Why secular civic institutions always work better than religious ones

Today the great state of Massachusetts bestowed upon me the title of notary public, of whose position on the state government hierarchy I'm uncertain but that I know to be somewhere between prison bingo-night manager and the official chronicler of Mitt Romney's favorite bistros. But now I've got the little document officially recognizing my unparalleled civic virtue, and all I had to do to validate the little document was recite an oath in front of a bored local-government thrall. She gestured to the printed text of the oath next to her and told me to raise my right hand and recite it (she didn't look away from her computer the entire time). I glanced over the text, and saw at the conclusion the four most annoying words Western civilization has ever created.

So help me God.

Ugh. There he is- that facile old man intruding on civic institutions that neither need nor want him. He's like a bully we used to have to deal with in primary school - a jerk to everybody who ever got near to him, but he still wanted to be included in all the games. This guy wormed his way into the Pledge of Allegiance (via an invalid usurpation of the privately-written, privately-circulated Pledge by Congress), onto our currency (ditto), just a squeak into the Declaration of Independence, into the President's oath (presidents say "so help me God," but the phrase is omitted from the oath as it's written in the Constitution), and now the little bastard is in my notary oath. Look, all I wanted was to get a certificate that I could put on my resume because law firms and consulting firms like that kind of thing. Don't make me piss all over my own values to get it! So, with the little sarcastic whine that always takes me about twenty minutes to regret using when feeling self-righteous, I asked for a secular, "non-superstitious" alternative to the oath.

"Yep," she said, reaching under her desk and putting a new version of the oath with "so help me God" replaced with "this I affirm under the pains and penalties of perjury." I don't think she even had to look away from her computer for it. It was that simple. So I took the oath, got my little notary dealy, ordered my stamp and my record book, and I went on my way with that little feeling of private triumph.

The only thing unfortunate about the whole setup of this and similar institutions is that the secular alternative is the alternative, with the default position of even something relatively insignificant like a notary application being that the rights and duties of that position will be enjoined upon the applicant by the fear of God, rather respect for the state or the institution. That seems a little bit backwards to me. When I apply for some kind of position within the formal structure of an institution, I am tacitly consenting to the legitimacy and authority of that institution, of its various powers and privileges- otherwise, why would I be applying to participate in the institution? If I'm not accepting its parameters, then in what possible sense could I ever be a member of, or a participant in, that institution?

Suppose that you wanted to join the army. In so doing, you necessarily take it upon yourself to obey the institutional hierarchy of the army. Nobody would ever join the army being legitimately surprised that they would, for example, be expected to follow orders given by their superiors. But what someone joining the army would find surprising would be if they found out that, should they ever transgress the army's rules, they will be sentenced and punished... by the firefighters' union of a foreign country. Or, perhaps more analogous to God's case, by a tribunal consisting of Sauron, Voldemort, and the Tooth Fairy. It doesn't make sense, for a variety of reasons - even if an army applicant believed in the Tooth Fairy, doesn't it seem like army punishments should be enacted and carried out within the army, since such punishments are for violations of some established army rule, whereas Tooth Fairy punishments should be for... whatever Tooth Fairies punish?

Such seems like a sensible structure for most of the institutions that we generate in western democracies: the price you pay for whatever benefits the institution offers (a paycheck, a notary seal, the divine rewards of Mormonism, etc.) are that you obey whatever conditions permit the institution to offer those rewards in the first place. The army as an institution could not give you the benefit of a paycheck if soldiers did not follow orders because such an army would quickly be destroyed by another army - the institution's conditions just are those conditions that permit the institution to provide benefits for their members. Institutions grow when the balance of the conditions and benefits favor the benefits, and they contract when the opposite is true.

Note that this structure receives a slight twist with things like charities: charities typically benefit more people than just their members. But the only real difference between an institution like a charity and an institution like the army is that the charity just has to specially designate some of its benefits as being for members and some for non-members. If someone is receiving money as the exchange for consenting to the strictures of the charity institution, that is designated a salary or a wage. If someone is receiving some reward for giving lots of money to the charity, that is designated recognition. Salaries and recognition are, of course, carefully distinguished from the actual products of the charity: money give to the poor is designated as a donation, and has that kind of extra moral elevation to it because no sacrifices to the institution are required to receive them, and we even frown on charities that condition their products on acceptance of internal institutional principles (that's why the great state of Massachusetts doesn't let Catholic charities condition orphanage services on the parents' being heterosexuals). But even armies at least peripherally offer some advantages to those who do not consent to obey army rules; I would not be punished for failing to salute a general, but I still get the protection of the army.

