The Part-Time Religion of the World: The Path Towards All Answers
The Part-Time Religion of the World
No one should have to celebrate a better world alone, yet every night, millions of people celebrate victories that belong to someone else. They cheer for records they did not set and milestones they did not reach, all on behalf of a person who does not even know they exist. I would argue that this kind of devotion offers one of the most revealing windows into how faith works, precisely because, at first glance, it seems to have nothing to do with faith at all.
To see what I mean, picture a nineteen-year-old fan at her desk at two in the morning, four muted phones in front of her, each looping the same music video. Over time, she has learned which platforms count a view and how long a song has to play before a stream registers, as well as why skipping a track feels like a small betrayal. Next to her bed stand thirty copies of the same album, most of them still sealed, since she knows the music by heart and listening was never the reason she bought them. Each copy works as a ticket in a lottery whose prize is a few minutes across a table from the person on the cover. Meanwhile, someone in her group chat has posted a screenshot of their streaming count and asked everyone else to do the same. An unspoken tally of who is pulling their weight (and who might not be a real fan after all) keeps running in the background.
She is tired, as her exams are close and her savings have shrunk, while her friends outside the fandom have slowly stopped inviting her to the evenings she keeps declining. Still, when the group’s new song climbs the chart the next morning, she feels something close to pride, as though the achievement were partly hers, which, in a sense, is exactly what she believes.
It’s easy to dismiss this as obsession, or plain foolishness. From the inside, though, it makes sense, like almost every other behavior in this book so far. She acts on what her mind currently perceives as rewarding, in an environment that has been engineered to keep that perception intact. So whether she’s being rational at all is, to me, the less interesting question. I’d rather ask what exactly she’s being rational about, and who designed the rules of the game she plays so diligently.
The answer leads further than you might expect. Strip away the lightsticks and the choreography, and the machinery behind this devotion looks oddly familiar. There is a figure raised above ordinary people and a community held together by shared rituals. Offerings are made to prove loyalty and sins can be committed against the object of devotion, while a form of exile awaits those who doubt too loudly. In function, these are the structures of religion, just without a god at their center.
Looking at them first in a setting where few of us have anything personally at stake makes it easier to agree on how they work. From there, we can turn to the places where far more of us do and, eventually, to the one framework almost all of us live by, even if only part of the time.
Nowhere in today’s entertainment business has this machinery been built more openly than in the idol industries of South Korea and Japan, where producing devotion has been refined into something close to an engineering discipline. They are by no means its only home. Yet, their methods are documented in unusual detail, at times even in courtrooms, which makes them a particularly transparent place to study how such devotion works.
Manufactured Messiahs
To understand how this devotion is produced, we have to start with the idol, who is more often assembled than discovered. Many, particularly in South Korea’s industry, are recruited as teenagers and train for years before they ever appear on a stage. They refine their singing and dancing along with their manners, speech, and appearance, as well as the version of their personality the public will be allowed to see. By the time they debut, the agency has usually shaped a figure that is skilled and attractive but, above all, carefully incomplete. Fans receive enough of a person to attach to, yet rarely enough to be disappointed by.
Fans might learn about a favorite food or a habit of thanking the fans after every performance, while the opinions and messy relationships that make up the ordinary human stay out of view.
It’s the crowdfunding trick from earlier: the dream feels perfect precisely because it’s unfinished. Whatever a fan longs for, be it gentleness, ambition, loyalty, or simply someone who seems to understand them, can be projected into the empty spaces of a persona designed to hold it. Each fan likely ends up devoted to a slightly different person built from the same material, privately convinced that their own version is the real one.
What turns this projection into a business is the promise of access. Alongside the music, the industry sells the feeling that the distance between fan and idol could close. There’s the handshake event, where every purchased ticket buys a few seconds of contact, or the video call raffled among the buyers of an album. A paid app lets the idol send short messages that arrive on the fan’s phone like texts from a friend. For years, a ballot packed with every copy of a designated single let fans help decide which members got the most prominent roles in the next release. Each of these offers is small on its own, yet together they sustain an implied availability, the sense that the idol belongs (at least partly) to the people who support them.
