Blog, Reports

The Next Great Awakening

by Edward Dutton

With the rise of the BLM movement, we are not just witnessing protests and riots but the birth of an old/new religion.

Summary

The Black Lives Matter protests are best understood as a religious revival, emerging from the United States but global in scale. This new religion is “Multiculturalism” and based on institutions and ideals outside traditional churches; however, its structure and sacraments strikingly resemble those of Christianity. It could even be considered a kind of heresy.

Religious revivals take place in the wake of wars and disasters, periods of elevated stress and widespread angst. They are spearheaded by and attractive to people who are relatively high in neurotic traits such as anxiety. Their disturbed mental states are, temporarily, alleviated by the religious experiences that take place through these revivals—with religion, more generally, being an adaptation that allows us to cope with an unpredictable and traumatic world.

Leftists and atheists, of course, proudly reject traditional religion and sexual morality, and we should appreciate the irony of a “religious revival” capturing their hearts and minds. However, as a group, leftists and atheists are high in mental instability—especially those who are young and female—and thus they are highly susceptible to the religious experience, if not religion as it has been historically understood.

Following the Industrial Revolution and the exploitation of fossil fuels, the world became immensely wealthier, healthier, and more comfortable, and the harsh Darwinian selection pressures that characterized previous ages subsided. One of the most impactful consequences of this is the dramatic decrease in childhood mortality. Thus, millions of people with high levels of mutations, who would not have survived childhood in previous times, walk among us in the postmodern age. These “spiteful mutants” have managed to bring about the collapse of traditional religion—which is associated with mental and physical health and evolutionary success. They have spread Multiculturalism as a religion in its place. The result is a Multiculturalist revival, where 70 years ago there would have been a Christian one.

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace
You, you may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you will join us
And the world will be as one

—“Imagine,” John Lennon

Interesting Times

The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement swept through the Western World beginning in May 2020 after the accidental death of African-American criminal George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer. The initial result was widespread riots and looting by African-Americans in Minneapolis, followed by similar scenes in other places. But this quickly morphed into an ideological movement—under the already extant slogan “Black Lives Matter”1—in which a kind of anarchy swept through American cities, encouraged by Social Justice Warriors2 and, to a large extent, the leftist media and political establishment. A kind of hysteria appeared to take hold among White Americans, including politicians and even police officers.

Flagrantly breaking the “lock down,” which had been in action for two months due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Whites gathered in the streets and knelt in the name of George Floyd. Many police officers publicly engaged in this deferential behavior, often holding out their open hands to signify their willingness to make themselves defenseless. White Americans were filmed not just kneeling before Blacks but symbolically washing their feet.3 The riots were stated, by the media, to be “largely peaceful” even as buildings were aflame behind them or as White news reporters were physically attacked by rampaging mobs. There were calls to abolish the police and even for complete anarchy, under the slogan “No Justice, No Peace.”

The hysteria quickly spread to other Western countries. There were Black riots— assisted by White SJWs—on the streets of central London. White news reporters were attacked live on air. British police, in front of the gates of Downing Street, knelt before Black protestors rather than arrest them for breaking the lockdown and for rioting, as English Law demanded. Companies began to signal their support for “Black Lives Matter,” with those who were slow to do so being criticized as “racist” because, according to one slogan, “Silence is Violence.” In a BLM protest in Helsinki, the overwhelmingly White and female “protestors” didn’t merely kneel but lay prostrate on the ground in order to signal total submission and deference. Young females posted videos of themselves online renouncing their Whiteness, showing their “solidarity” with BLM. In one extreme case, a woman smeared herself in excrement as a sign of abasement.

Then came the attacks on statues and other public monuments. A statue of Winston Churchill in central London was graffitied with the word “Racist.” Britain’s Cenotaph war memorial was desecrated, and a young Black woman attempted to burn the Union Jack that hung from it. The statue of an 18th-century philanthropist and slave trader, which had stood in Bristol since 1895, was dragged down by a mob and thrown in the dock. Other statues that “offended” the sensitivities of the mob were preemptively removed, likely never to be re-erected, to prevent their destruction, including one of Belgium’s King Leopold, which stood in Brussels.

The streaming service HBO Max removed the American civil war epic Gone With The Wind (1939)—a film preserved by the Library of Congress as “culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant”4—after its romanticization of the South and depiction of African slaves was deemed unwatchable in the current climate. The chairman of Warner Media called the ban a “no brainer,” a curious choice of words.5 The BBC even removed from its streaming sites relatively recent comedies, made by liberal comedians only a decade ago, such as the light-hearted “Little Britain,” because “times have changed.”6

A New Religion

This wasn’t just mob rule and anarchy. On display was a religious intensity. And people were sucked into it. If the mob declared that you were not a “true believer,” you could lose your job, or perhaps even be subject to a police investigation. So, as more people exhibited their adherence to the Cult of George Floyd, an arms-race developed to indicate ever-greater fervor.

This eventuated in some White protestors “going Medieval” and actually engaging in self-flagellation—a grotesque spectacle but a seemingly inevitable culmination of the White guilt narrative.

What Causes Religiousness?

This was all so predictable. In April 2020, experts in the study of religion cautiously suggested that there might be some kind of religious revival in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis, though they focused on what might happen in churches.7 There are always religious revivals after or during wars, famines, and pandemics. Why would the Covid-19 be any different?

In other words, we are witnessing another “Great Awakening.” But the religion of a significant portion of Western populations, and especially the young, is not Christianity. This new global religion of the 21st century is Multiculturalism. That said, Multiculturalism contains many elements of evangelicalism, both aesthetically and structurally, and perhaps could be viewed as Christianity’s latest mutation.

