay to be advertisers on behalf of the brand. But every time I’ve been in a church and have looked around, I’ve been amazed at how much effort goes into telling the religion’s stories – everywhere. The doors, the windows, the statues, special engravings, candles. Very little within a church is story-less.

3. People gather for stories, not lessons
OK, I am stretching the ‘story’ thing into a third point… to make a point. The time people spend in church is a lesson wrapped in entertainment, something the evangelical and new school churches understand and have merely made more contemporary. The stories have orators – leaders within the institution and/or its community, and are accompanied by song (with words and melodies that are easy to remember, and frequently repeat themselves a lot). The communal nature of this time reinforces conformity and forcibly yet implicitly sets out the community’s moral standard, of which ‘thinking like everybody else’ is key.

4. Hierarchy implies that conformity gets you ahead
Churches and the lay communities built around them are just like every other group of humans – riddled by hierarchy. Much of humanity has a drive to get ahead built into them, and this is something that many religions play to – if only because they were all built by humans.

5. Physical size reinforces people’s dependency on the institution
I’ve sometimes found myself visiting a church and seeing an ornament or a huge window that must have cost a huge amount of money, wondering why it’s OK for churches to spend such money on such stuff – even if the money was donated. Psychologically, these efforts of largesse make people feel small and in need of a higher power; they are also wonderful theatrical elements to get people out of their daily mindset.

6. Re-enactment and role play helps us internalise
From a psychological point of view, a lot of the re-enactment rituals in church help people take an idea or story or lesson, and internalise it. For some reason, I keep thinking about shadow boxing. You can watch someone box all day but it’s when you stand in front of a mirror and mimic them that you really learn what they are doing… so you can apply it yourself.

7. Collective action leads to less questioning
The call-and-response routine that happens in various institutions not only helps people internalise the religion’s lessons (as per rote learning at school), it also gives individuals the feeling that everyone else thinks a certain way and to not question it… as if the wisdom of the crowd is made up only of the the words they speak together.

8. Pageantry makes things memorable… and official
This point crosses over with much of the above: the pageantry – the music, the costumes, the ornaments – all theatrically reinforce the religion’s ideas, make them memorable (each idea has a story that can be sung, acted out or quoted) and give them a sense of being from a higher order.

Thoughts?
Agree? Disagree? Got another example, or a counter example? Would love to hear them.

Photo courtesy of Stuck in Customs.

If you enjoyed the read, please leave a comment. Feel free to follow me on Twitter