That availability rests on carefully staged intimacy: the idol looks directly into the camera, speaks to the viewer in the second person, remembers the name of the fan club, and tells millions of people at once that they are loved. The technique itself is far older than the platforms. Radio and television hosts had already learned by the 1950s to address their audiences as though they were talking to a single friend, and today’s platforms have only refined it. (Detailed explanation: The anthropologist Donald Horton and the sociologist R. Richard Wohl coined the term for this one-sided bond in 1956 [parasocial interaction], observing that radio and television performers deliberately address each viewer as a personal friend, creating an illusion of face-to-face intimacy that the audience cannot return (Horton & Wohl, 1956)1.) A message written once and sent to a million phones still arrives as a private notification, read by every fan alone in their own room.
Much of the bond’s power comes from the starring role it grants the fan. In an ordinary life, the fan becomes, at least in imagination, someone the idol is speaking to, perhaps even someone the idol would choose if only the two of them could meet and get to know each other. Many fans would never say this out loud, and some would deny it if asked. But a possibility doesn’t need to be believed to be felt. It only needs to stay open. Nor is the strength of the attachment much of a mystery, since the idol pulls at the triggers that ignite caring (and the dopamine machinery behind them). The community supplies the social proxy, as a teenager whose friends adore a group readily comes to adore it as well. Attraction and the longing to belong supply the biological relevance, with many idols presented as the ideal partner or the ideal friend.
The investment loop then does the rest. With every album or merchandise purchased, every hour streamed, and all the concerts that have been visited, along with every late night spent voting, the stakes of caring rise. The more a fan has given, the more their mind needs the object of that giving to be worth it. (Detailed explanation: The more effort or discomfort people go through to obtain something, the more they tend to value it afterward [effort justification]: in a classic experiment, a harsher initiation made a dull discussion group seem more appealing (Aronson & Mills, 1959)1. Past spending also keeps people investing in things they would not choose again [sunk cost effect]; theatergoers randomly charged full price for season tickets attended more plays in the first half of the season than those given a discount (Arkes & Blumer, 1985)2.) Once a fan has started buying in bulk, each purchase makes the next one easier to justify, until the spending itself becomes evidence of how much the idol matters.
When we care strongly for someone, their goals can become our own, a kind of meaning by proxy that lets a parent experience a child’s success as a personal triumph. Fandom borrows this mechanism, so when the group breaks a sales record, the fan who helped buy it experiences the milestone as a shared achievement, and in a narrow sense, it is one. (Detailed explanation: Supporters readily absorb a team’s success into their own identity [basking in reflected glory]: after their university’s football team won, students wore university apparel more often and were more likely to describe the result as “we won,” while after losses they more often said “they lost” (Cialdini et al., 1976)1.) Yet, meaning by proxy normally draws its weight from the mutual knowledge that two lives are intertwined. Here, that knowledge is missing entirely on one side, as the fan has made the idol’s goals their own while the idol’s life goes on without any knowledge of the fan. Regardless of how sincere the idol’s warmth may be in the moment, it is addressed to everyone, and therefore to no one in particular. A fan can be counted, thanked, and even remembered by name at a fan meeting, yet they can’t be chosen in the sense that would make the affection truly fulfilling.
Some part of the mind seems to register this gap. For the minority of fans whose attachment turns compulsive, the bond likely works like any reward that never quite satisfies, demanding more of the same just to keep feeling like enough.
The industry structures time to match, as releases arrive as carefully spaced comebacks. These are announced through teasers and countdowns that stretch the anticipation over weeks, akin to the weekly chapter of a serialized story, until the waiting itself becomes part of the reward. Between comebacks, a steady drip of content, from behind-the-scenes clips to short live streams, keeps the baseline of anticipation from ever fully settling. Fans rarely get a stretch of silence long enough to ask what they’d do with their evenings if the group disappeared.
And to be clear, fans aren’t fools, and the joy they feel is real. The music can be excellent and the friendships formed in fan communities are often genuine, while having something to look forward to on a difficult day holds real value of its own. The needs being met, such as belonging, excitement, comfort, and the sense of being part of something larger, are legitimate.