In order to understand what has taken place, we need to make sense of what religion is; why “mortality salience” is relevant to it; and how, precisely, religious revivals occur. Once this is clear, we will see that Multiculturalism is not just an ideology, partisan politics, or passing fad; it must properly be understood as a religion itself.

One of the key predictors of becoming religious is being confronted with your own mortality or that of your loved ones. No matter what an inveterate skeptic might say or write throughout his life, when told that his mother is in intensive care or his daughter has been in a car accident, there is a very strong possibility that, in private, he will beg God for help. “There are no atheists in foxholes,” as the saying goes. So-called “mortality salience” is an extreme example of the kind of psychological stress that appears to elevate religiousness. “Feelings of exclusion” seems to cause people to become more religious, too, as do periods of dramatic change, such as significant changes in government.8

“Religion,” in the widely accepted sense of the word, involves all of the key components of an evolutionary adaptation. Religiousness is around 0.4 genetic; it is associated with physical and mental health partly at the genetic level;9 it correlates with fertility; and specific parts of the brain are associated with it.10

There are likely a number of non-exclusive reasons why religiousness evolved. One is that it promoted pro-social behavior. Those who believed in a god who told them to behave in a pro-social way were less likely to be cast out or killed by the pre-historic band and were, therefore, more likely to pass on their genes. A related possibility is that it reduced stress in the face of danger or as we become aware of our own mortality. Those who felt that their life had eternal meaning and that a god was constantly looking after them would be less likely to become depressed and anxious and would be more likely to pass on their genes.11

Consistent with this, not only do people tend to become more religious at times of stress, they are more likely to have dramatic religious experiences, in which they do not merely vaguely feel that God is present but, as far as they are concerned, see Him and hear His reassuring voice.12 People who are high in neurotic personality traits are prone to depression and anxiety, these being manifestations of “mental instability.” Neuroticism seems to decrease considerably after one has undergone conversion and other religious experiences.13

Intrinsic religiousness—genuinely believing in god—is negatively correlated with Neuroticism.14 We can see this in the average churchgoer of the past century, a man who conforms to the belief system of his community, intellectually believes in a higher power, but likely doesn’t take his religion overly seriously nor does he worship with particular emotional affect. On the other hand, extrinsic religiousness—outward conformity to religion—is positively associated with Neuroticism. We can think of the fanatic or obnoxious scold, someone who wears his faith on his sleeve, perhaps even so devoted that religion negatively affects his welfare.

Being a “religious seeker” is also associated with Neuroticism. This involves going through phases of mental instability that are alleviated by an unusual and often very extreme forms of religiosity, which are duly abandoned during periods of sound mental health.15 Overall, it’s reasonable to argue that religiousness would have been selected for, because it promoted mental health, with the result that mental health and religiosity have become genetically related, due to both being simultaneously selected over a lengthy period of time.16

Religion also would have been “kin-selected.” You can pass on your genes indirectly by aiding your kin: your children share 50 percent of your genes, and more distant kin, such as nephews, share 25 percent. If a person were highly religious, it makes their kin more attractive, because of the associations between religiousness, pro-social behavior, and mental stability. This would help explain why some Islamic fundamentalists kill daughters who have dishonored the family. It is a way of signaling the family’s commitment to Islam and, thus, elevating kin selection.17 An ethnic group is, in the sense, an extended genetic kinship group and thus a means by which you can indirectly pass on your genes.18 It is has been found, using computer modeling, that groups that are highest in positive ethnocentrism (internal cooperation) and negative ethnocentrism (external hostility) tend to dominate others in the battle of group selection.19 There is evidence implying that religiousness is genetically associated with both kinds of ethnocentrism, because a part of the brain associated with ethnocentrism is also associated with religiousness.20 And the correlation between positive ethnocentrism and religiousness would make sense because a group would be more internally cooperate if it were high in pro-social traits and low in mental instability. But our key point is that religiousness has evolved, in part, as a means of coping with stress and mortality salience.

Why Are Women So Religious?

The high female presence both in BLM protests and in churches is obvious to anyone who has ever attended either. And this shouldn’t be surprising. Women are more religious than men, across cultures, in terms of how likely they are to believe in God and engage in collective worship.21 In the United States, Catholics, Evangelical Protestants, Mainline Protestants, and Mormons are each 55 percent female. Some 70 percent of American women report an “absolute certainty” in their belief in a god, compared to 57 percent of men. American women are also much more likely to report that religion is important in their lives, and atheism is found twice as often among men than women (12 percent vs. 6 percent).22

This occurs because religion has been sexually selected for, too, as it is associated with being pro-social, rule-following (and thus not cuckolding your husband or abandoning your family and child), and with being part of a supportive group of co-religionists. These clear sex differences in the strength of religiousness will become significant later when we analyze the Black Lives Matter protests.

There are a number of probable reasons for higher female religiousness, one of which is empathy. Females are higher than in empathetic behavior, which involves being interested in people’s feelings and being able to detect their feelings from external markers, such as facial expressions.23 There is evidence that people who are high in empathy transfer this ability over to the world itself, meaning that they perceive the presence of a “mind” or “higher power” simply from looking around the world. Accordingly, low empathy—that is, stereotypical autism—is associated with atheism.24

Another reason may be adaptation to patriarchy. Females sexually select for male status because a high-status male is better able to invest in them and their offspring, meaning that both are more likely to survive.25 Until the Industrial Revolution, wealth and status strongly predicted completed fertility, and this is the case among pre-industrial peoples today. 26 If males must invest resources in the female in order to obtain sexual intercourse, then they want to be certain that the offspring in which they are investing their resources are actually their own. The result is a system of patriarchy in which females are controlled by males such that male paternity anxiety can be reduced. This system of patriarchy will tend to be promoted by the society’s religion as divinely ordained, possibly because patriarchal societies reduce paternity anxiety, meaning that they, in turn, reduce inter-male conflict, thus causing males to be more internally cooperative. And, again, as computer models have shown, societies of internally cooperative people are more likely to triumph in warfare with competing societies.27

This system of patriarchy, however, would mean that females would be strongly selected to be accepting of patriarchy and thus to be religious, as this is what the religion would promote.28 Consequently, there would be a religious “arms race” among females in order to obtain the highest-status males, especially in the kind of polygamous societies in which humans have lived for most of history, in which the highest status males monopolize the most desirable females. As such, we would expect females to be strongly prone to wishing to signal their virtue and, if religiosity were regarded as virtuous, to signal this. And they would be more convincingly able to signal it if they genuinely believed it.