This is because the vast and complex web of institutions that makes up the quasi-super-institution that is the United States is designed to reward my paying taxes with certain protections like the army, but such is beyond the scope of the present point. The present point is that being punished by an institution is entirely appropriate for participants in that institution, and why it is utterly nonsensical for such punishment to come from outside the institution. I do not get punished for failing to salute a general because the general is not a higher rank than me (rank is an internal army designation of who may punish who for violating the conditions of the institution), but this does not entail that I have a higher rank than the general: I am outside of rank and so outside the institutional punishment structure for breaking rank.

That is why the slightly harsher sounding "pains and penalties" version of the oath (which is identical to the other version except for the replacement of "so help me God") is actually far more appropriate and really not at all "harsh" when you think about it. Perjury is a special class of lying; namely, it is lying in defiance of a specific oath taken in a specific institutional setting that is itself mitigated by specific, pre-set institutional boundaries. In this case, perjury means breaking the notary oath, and the pains and penalties of perjuring as such are the pains and penalties constructed by the state and administered by the state. This is exactly what we would expect on any sane institutional structure, that deviation from its sensible strictures would receive punishment from within.

The theistic version, then, seems like it ought to be the alternative, since it is complete opposition to the sensible structure of an institution. It essentially says, "these are the rules of the notary institution, but if you break them, we are completely unequipped to deal with you and so we would like to take this time to appeal to your fear of a being completely beyond our control." A being whose motives are unknown, to be sure, but one gets the feeling that he really cares about what you do in regards to your notary oath. He's like an outside mercenary hired to enforce rules that sensible democratic institutions enforce and police themselves.

The larger point of the general, radical difference between God and the institutions we've created scarcely needs to be made. Our institutions are democratic; God would be an unquestionable tyrant if he existed. Our institutions are generally opt-in, and where they aren't, their enforcement power is at least ostensibly based on very basic needs like survival (that is why the government says it can draft you); God doesn't really give you any flexibility in terms of "opting." Our institutions change according to ever-evolving circumstances, they grow and shrink, they begin to exist when there are needs to be met and cease to exist when the need ceases to exist, they are fallible, they are always in need of improvement; God would just be whatever he had been forever, if he existed.

Historically, institutions that have relied on external religious justifications have failed, far in excess of institutions that rely on external secular justifications or even other institutions. (We are hopefully about to see the cataclysmic failure of just such an institution in the most slavishly cultish theocracy the modern era has seen - that of the North Korean government.) When a secular institution comes to utterly depend upon another secular institution, the dependent will tend to merge with the benefactor until they become more or less indistinguishable, the way that music has merged with the recording industry, the way that authors have merged with the publishing industry, the way that the Republican Party has merged with the energy industry, the way that client states and vassal states tend to merge into super-states politically centered on the benefactor dominant state, so on, so on. In secular institutions, force and money are the dominant tools for subsuming client institutions into dominant ones, but institutions are rarely completely destroyed in western democracies: rather, they tend to change according to where the force or money goes, or they get subsumed into larger ones.

By contrast, institutions with purely supernaturalist external justifications tend to fail. Today, there are virtually no pressures on most Americans to be Catholic, except in those communities or families where such is expected, but the restraints imposed on members thereof are enormous: and the Church is rapidly shrinking as a consequence. The Inquisition as an institution did not get reabsorbed into the Church: it disappeared entirely, its offices and officers all gone, its authority ended because, once severed from the political power it held over secular institutions in Europe, it had only God to rely on - it had nothing to rely on. It just stopped.

Imagine setting a bowl of candy in front of a child and then putting a plastic elf next to the bowl, then telling the child that if they take any of the candy, the elf will punish them. The institution only works if the child actually believes in the power of the elf to punish them, and as soon as the kid figures out that the elf can't do it, the "institution" you've set up falls to shit. It has no more enforcement power over its own rules, so suddenly anybody who wants to can reap its benefits without accepting its conditions. Historically, religions that have not accounted for this problem have gone extinct, so the ones that survive have accounted for it, usually through some combination of claiming that their power comes from God when in fact it comes from secular force, money, social pressure, some combination thereof, and the threat of eternity in Hell (as well as various methods for hastening your arrival there).

The clearest implication of this model of normal secular institutions is that God has no role in our institutions because he doesn't do anything. He neither confers benefits nor enforces conditions. Where his temporal representatives have power of the mundane sort, then God is rather influential, but where the faithful are powerless, so too is God. The reason that I swore "on pains and penalties of perjury" to uphold the Constitution of Massachusetts is because I recognize the temporal authority of Massachusetts to condition participation in its specialized institutions upon certain rules. Nothing more.

The next clearest implication of this model is that anything with an ontological status like God's is irrelevant to democratic social institutions. This, I think, includes moral propositions. In the model presented here, notice that the questions are only about the ability of some factor x to either reward participation in or enforce the conditions of participation in an institution. The rightness or wrongness of some proposition will not matter outside of its ability to affect either outcome. This doesn't particularly bother me since I've long held that our moral language is so utterly broken as to be useless anyway, but hey, it's nice when it works out that my models end up being consistent with each other.