What I’d question is the price at which those needs are supplied, and by whom. A market that profits from loneliness (an economy of misery) has little reason to cure it. An industry whose revenue rises with every extra copy a lonely teenager buys is rewarded for keeping that teenager devoted, especially as devotion tends to be most reliable when the fan has few other places to direct it.
So the idol is a source of light in an ordinary life, designed to be loved and sold in installments. A savior of this kind never has to save anyone in a concrete sense, as being followed is enough. What the industry has learned is that such faith becomes far more profitable once it is asked to prove itself.
Faith rarely stays a private feeling for long, as most traditions ask for it to be shown through visible signs of loyalty that turn an inner conviction into something the community can see and count. Idol fandoms have built an entire economy around this demand, with the album as its most visible currency.
Hardly anyone in this economy buys a physical album for the music, which they could stream for a fraction of the price. They buy it for what the purchase unlocks. Each copy can count as an entry in a lottery, either for a fan signing event, where the winners sit across a table from the members for a few minutes, or for a short video call. Since the draw is commonly believed to favor those who buy more, fans buy accordingly. Several copies of the same album per event are common, and some fans buy well over a hundred for a single event, all for an encounter that typically lasts one to three minutes. (Detailed explanation: Fans who bought albums to enter fan events averaged 6.7 copies of the same album, one as many as 80, according to a Korea Consumer Agency survey released in 2023 (Yonhap News Agency, 2023)1. The office worker in her twenties who described buying 150 to 200 copies per event said she spent about 50 million won in a single year (The Korea Times, 2024)2.) Where the lottery doesn’t decide the prize, randomness is built into the product itself. Many albums contain one or two photocards drawn from a larger set, sometimes with dozens of variations. A fan hoping for a particular member, or for the complete collection, cannot simply buy what they want and has to keep buying until chance delivers it.
Anyone who has opened a loot box will recognize the pull of uncertainty here, attached to exactly the kind of lever designed to keep us pulling. There is the suspense of tearing open the plastic and the small spike when the right face appears, or, when it doesn’t, the flat disappointment followed by the resolution to try one more copy. The practice has become controversial enough for South Korea’s antitrust regulator to investigate several of the largest agencies over it. (Detailed explanation: Paid rewards of random content in video games [loot boxes] often share the structural features of gambling (Drummond & Sauer, 2018)1, and spending on them was linked to problem-gambling symptoms in a survey of more than 7,000 gamers (Zendle & Cairns, 2018)2, a small-to-moderate association that a meta-analysis of 15 studies later confirmed (Garea et al., 2021)3. When the Korea Consumer Agency examined 50 best-selling albums in a study released in 2023, almost all contained random photocards; on the album with the most variations, collecting all 78 cards would have taken at least 13 copies even without a single duplicate, and fans who bought for the random goods averaged about four copies of the same album, one as many as 90 (Yonhap News Agency, 2023)4. In the summer of 2023, South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission reportedly carried out on-site inspections at SM, JYP, and YG Entertainment to examine whether selling albums with randomly inserted photocards broke the law (Park, 2023)5.)
What happens to the surplus shows what the purchase was really for. Unwanted copies are resold in bulk at a fraction of their price, given away, or simply left behind, and photos of stacks of unopened albums abandoned on city streets have circulated widely among fans themselves. (Detailed explanation: Albums have been found abandoned in bulk near record shops and a subway station in Seoul, some already unwrapped (Lee, 2023)1, others still sealed in their plastic wrap (Kim, 2026)2.) An object that is made and paid for, only to be thrown away still sealed, is hardly a product anymore. It works far more like an offering, valued for the act of giving and not for anything it contains.
The album thereby works much like a tithe, a portion of income set aside to prove devotion and sustain the institution that receives it. The difference is that a tithe is commonly a fixed share, while the album has no ceiling. Because each extra copy raises the odds of meeting the idol, or at least appears to, devotion turns into an auction in which, by the rules of the game, the most loyal are those who can or will spend the most. A fan with modest means and the same love will find their devotion ranked below that of someone with a bigger budget. Without anyone ever saying so, the system thereby teaches those caught up in it that affection is measured in receipts.