Why is Religiousness Associated With Mental Health?

It is also clear to anyone that has ever attended a BLM protest that many of those involved—with their stereotypical unnatural colored hair and screams of righteous fury—are not mentally well. By contrast, females in churches appear sober and under control.

Why should traditional religiousness be associated with mental health? The answer lies in its evolutionary history. In understanding the evolution of religion, it is worth noting that it is a combination of a variety of traits, which would have been adaptive in pre-history.

1. Agency Over-Detection. We have a cognitive bias towards detecting the presence of an agent behind events. Following the “Smoke Detector Principle,” it is adaptive to assume the worst and get it wrong—such as to assume that that noise over there was a wolf rather than just the wind. This helps to explain why we might see evidence of god in the world.

2. Pattern Over-Detection. We are evolved to over-detect causation. This is adaptive because those who under-detected it would have put themselves in danger of being wiped out or not been able to analyze and understand the world around them.

3. Follow the Leader. We are evolved to form strongly-bonded groups and obey authority. By working as a team with a leader, groups are more likely to survive in the battle of group selection.29

Religions will vary in the extent of the prominence of each of these factors. This means that although religiousness is generally adaptive in an evolutionary sense of promoting individual and especially group fitness, it is quite possible for maladaptive forms of religiousness—which do not promote genetic fitness—to manifest. Some devotees might be, for example, too extreme in their obedience to the leader or in their pattern over-detection, such that adhering to such a religion is harmful for its followers. An obvious example of this would be suicide cults—such as the notorious Jonestown—in which devotees are so inclined to follow their leader and so inclined to over-detect patterns that they accept a mentally ill man’s paranoid worldview and kill themselves, completely destroying their genetic interests.30 Membership of such groups is associated with other maladaptive traits—such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder—whereas traditional religiousness is genetically associated with mental health.

The relationship between religiousness and sound mental health makes sense if we delve a little deeper into how religiousness has been selected for over time. This will also be highly relevant, later, to understanding the nature of the Black Lives Matter movement. As I have discussed in my study “The Mutant Says in His Heart, ‘There is No God,’”31 we were under conditions of harsh Darwinian selection until the breakthroughs of the Industrial Revolution, which began in around 1800. The resulting improved public health and living conditions meant that child mortality has fallen from around 50 percent in 1800 to 1 percent today.32 High child mortality ensured that the surviving population was very strongly adapted to its ecology. Babies with mutations that made them unfit—such as those leading to a poor immune system—were purged from the population every generation, meaning that it overall had a very low “mutational load.” Under these brutal conditions, traditional religion—based around the collective worship of a moral god—was adaptive, meaning that it came to be selected for in tandem with other adaptive traits, which thus became genetically connected.

With the break-down of harsh Darwinian selection, we would expect the population to display increasing evidence of mutational load. This would be observed in secular increases in the prevalence of partly genetic medical conditions.33 We would also expect the development of all kinds of deviations from this delicately balanced Darwinian religious norm—deviations that would be maladaptive in terms of group and individual selection and that would be attractive to people with maladaptive traits, such as mental illness. Religious suicide cults, such as Jonestown and Waco, would exemplify this process. These religious deviants would have high mutational loads and likely be people who would not have survived childhood under harsh Darwinian conditions.

How do we know that such people would not have survived? In that the brain is 84 percent of the genome, it is an enormous target for mutation, meaning that those who have physical mutations can be expected to have mental mutations as well, which would direct them towards deviations from the most adaptive form of religiousness. Consistent with this, it has been found that, in modern samples, collective worship of a moral god is genetically associated with physical and mental health and is negatively associated with other markers of high mutational load, including autism, physical asymmetry, and left-handedness. These are associated with atheism or religious deviations, such as paranormal belief. The inability to develop a symmetrical phenotype implies a poor immune system, because a person with a poor immune system would have to use disproportionately more of his bio-energetic resources to fight off pathogens, meaning insufficient resources left over to ensure symmetry. Left-handedness is an accepted marker of “developmental instability.” If the brain develops symmetrically, people will tend to be right-handed. Failure to do so implies mutational load and, thus, left-handedness is associated with many examples of poor physical and mental health.34

So, with the nature of “religion” and its connection to mortality salience understood, let us now turn to making sense of “religious revivals.”

What Causes Religious Revivals?

Religious revivals appear to occur when the kind of situation that would lead to a period of religiousness in an individual—such as stress and mortality salience—are experienced relatively suddenly by a substantial portion of a society. There will be variation in the nature of the revival, depending on the kind of people who are impacted. But, in general, dramatic change and a period of difficulty can be expected to lead to a religious revival of some kind. These can be charted throughout history and, interestingly, there is often a time lag separating the period of stress from the revival itself.

Christian evangelists are constantly attempting to create revivals, traveling to different communities and preaching their message of conversion and redemption. However, they only seem to be able to create mass revivals during, or just after, periods of significant distress.