Purchases, however, are only half of the liturgy, while the other half is repetition. Whenever a new song comes out, fans coordinate to play it as often as possible on every platform that feeds a chart, a practice some describe as streaming the way one breathes. Phones and laptops run through the night, often muted, because what matters is that the song gets counted, whether or not anyone hears it.
Fans study each platform’s rules to make sure their plays register and build playlists around how each chart counts, sometimes even streaming other groups’ songs in exchange for support from those groups’ fans. Among the most engaged, five hours or more of organized streaming a day isn’t unusual.
Mechanically, this resembles the repetitive devotions found in many traditions, from counted prayers to recited mantras, where the value of the act lies in the repetition itself. Like other rituals, it gives an abstract hope a concrete form. (Detailed explanation: In 2022, the fan-run climate group Kpop4planet surveyed 1,097 fans, more than three quarters of them in Korea, and most said they spent more than five hours a day in organized streaming sessions [streaming parties] (Yang, 2024)1. The respondents chose to take part, so the figure describes highly engaged fans rather than fandom as a whole. Rituals, meaning fixed sequences of actions with no direct practical purpose, appear to help regulate emotion and restore a sense of control (Hobson et al., 2018)2. Anxiety itself makes people’s movements more repetitive and ritualized (Lang et al., 2015)3, and in a field experiment in Mauritius, people who performed a familiar temple ritual after a stressful task showed a larger drop in both reported anxiety and physiological stress than those who simply sat and relaxed (Lang et al., 2020)4.) Yet, streaming adds something most rituals can’t offer: a visible, daily confirmation that the effort is working. A chart position that rises overnight rewards the ritual almost in real time, which likely makes it far harder to stop.
Once devotion is measured, it can also be audited. Many fandoms ask their members to post screenshots proving how much they have streamed. Those who contribute little risk being labeled “light fans” or “fake fans,” shunned by the core community and occasionally told to leave. This directly parallels the purity testing described earlier. Any community that defines belonging through visible contribution creates a permanent anxiety about whether one’s own contribution is enough, and because someone is always streaming or buying more, the bar can only rise. In the most demanding fandoms, what began as voluntary enthusiasm turns into an obligation enforced by peers, to the point where stepping back feels like a betrayal rather than a change of hobby.
That same pressure has also produced its own reformers. Some fans have publicly called for moderation in streaming, while fan-led groups have petitioned major agencies and mailed thousands of unwanted albums back to them, asking them to scale back random photocards, multiple album versions, and lottery-based events. (Detailed explanation: The fan-led climate group Kpop4planet collected more than 8,000 unwanted albums from fans and delivered them to HYBE, JYP, and SM Entertainment (CBC Radio, 2023)1. In 2024 it protested outside HYBE’s headquarters against fan-sign entry tied to album purchases, random photocards, and multiple album versions, citing a survey of more than 12,000 fans in which 42.8 percent named album-based fan-sign odds as the company’s worst practice (Kim, 2024)2.) To me, it matters that these voices came from inside the fandoms. It shows that the people caught in a ritual are fully capable of recognizing its costs once someone gives them permission to say so.
Once identity fuses with the object of devotion, criticism is no longer processed as an opinion about music and is felt instead as an attack on the self. A negative review, a rival group’s chart victory, or an unflattering rumor can then mobilize thousands of fans to flood comment sections and defend their idol against perceived slander, with an intensity that would seem wildly out of proportion from most points of view. (Detailed explanation: When a person’s sense of self merges with a group or cause [identity fusion], attacks on that group are felt as attacks on the self, and strongly fused people report greater willingness to make extreme sacrifices for it (Swann et al., 2012)1.) Rival fandoms, in turn, can come to resemble rival faiths, each convinced that its own object of devotion is the most deserving and quick to read the other’s success as evidence of manipulation or unfairness.
And here we are back at it again with the team-sport mentality. The notable difference is that a sports team rarely seems to speak to its supporters through their phones at midnight.