An examination of British revivals during the 20th century is consistent with this pattern. The first major revival of the twentieth century took place in Wales between 1904 and 1905. At the time, South Wales was ravaged by industrial unrest and unemployment in a society in which there was no welfare state. Accordingly, Welsh workers, many of whom were already heavily influenced by Methodism and were facing serious hardship and the realistic possibility of destitution.35 Interesting, there was no religious revival during World War I in the UK, nor during the Spanish Flu pandemic that immediately followed it36. There were, however, various revivals during the 1920s. The lack of communications at the time meant that it was more difficult than in the 1950s for these to become national phenomena. A major revival in East Anglia in 1921 focused around socioeconomically deprived fishing communities, which were under considerable distress even compared to ordinary people recovering from the Great War. The following year, there were revivals in other parts of the country, most notably in fishing communities in northeast Scotland.37 There was no major revival in Britain in the 1930s, other than in the deeply conservative Hebridean islands off the north west of Scotland in 1939. This year was a time of elevated distress due to very real possibility that Britain might go to war again.38

There was no major revival in the UK during World War II itself. The next Christian revival, and a concomitant reassertion of conservative attitudes, came after the War, and especially in the 1950s. There was a revival in the Hebrides in 1949, in which large numbers of people, who had not previously been especially devout, underwent religious experiences and became more involved in their church and in which those who were already religious became more fervent. According to revival leader the Rev. Duncan Campbell (1898-1972), in late 1949, in the village of Barvas on the Island of Lewis, he conducted a night-time meeting at which:

Three o’ clock in the morning came and God swept in. About a dozen men and women lay prostrate on the floor, speechless . . . We left our cottage at 3am to discover men and women seeking God. I walked along a country road and found three men on their faces, crying to God for mercy. There was a light in every home; no-one seemed to think of sleep.

At 5 AM that morning, 14 buses full of people arrived from all parts of the island and even from the island of Harris. People at these meetings fell into trances, fainted, swayed and collapsed to the floor.39 Campbell felt that he had been inspired by the Holy Spirit to go and revive the Outer Hebrides and, given the stressful conditions of the time, people were extremely receptive to religious-fervor in a ways that they otherwise wouldn’t have been.40

Wartime rationing did not cease until 1954, so it could be argued that it was only at this point that “normal life” finally reasserted itself.41 In an era of mass-communication, a spark was needed to set off a nationwide revival, and this came in the form of American pastor Billy Graham (1918-2018), as witnessed in his British rallies, which took place between 1954 and 1955. The postwar religious fervor was such that it has been estimated that roughly 21 percent of the London population attended a Billy Graham rally, while up 73 percent of the Glasgow population did so.42 In 1955, 100,000 people packed a Glasgow stadium to attend a single service conducted by Billy Graham.43 I am not aware that the relationship has been quantitatively tested, but, as a rule of British Modern History, religious revivals seem to manifest in areas of elevated mortality salience as a consequence of impoverishment or, directly, famine and other highly stressful phenomena.

What Kind of People Have Religious Experiences?

What was happening, in terms of individual and mass-psychology, during these revivals? As we have discussed, quotidian, stable religiousness—in which you are religious all the time—is correlated with sound mental health. Even religious people who are mentally healthy, however, go through periods of stress and mortality salience in which they may become more religious. They may even undergo forms of what is known as a “religious experience.”

Religious experiences are profound psychological experiences in which a person may be overwhelmed by a feeling of God’s love and even hear God’s voice or believe to have seen Him. In making sense of these kinds of experiences, American neuroscientist Andrew Newberg and colleagues argue that the mind has two effective systems, calming and arousal. When either of these systems is pushed to their extremes, through meditation or hyper-arousal—both of which can be achieved via religious services—they argue that it is dangerous for the body. Accordingly, the other system hits in, leading to alternative states of consciousness and intense psychological experiences.44 British biologist Richard Dawkins has suggested that they may be provoked by the way in which stress makes us highly instinctive, and thus prone to religious belief anyway. Dawkins also argues that we are also evolved to over-detect agency: as mentioned above, if we mistake a distant rock for a wolf, we have lost nothing, but if we make the opposite mistake, we may be killed. Accordingly, at times of very intense stress, we are much more likely to mistake some unidentified sound as the voice of God and, at the same time, find that our calming system would hit in. This would lead to an intense religious experience combined with feelings of relief and joy.45 Undergoing mild religious experiences—known as “spiritual” experiences—is about 0.3 heritable. Undergoing intense religious experiences is approximately 0.66 heritable.46 This high heritability might imply that the ability to undergo a religious experience is extremely beneficial, in evolutionary terms, because it combats stress and, due to its profound nature, keeps you low in negative feelings for a substantial period of time afterwards.

However, we must distinguish between the “religious experience” and the “conversion experience”—and also between being “religious,” being “hyper-religious,” and going through a phase of being intensely religious. American psychologist William James (1842-1910) distinguished between the religion of the “sick soul” and that of “healthy mindedness.” The religion of healthy mindedness is characterized by relatively mild religious experiences. The religion of the “sick soul,” however, is marked by a dramatic conversion experiences, which occur at times of intense stress.47 Those who lead religious revivals—people such as Billy Graham—can be regarded as constantly “hyper-religious.” As already noted, this is associated with either schizophrenia or with being a severely depressive personality. Psychological studies of those who lead religious revivals have found that most of them display evidence of these pathological traits. They require, for example, the absolute structure and order which fanatical religiousness provides in order to allay their anxiety and frequently undergo intense religious experiences.48 Such is the nature of revival “leaders.” It may be beneficial for a healthy society to be able to maintain a very small percentage of such lunatics, precisely because they are able to inspire fervent religiosity in other people and religiosity is traditionally a means of promoting ethnocentrism. In this regard, it has been noted that tribal shamans tend to the same kinds of psychological characteristics as modern-day charismatic leaders.49

But what about the followers, and those who become followers during a revival? What is their psychology? Religious revivals are characterized by the “conversion” type of religious experience, in which a person undergoes a kind of psychological breakdown and, to some extent, adopts a new identity, for example as a “Christian” or as “real Christian” in a way that they somehow were not prior to the revival.50 They, consequently, go through a transient phrase of hyper-religiosity. Transient hyper-religiosity is associated with high Neuroticism,51 while bipolar disorder and bouts of depression also predict periods of extreme religious fervor, as does schizophrenia.52 Schizophrenia, and its milder forms, is also elevated at times of stress, just as is anxiety.53 There is a range of severity to schizophrenia-type conditions. Mild symptoms are summarized as “schizoid personality.” This is characterized by anhedonia (the inability to experience joy) and apathy. More severe is “schizotypal personality,” where the schizoid symptoms are accompanied by social anxiety, paranoid ideation, unconventional or paranoid beliefs, and, sometimes, psychosis. Diagnosable schizophrenia is a particularly severe manifestation of these characteristics.54 Having undergone a conversion experience has been found to be associated with having been, prior to that experience, high in anxiety and other Neuroticism traits.55 When people suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress, which is associated with high Neuroticism, they can develop a very specific kind of religiosity known as “spiritual struggle” or “negative religious coping.” Those who undergo this believe that God is punishing them for their sins, plead for God to intervene in the world, and project hostility towards out-group members. “Positive religious coping” can cross over with this, insomuch as it involves conversion, but this also involves the belief that God has forgiven you and that you are purified of your sins.56

So, people who are high in Neuroticism—and even under the harsh Darwinian conditions prevalent until 1800, there would have been population variance in this trait—are more likely to become part of religious revivals. They will feel stress more acutely and will, accordingly, be more likely to become extremely religious in the aftermath of periods of intense societal distress. Females score higher than males in Neuroticism. For this reason alone, we would predict that females would play a noticeable part in religious revivals.57 Consistent with this, studies of religious revivals in the U.S. have found that “white and black women were among the most visible participants at religious revivals, where converts wept, wailed, writhed, and fainted as they received God’s grace.”58 Neuroticism tends to decrease with age in males. But in females, Neuroticism decreases with age until adolescence and at that point, it increases, possibly due to the adaptive need to worry about one’s children. This can be seen most obviously among university students, where females in particular tend to suffer mental health problems of various kinds that they will often have recovered from by the time they are in their mid-20s.59 Neuroticism, in women, begins to decline in early adulthood.60 For this reason, as well as due to their higher general religiousness, we would expect females in their mid-teens to mid-20s to be attracted to religious revivals. In line with this prediction, there is detailed data on those who “came forward” to receive God’s forgiveness during Billy Graham’s British rallies. In London, 65 percent were female and 50 percent were under the age of 19. In Glasgow, 71 percent were women and 73 percent were under the age of 30.61

Even those who are not sufficiently Neurotic to undergo religious experiences can be expected to be influenced by a religious revival if it appears to be sufficiently popular. Neuroticism predicts extrinsic religiousness, that is, religious outward conformity.62 People who are high in Neuroticism will fear being judged negatively or even being ostracized for failure to conform, meaning that they may fake religious fervor even if they don’t actually feel it. This means that religious revivals that become particularly prominent can envelop people who are far lower in Neuroticism than those who are, as they see it, “slain by the Holy Spirit.” Accordingly, popular revivals can generate a kind of group hysteria and thus appear far more popular than they really are. This is obvious when we consider how so many celebrities felt compelled to jump on the bandwagon of Black Lives Matter.

The Religion of Multiculturalism and Mental Health

So, with the nature of “religion” and “religious revivals” clear in our minds, we can now explore the “religious” nature of the Black Lives Matter protests. There are obvious parallels between 20th-century religious revivals—such as that that spear-headed by Billy Graham—and the Black Lives Matter revival. The leaders of the movement are extreme “liberals”—with this being clearly associated with mental instability, where conservatism and traditional religiosity are correlated with mental stability.63 The “revival” has taken place in the wake of a period of elevated mortality salience; in other words, it is a response to stress. Those who are drawn into it are politically liberal themselves, with this being associated with mental instability.64

In many respects, Multiculturalism can be argued to be a secular “replacement religion” for Christianity—and perhaps even a kind of Christian sect. The same argument has been made with regard to Marxism and even some kinds of Romantic Nationalism.

1. Dogmas

Traditional Christianity is based around a series of dogmas that you must accept in order to be regarded as a Christian and achieve salvation. These dogmas are sometimes logically incoherent—such as the Trinity—or require the acceptance of truth-claims that cannot be proved or are, on any reasonable basis, extraordinarily improbable. However, you signal your intellectual submission to the religious community by accepting these. This can be regarded as their purpose; they are tests of loyalty. In much the same way, Multiculturalism requires that you accept dogmas that are empirically inaccurate or patently nonsensical, such as that there are no race differences in intelligence or that everyone is “equal.”

2. “The Last Shall Be First.”

Christianity also tends towards idolizing the “marginalized.” It preaches that “the last shall be first” and encourages its followers to empower those who are supposedly marginalized, and humble themselves, embracing a kind of sacred poverty. Similarly, Marxism idolizes the dispossessed in the form of the “worker”; Romantic nationalism worships the “peasant”; and Multiculturalism, as espoused by Whites, idolizes non-Whites, and the more different they are—culturally and genetically—from Whites, the more they are worthy of reverence. There is evidence that humans—being evolved to tightly structured groups—have two fundamental instincts: one towards climbing the social hierarchy and the other towards equality, as groups that are relatively equal tend to avoid collapsing into discord.65 Thus, religions that preach “equality” can be highly psychologically attractive, especially to those who are not close to the top of the hierarchy or who fear they will not be able to get there. This is consistent with evidence that males who are physically strong—and thus who would have been more likely to ascend the prehistoric hierarchy via winning fights and being sexually selected for—are more likely to hold conservative views that specifically favor hierarchy and inequality.66

3. Self-Abasement and Guilt

The third key point that Multiculturalism has in common with Christianity, though not with pagan religions such as Hinduism, is the salience of “guilt.” In general, “guilt” and “shame” both function to make people “know their place,” and thus conform and behave in pro-social, cooperative ways. Accordingly, a group that adopts a religion imbued with these feelings to an optimum degree would be likely to out-compete other groups.