Then there are the relics: official lightsticks, designed differently for each group, turn a concert hall into a sea of colored light that shows at a glance who belongs to which community. Photocards, meanwhile, are kept in protective sleeves and photographed against scenic backdrops. Much like politically branded products, such merchandise signals loyalty to fellow believers and distance from outsiders, so its value lies mainly in what it says about its owner. A small, cheap object can become irreplaceable once it carries a real story. A photocard borrows this emotional mechanism, yet its story runs in only one direction, as the fan has filled the object with meaning while the person printed on it will never know it exists.
These rituals together reveal the shape of the bargain, only now running at industrial scale. For the fans most drawn in, the terms are plain: they receive community, excitement, and a sense of purpose, while the toll gets shifted onto their own resources.
Money that could have built a cushion and hours that could have built a skill or a friendship are poured into manufacturing the success of a stranger, along with emotional bandwidth that could have gone into the fan’s own life. The chart record then frequently becomes a proxy for an achievement the fan hasn’t yet allowed themselves to pursue. Since the proxy delivers such a reliable sense of progress, the more demanding work of building something of one’s own can start to feel unnecessary, if not out of reach.
The reckoning usually comes when the music stops. Groups disband, contracts expire. Members leave or, in the language of some idol groups, “graduate,” and in South Korea, male idols with Korean citizenship eventually pause their careers for mandatory military service. The agency moves on to its next project, and the most successful idols carry their fame into new ventures.
The fan, meanwhile, is often left standing in the same reality they spent years escaping, sometimes with fewer savings and a thinner social life outside the fandom, and with a sudden question about what all that devotion was for. Some find that the friendships and the joy were worth every hour. Others discover what many people find when a long-held faith dissolves, namely that the empty evenings it used to fill are often far harder to face than the loss of the object of devotion itself.
These fans can sustain devotion for years, as long as the image at its center holds. Their weak spot is that this image belongs to a living human being, someone who eats, ages, makes mistakes, and occasionally falls in love. The industry knows this well enough that it has long tried to regulate even whom its idols are allowed to love.
To see how far that regulation goes, think of the vow of chastity that some religious orders ask of those who serve them. They give up romantic and sexual relationships so that their devotion can belong entirely to something greater than themselves. The idol industry, particularly in Japan, has developed its own version of this vow. The telling difference is that it is taken for the sake of the fans and not for a god, or more precisely, for the sake of the illusion that keeps those fans buying.
Among Japanese idol groups, contracts forbidding romantic relationships have long been common, and even where nothing is written down, everyone involved tends to understand the expectation. AKB48, one of the largest groups, prohibited its members from dating so that they would project a clean image and signal their devotion to the group and to its mostly male fanbase. The reasoning follows directly from the idol’s implied availability. A fan who buys handshake tickets and election ballots is (at least partly) buying the feeling that the idol could belong to them. A visible partner would end that feeling, taking a portion of the revenue with it.
That reasoning has even been argued openly in court. In 2015, a Tokyo district court ordered a former member of a small idol group to pay her management company roughly 650,000 yen in damages for breaching the no-dating clause in her contract. The company had learned that she had gone to a hotel with a male fan at a time when she was fifteen years old. The judge reasoned that the clause was needed to secure the support of male fans and that revealing an idol’s relationship damages their image. In the eyes of the ruling, then, the injured party was the company, not the teenager whose private life had been placed under contract.
Only a few months later, the same court reached the opposite conclusion in a similar case. A management company had sued a twenty-three-year-old former idol for a far larger sum after she started dating a fan, citing a clause in her contract that threatened compensation for exactly that. This time, the judge dismissed the claim, describing dating as a right people decide for themselves in order to enrich their lives, as part of the freedom to pursue happiness, and concluding that forbidding it went too far. (Detailed explanation: In September 2015 the Tokyo District Court held that a dating ban was necessary to secure the support of male fans (Baseel, 2015)1; in January 2016 another judge of the same court dismissed a 9.9-million-yen claim, calling association with the opposite sex part of the pursuit of happiness (Baseel, 2016)2.) Together, the two rulings capture the tension at the center of the industry. A business model that depends on regulating love has to operate inside a society whose broader principles recognize that a company cannot own someone’s love.