Christianity is a religion to which “guilt” is extremely important—“central to the biblical message” as one theologian has put it.67 According to Christian dogmas, humanity is “Fallen” as a consequence of its “Original Sin.” In other words, God is perfect and all-benevolent, whereas humanity is inherently sinful and bad, living in a sinful, Fallen world. Indeed, it was cast down into this world from Paradise as a punishment for its wickedness. The only way humanity can gain salvation and forgiveness is to admit how sinful it is and humbly worship God and follow the commands of His Church. Worldly success is, in a sense, something for which you should feel guilty—unless you are certain that God has blessed you with this success—because it implies that you are insufficiently humble; you are failing to sufficiently repent for your wickedness.

In much the same fashion, the Church of Multiculturalism tells its adherents that they are burdened by the Original Sin of Whiteness. White people are presumed to have treated people of other races in abominable ways, with images of slavery, the Holocaust, Jim Crow, and the like acting as symbols of their primal deeds. Whites must repent for their Original Sin by empowering those who are not White, such that racial “Equality” is attained. In the same way that wealthy people in Christian societies are “privileged” and must engage in charitable works to assuage their “guilt,” White people have the “privilege” of being “White”—not only being wealthy but enjoying that wealth at the expense of non-Whites, whom their ancestors brutalized, enslaved, or murdered. “Privilege” is the source of “guilt,” which must be assuaged through acts of humility and penance, potentially including not producing White children and adopting non-Whites instead.

Shame, though less obvious, is also germane to Christianity and its replacement religions. Those who refused to conform to Christianity could be “shamed” as devil-worshippers who might bring God’s anger on the community, and shunned accordingly. Those who do not “take the knee” for George Floyd or who remain silent, instead of publicly stating their support for Black Lives Matter, can be shamed as possible “racists;” with this term of abuse implying that you are not an adherent to the religious community. You are “Other.” This is because membership of the community is based around adherence to dogmas, not around blood-bonds, as is the case with pagan religions and with many forms of nationalism.68

A New Kind of Awakening

The key difference between the Church of Multiculturalism and Christianity is that there is no god—no non-physical existence. Moreover, Black Lives Matter represents an extremely “spiteful” form of religiosity, in the sense that there doesn’t appear to be any “forgiveness.” In Billy Graham rallies, you could “step forward” and be forgiven for your sins. In Black Lives Matter rallies, it doesn’t matter how many times you “take the knee,” there can be no forgiveness for your sin of being White. You must simply learn to live with the guilt, slightly assuaging it ever so often by campaigning to empower non-Whites.

As previously discussed, we can conceive of two distinct kinds of religion: those which are selected for under centuries of Darwinian conditions—that tend to involve the collective worship of a moral god—and those which deviate from this norm. Due to the way in which mental health and religiousness were co-selected under Darwinian conditions as we have explored, this “traditional religiosity” is now positively associated with mental health, while deviations from it—such as New Age affectations or belief in the paranormal—are associated with anxiety and depression, either on-going or periodic. People who are high in mental instability can be expected to become highly religious in the wake of a crisis and being low in traditional religiosity as well as fervently left-wing correlates with being high in mental instability

Accordingly, we would expect such people—self-identified “liberals”—to become extremely religious (in terms of their religious deviation) in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, and this is what we appear to be seeing. In previous situations of gravity, the overwhelming majority of the British population was Christian and believed, to varying degrees, in its doctrines. This would have meant that the relationship between being a traditional Christian and mental stability would have been much weaker than is now the case. It also meant that the revivals were Christian in nature, because this was the religious belief even of the kind of mentally unstable people who tend to undergo intense religious experiences. As already noted, a specific form of religiosity has been found to manifest among mentally unstable people suffering from high levels of stress—“Spiritual Struggle.” Those who felt the Holy Spirit during this revival would be, in general, relatively high in Neuroticism, something that would be soothed, temporarily, by their religious experience. Usually, their Christian zeal would be temporary. It would no longer be psychologically required once the period of stress was over and recovered from, by which time the factor that was elevating their anxiety to intolerable levels would have dissipated.

In 2020, especially for younger people, their religion is Multiculturalism and not Christianity. Christianity is now the religion of a shrinking minority. Consequently, we would expect some variant on the kind of revival outlined above to occur in the wake of Covid-19, especially among such people. Its leaders, as with Christian revivals, would be mentally unstable people. However, many of the “followers,” caught up in the revival, would be prone to mental instability and would be going through a particularly acute phase of anxiety. As with a Christian revival, these feelings would be alleviated by the collective experience—in this instance of “Black Lives Matter”—in which they would feel a sense of certainty that they were morally superior; that they were better than most (“racist”) people; and that they were part of creating a paradise on Earth. Once the anxiety-reducing feelings this induced wore off, such people would no longer be subject to acute mortality salience and then they would return to being much less fervent believers in the Church of Multiculturalism.