The most famous violation came earlier, in early 2013, when a weekly magazine published photos of a twenty-year-old member of AKB48 leaving the apartment of a nineteen-year-old member of a boy band one morning. The same day, she posted a video on the group’s official channel. She appeared in it with her head shaved, a traditional gesture of contrition in Japan, though a rare one among women. She bowed in tears before apologizing for having acted thoughtlessly, as a senior member who had been expected to set an example for the younger ones. Within a day, the video had drawn millions of views and set off a national debate about how much control the group’s management exerted over its performers. Management, which demoted her to trainee status, stated that she had made the decision on her own and that shaving her head hadn’t been necessary. Critics, however, questioned whether any member of such a tightly controlled group would have taken so drastic a step entirely of her own accord. One lawyer remarked that not even a criminal defendant would be expected to shave her head.
Every element of this sequence is recognizable from religion: the vow and its violation, the public confession, the visible penance that marks the body, and the punishment that lowers the transgressor’s standing in the hierarchy, all while a congregation watches and debates whether to forgive. There is also an institution whose own rule created the sin in the first place. Without the contract, a young woman spending a night with someone her age would have been unremarkable; the offense only existed because the business, and the expectations it had cultivated, required it to.
Such rituals tend to outlive the moments that produced them. In June 2026, the same group terminated a member’s contract, in what it called the first such case in its history. It said that the twenty-one-year-old had repeatedly arrived late, met privately with a fan, and given an account of those meetings that conflicted with what others reported. On the same day, she published a video of her own, her hair cropped close to the scalp, apologizing for having met the fan. She alleged that management had brought up the 2013 incident and told her that shaving her head would show her sincerity if she wanted to stay in the group, which the company firmly denied. (Detailed explanation: In 2013, the group’s manager said in a statement that shaving her head had not been necessary, while one lawyer remarked that even a criminal defendant would not be expected to do so (Associated Press, 2013)1. In the later case, the group’s operator announced the termination on June 23, 2026, calling it the first in the group’s history; the former member’s video and the company’s denial were published the same day (Daily Sports, 2026)2.)
Whatever was or was not said in those meetings, the story shows how a single act of contrition can harden into precedent. Thirteen years later, a shaved head was still the gesture that came to mind when a young woman felt she had to prove her remorse to an institution and its audience.
Why a relationship can be treated as a catastrophe becomes clearer once we look at what it does to the fan. For as long as their devotion lasts, the idol stays a carefully incomplete figure onto whom the fan can project a private story with themselves in a leading role. A photograph of the idol leaving a partner’s apartment works as a falsification event, introducing a piece of reality the projection can’t absorb and proving that the idol’s actual intimacy belongs to someone else, someone who was freely chosen. In that moment, the fan is demoted from the protagonist of a private romance to what they always were in the idol’s real life, a background character who is valued and perhaps thanked, yet never chosen.
Not every fan hopes to be chosen, and many would find the idea absurd if asked directly. Yet, even fans who never imagined a romance can react to a relationship with a sense of betrayal. This is partly explained by a less obvious demand, namely that the idol’s affection stay distributed equally among everyone who supports them.
As long as the idol stays single, every fan can feel equally valued, much like the users of a public utility who each receive the same supply. A partner breaks this arrangement by concentrating, in one private relationship, the warmth that had seemed to flow to all. In many cases, the anger that follows is likely the ego defending itself against a humiliating realization, that years of resources went into a relationship that only ever existed on one side.
This is also why the idol holds a strange double role. To the fans, they are the object of devotion, while to the institution they are something closer to clergy, bound by vows on behalf of the congregation, expected to model purity, and disciplined when they fall short. Unlike most clergy, many idols take on these vows as teenagers, under contracts negotiated by adults with far more power, in an industry whose revenue depends on their compliance. When the image cracks, though, it is the person inside it who pays, far more than the agency that shaped it.
Of the two industries, Japan’s is the more explicit about these rules, but it is not alone in them. In South Korea, dating bans are rarely written down as openly, yet agencies have long been reported to discourage relationships, especially early in an idol’s career. The revelation of a relationship has repeatedly triggered fierce backlash from parts of the fandom. (Detailed explanation: In 2024, after one of K-pop’s best-known singers confirmed a relationship, some fans parked a truck with an electronic billboard outside her agency asking whether their love was not enough; she posted a handwritten apology, and the relationship ended within weeks (Yeung, 2024)1.) At the same time, the court rulings and public debates, together with the growing number of idols and fans who openly question these expectations, suggest that the vows are slowly losing their grip.
From a distance, it’s tempting to file all of this away as a quirk of one region’s entertainment industry. That would be comfortable, and wrong, and the evidence starts with a single word many English speakers now use without knowing where it came from.
That word comes from a rap song released in 2000 that told the story of a fan named Stan, who writes letter after letter to the artist he idolizes, convinced that the two of them share a special bond. When no replies come, his devotion curdles into resentment, and the story ends in tragedy, both for him and for the pregnant girlfriend he takes with him, while the artist’s reply arrives only once it is too late. The song was a cautionary tale about what happens when a one-sided relationship is mistaken for a mutual one.
Over the following years, the fan’s name became a word of its own. Within two decades, the major English dictionaries had adopted it, both as a noun for an extremely or excessively devoted fan and as a verb for displaying fandom to an excessive degree, flagged as slang and often disparaging. (Detailed explanation: Oxford’s online dictionary listed the word in 2016, but the Oxford English Dictionary itself added it only in June 2018; widespread reports in 2017 that it had reached the OED confused the two (Oxford English Dictionary, 2018)1. Merriam-Webster added the noun and verb in April 2019, labeling both “slang, often disparaging” (Merriam-Webster, 2019)2.) In everyday use, the disparagement has largely faded, as countless people now call themselves stans with pride and attach the label to singers, actors, series, and even brands.
The English-speaking world named its most devoted fans after a story about obsession ending in death, and then largely stopped hearing the story.
These dynamics didn’t stay in Seoul or Tokyo either. Fan clubs of Western pop stars have organized mass listening parties to push new singles up the charts, coordinating thousands of participants to stream the same song at the same time. Fans commonly buy several variant editions of the same album, each with a different cover or vinyl color, both to complete a collection and to help a release break a sales record. (Detailed explanation: A single listening party hosted by Taylor Swift’s official fan account drove more than a million streams in under a day (Houghton, 2024)1, and The Tortured Poets Department set a modern vinyl sales record in a week when it was available in more than 20 different editions (Caulfield, 2024)2.) Online, the most active members of fandoms with names of their own patrol comment sections and wage chart battles against rival fandoms with the same intensity as their counterparts in Seoul and Tokyo.
Likewise, when a beloved star reveals a new partner, parts of a fanbase can respond with a hostility that has little to do with the partner and far more to do with the private story the announcement interrupted.
That same structure reaches well beyond music. On livestreaming platforms and in the wider business of paid intimacy, millions now keep up one-sided relationships with streamers and influencers who speak to them daily through a screen and thank their subscribers by name. Sports supporters show many of the same patterns, from the rituals of match day and the scarves and jerseys that work as relics to the rival clubs whose success feels like a personal affront. Some fans have even adopted the language of religion openly, such as fans of anime in Japan who travel to real locations that appeared in their favorite series and call the trip a pilgrimage to a sacred place (obviously meant somewhat ironically, but the point still stands).
So this is neither a regional quirk nor anything new. The term for these one-sided bonds was coined in the 1950s to describe audiences of American radio and television, yet the pattern itself is far older than mass media. People formed intense attachments to rulers, saints, and gods they would never meet long before a screen could deliver a face into their homes. (Detailed explanation: Japanese fans call the real locations of their favorite anime “sacred sites” [seichi] and their visits “pilgrimages” [seichi junrei] (Okamoto, 2015)1. The cultural historian Leo Braudy traces the pursuit and worship of fame from Alexander the Great through the saints to modern celebrity (Braudy, 1986)2.) Mass media simply took the capacity for devotion at a distance, which religion had drawn on for millennia, and gave it new objects.