We would expect any such revival to be more pronounced among Multiculturalists than among Christians. Social Justice Warriors are irreligious and liberal, both of which correlate with mental instability. “Christians” are conservative and religious, both associated with mental stability. Accordingly, in a world in which remnant Christianity is associated with sound mindedness, a Multiculturalist revival in the wake of a pandemic becomes far more probable than a Christian one—though there still may be a Christian one of some kind in the near future. We would expect this Multiculturalist revival to be elevated among young people—because people go through a period of relatively high mental instability when they are young adults—and, in particular, among young females, because females are more religious than males and they are more prone to depression and anxiety. Multiculturalism is the “new religion”—the “new morality”—and thus females would be evolved to want to signal the extent of their adherence to it, being ultimately psychologically adapted to polygamous societies in which they must compete for the highest status males by strongly signaling their religiosity and sexual faithfulness.69 Females are also evolved to a patriarchal society in which decisions tend to be made for them by their fathers and husbands. With the breakdown of patriarchy, it has been argued that we would expect females—especially young females—to make particularly maladaptive decisions.70 These would include strongly aligning with a religion that seeks to destroy their ethnic group and effectively encouragers them to be childless.

It should be noted that, in relatively religious societies, females tend to be more politically conservative than males, seemingly because females are more religious and the religion promotes “traditional” values as the will of God. However, when the influence of traditional religiousness breaks down, the female propensity towards higher empathy—and thus leftism and anti-traditionalism—begins to manifest. In 1992, in Britain, women born in the 1920s were more conservative than men of the same age. However, women born in the 1960s were less conservative than males of the same age.71 These younger women, no longer as influenced by traditional religious ideas, tend to promote leftist ones—including altruism towards competing ethnic groups—with a kind of religious zeal. One commentator astutely termed them “The New Church Ladies,” evoking the subterranean religious quality to so much of contemporary female discourse.72

Traditional religiousness took the female propensity to strongly believe in God and engage in religious worship and focused this into an adaptive form of religiosity in which God promoted group-selected values. With the breakdown of this religion, we are left with females tending to be religiously fervent and high in generalized empathy and thus attracted to Multiculturalism and leftism. Females are also higher than males in Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Neuroticism, and, thus in social conformity.73 So, for this reason as well, we would expect them to be more heavily involved in the New Church into which younger females have been inculcated.

It has been observed that highly educated young people—those with post-graduate degrees—are significantly over-represented among Black Lives Matter activists.74 One possible explanation for this—beyond the fact that university Humanities and Social Science departments are increasingly indoctrination factories for leftist ideas75—is that there is a positive relationship between Neuroticism and academic success at university, especially when this is combined with high Conscientiousness (impulse control and rule-following).76 This is possibly because anxiety acts as a motivator towards diligence or because Neuroticism means you desire greater certainty about the nature of the world and believe you can attain this through higher education. In that Neuroticism predicts extrinsic religiousness77—that is, outward religious conformity—we would expect non-SJWs who were relatively high in these traits to be drawn into this dominant, public revival due to their fear of not conforming, leading them to compete to strongly outwardly conform.

Anarchic Religious Awakenings

The other difference between the British religious awakenings in the 20th century and Black Lives Matter is the anarchy involved: BLM activists flagrantly breaking the law, engaging in dangerous behavior, rioting, inciting perpetual disorder (“No Justice, No Peace”), and engaging in iconoclasm by toppling statues and desecrating memorials. In this sense, a clearer comparison can be found in the Peasants War that took place in German-speaking states in the 1520s, in the early days of the Reformation. There are multiple reasons why the Reformation began when it did, but one of them was a period of elevated mortality salience. There had been severe famine in Germany between 1515 and 1520.78

Reports indicate that violent Protestant mobs would strip Catholic Churches of their valuables and destroy their idols. As with Black Lives Matter, educated people were heavily over-represented among early Protestant iconoclasts—they were mainly the so-called “middling sort.”79 The Protestant leaders would oppose iconoclasm, publicly stating that idols should only be removed with permission from the proper authorities. But, as has occurred in Britain in 2020, the Swiss authorities preemptively removed icons as a way of halting public disorder and also as way of appeasing Protestant leaders. In June 1524, all Zurich churches were closed in order to prevent a maelstrom.80

In other words, Black Lives Matter is a particularly pronounced religious revival. In the 1520s, this occurred, in part, due to particularly difficult conditions. In 2020, it may be that the cause was moderately difficult conditions plus a growing percentage of young people who, partly for genetic reasons underpinned by increasing mutational load, increasingly suffer from depression and anxiety and, therefore, cannot psychologically cope with what would have been historically regarded as quite normal levels of mortality salience. Contemporary young people are increasingly in a situation of “evolutionary mismatch” where—under the influence of modern, anti-traditional ideologies, over-parenting, and education— they are decreasingly socialized as children in the manner that was the norm under harsh Darwinian conditions. This has been shown to lead to severe behavioral problems in non-human animals,81 and we will explore this issue in more detail below.

Furthermore, far superior communications—social media and instantaneous reactions to events around the world—mean that what may otherwise have been isolated patches of revivalism have been globalized, impacting much larger numbers of people. And there may also be an extent to which these riots are in the interests of some powerful individuals, who are themselves fervent adherents to Multiculturalism or who desire a subservient population that will not challenge them. If the population is depressed and demoralized, this subservience is clearly better accomplished. Accordingly, the riots—which could be crushed if so desired—are permitted to run their course. It is as if ordinary people are being told: “Look what we can allow to happen to you if you elect the wrong people or vote the wrong way in a referendum.” Afraid of offending the righteous mob—and their high-level sympathizers—even leaders who oppose leftist disorder dare not act decisively. Again, comparisons to the iconoclasm of the early English Reformation leap to mind. Iconoclasts were permitted to “get away with it” during the periods when the Protestant faction, most notably led by Thomas Cromwell (c.1485-1540), wielded the most influence at Court.82

All of this leads us to a final question. How have we reached a situation where so many people—including many in positions of power—wish to destroy their own extended kinship group?

BLM and the Spiteful Mutants

Christianity, even the zealous kind of the Reformation, was an adaptive form of religiosity. Thus, a key part of it is “forgiveness”—after publicly confessing your sins and wavering of faith. With the breakdown of Darwinian selection, we see an increasing deviation from this religious evolutionary norm, including religions that are maladaptive, because they are ultimately nihilistic and lack doctrines that allow a person’s highly negative feelings during times of stress to be fully expunged. This is what we see with Black Lives Matter—the ultimate logic of which is that Whites should simply feel perpetual shame throughout their lives with no hope of it being alleviated, other than in a very mild and brief way via “taking the knee.”

Young people have been inculcated with this maladaptive religion due, in part, to the breakdown of traditional Christianity, which, like all religions that survived under harsh Darwinian conditions, tended to take behavior that was adaptive in terms of group selection and turn this into the will of God. As discussed above, as child mortality collapsed, we had more and more people who would not have survived under harsher conditions—due to their high mutational load—who had mutations of the mind that caused to hold beliefs that would be highly maladaptive if held by even a small percentage of the group—anti-natalism being only the most obvious. Due to our being a highly eusocial species—that is, interacting in a “hive mind”—we are heavily influenced by those around us. In this way, it has been found that depression can spread like a contagion. If you are around a person who is depressed then you are more likely to become depressed yourself, a condition which is negatively associated with fertility.83 As a result, these mutants— spiteful mutants84—helped to spread their maladaptive ways of thinking even to non-mutants, gradually undermining adaptive institutions, such as traditional churches, and replacing them with their Church of Multiculturalism, a church which is now clearly adhered to even by the leadership of the Church of England.85 Having taken over the state’s organs of power, such as the education system and the media, they could then inculcate young people into the New Church, alter the evolutionarily adaptive methods of socialization traditionally imposed on them, and push them—and with them, the entire super-organism—to think and behave increasingly contra to their genetic interests.

This became possible when a “tipping point” is reached, whereby about 25 percent of the population advocated anti-traditional ideas. Experiments have shown that when this happens, people perceive the new worldview as the way forward and begin to abandon the old one en masse.86 With our evolution to obedience and following the leader and the mob, this can sometimes result in a misfiring of our adaptations such that we start to engage in behavior which is not in our evolutionary interests. This is particularly likely to be the case if we are subject to “evolutionary mismatch;” if we are placed in an ecology to which we are not evolved. We are evolved to a pre-industrial ecology, so we can expect to find ourselves increasingly maladapted as the ecology increasingly deviates from this. We will engage in behavior which would have been adaptive under previous conditions – such as following the crowd – but this will be decreasingly adaptive as the crowd is increasingly evolutionarily mismatched, mutated and influenced by spiteful mutants.

In 1954, this tipping point had not yet been reached in Britain. People forced themselves, for fear of ostracism, through so-called “effortful control,”87 to believe in traditional Christianity, meaning that the revival was Christian and adaptive in nature. Around 1970, the tipping point was reached. This is demonstrated by the fact that evidence of mutational load – in the form of autism, which is associated with paternal age – did not predict atheism in the 1950s, but by the 1970s it did predict atheism. By the 1970s, in the U.S., having an older father predicted atheism in a way that had not previously been the case. This is because Christianity was so strong during the earlier period that autistics, who tend not to be religious as we have already noted, forced themselves to conform to the dominant religiosity. By the latter period, the tipping point had been reached, so they no longer needed to conform.88

The Toppling of Evolutionary Success

The Church of Multiculturalism, and its Black Lives Matter conversion rallies, is a Church with “spiteful mutants” as its priestly class. Under harsh Darwinian conditions, only those with adaptive cognitive biases survived childhood, because maladaptive cognitive biases were under-pinned by mutation, and those with high mutational load would likely perish before reaching adulthood. With the extreme relaxation of these conditions, these “spiteful mutants” walk among us in significant numbers. These are people who are programmed to behave in a way that is highly maladaptive in evolutionary terms—which results in the destruction of group and even individual fitness—and to persuade others to do likewise. All of the doctrines they advocate involve, if accepted, essentially being a “failure as an organism”:

  • life has no meaning so you may as well not have children;
  • put the interests of other ethnic groups above your own and so reduce the extent to which your own genes are passed on;
  • have few or no children to assist non-human animals and their genetic interests over your own.

The toppling of “racist” statues by the Black Lives Matter mob can be perceived as tearing down the “old gods,” those whom European people have venerated as heroes. These statues have traditionally been erected to honor highly group-selected people who have promoted the genetic interests of Europeans by expanding their territory and leading their ethnic group to victory over rivals. In a sense, the statues are sacred, they are idols; objects of worship. To tear them down is a way of asserting that the religion that they represented no longer has any power, is no longer sacred, simply because the idols that embody it can successfully humiliated.

In 1520, Spanish explorer Hernan Cortes (1485-1547) destroyed every Aztec idol that he could and desecrated the temples. He noticed that it left the Aztecs demoralized and less able to put up a fight.89 So, this leaves the worshipers in a state of confusion in which the previously certain, uniquely real system by which they made sense of the world—and in which they played an integral and positive part—is an under assault. They feel confused because they have got used to this system, and the comforting presence of these statues, and they feel demoralized and anxious. Any significant change can cause this by virtue of elevating anxiety about the unknown.90

This, alongside the symbolism of the system that gives their life meaning being attacked, leads them to feel depressed and looking for new certainties. But what if the certainties offered are nihilistic and tell you that you are inherently evil and should debase and even destroy yourself, never able to be forgiven for your and your ancestors’ sins? This is the ultimate message of the Death Cult that is the Church of Multiculturalism. It is, therefore, no coincidence that it attracts the same psychological types who are attracted to literal suicide cults. Indeed, a Black Lives Matter Suicide Cult, in which young White women kill themselves to repent for their racist sins, would not be beyond the realms of possibility.

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