Such devotion comes in degrees. At one end lies the entertainment most fans enjoy, such as liking the music and following the news while sharing the excitement with friends. Further along lies a more personal and compulsive attachment, where the fan feels a special bond with the star and thinks about them constantly. At the far end, we find convictions and behaviors that border on the pathological. Most fans never move past the first stage. Among those who do, the excessive forms tend to go along with more depression and anxiety, less cognitive flexibility, and poorer close relationships. It remains unclear, however, how much of the distress the devotion causes and how much of it draws people toward devotion in the first place, and quite possibly, the arrow points both ways.
The dividing line therefore runs somewhere other than between admiration and its absence. For most people, such bonds seem to complement real relationships, while for a minority they start to replace them. (Detailed explanation: The most widely used measure [Celebrity Attitude Scale] grew out of an earlier celebrity worship scale (McCutcheon et al., 2002)1; factor analyses usually split it into enjoying and talking about a star [entertainment-social], intense and compulsive feelings [intense-personal], and uncontrollable fantasies and behaviors [borderline-pathological], with the first level by far the most common (Maltby et al., 2002; Brooks, 2021)2,3. The intense-personal level has been linked to poorer mental health, including more depression and anxiety (Maltby et al., 2004)4. A systematic review found associations with compulsive buying, poorer relationship quality and, in some studies, lower cognitive flexibility, but mixed results for attachment style and critical thinking, and cautioned that most studies are cross-sectional and that the scale’s structure is still debated (Brooks, 2021)3. Horton and Wohl saw parasocial interaction as a normal complement to social life for most of the audience, becoming a problem mainly when it substitutes for real social participation, as among the socially isolated (Horton & Wohl, 1956)5.) Much like with escapism, a refuge that helps us recover and return to our lives is a healthy one, while a refuge that slowly becomes the place we live starts to demand more than it gives. The fan who enjoys a concert with friends and the fan who has stopped seeing those friends to keep a streaming quota alive may own the same poster. Their relationships with it couldn’t be more different.
Perhaps tellingly, when a scale was first developed to measure intense fan attachment, it took its vocabulary straight from religion and called the phenomenon celebrity worship. Others have pushed the comparison further, describing fan behavior as mimicking religious practice and the star as occupying, in the fan’s mind, a place usually reserved for a deity. We might expect fandom to work as a substitute for faith, flourishing where religion declines and fading where it stays strong. The evidence, however, is messier than that, as more religious people tend to score only slightly lower on celebrity worship, if at all. One research team noted with some dryness that many religious people seem either to ignore the commandment against worshipping other gods or never to connect it to their favorite stars. (Detailed explanation: The religious-studies scholar Gary Laderman treats celebrity worship as one of the signs of religious life in the United States (Laderman, 2009)1, and the practical theologian Pete Ward argues that Western celebrity culture functions as a para-religion (Ward, 2011)2. Among 307 British participants, higher religiosity went with slightly lower celebrity worship, with an average correlation of only about −0.20 across measures (Maltby et al., 2002)3; among 164 American students, the same measures showed no overall relationship (McCutcheon et al., 2013)4. A later comparison even found that religious skeptics viewed celebrities in general less favorably than believers did, though they were no less attached to their own favorite (McCutcheon & Richman, 2016)5.)
To me, that messiness tells us something in its own right. Devotion seems closer to a set of habits that can attach to several objects at once than to a fixed quantity a person spends on a single object. The same person can attend a service on the weekend, stream a music video on loop on Monday, consult a horoscope on Tuesday, and defend a political leader with religious fervor by the end of the week. They can do so without ever experiencing these commitments as contradictory, because each faith claims only part of their time and is applied only where it feels rewarding. As we will see, this is how most of the world relates to its frameworks, including the one that keeps all of them running in the background.
Put fandom and faith side by side, and the parallels are hard to miss. Both typically raise a figure above ordinary people and present it through a carefully curated image, promising a personal relationship in which each follower feels individually seen. They ask for offerings and reward repetition, and the relics they produce signal belonging to a community whose bonds grow stronger through shared ritual. The edges of that community can be policed through purity tests, with doubt punished by exclusion, sins defined against the object of devotion, and paths of penance offered to those who stray, while rivalry with outsiders can turn into something resembling holy war.
Still, a fandom isn’t a religion. Pretending the two are the same would be just as wrong as pretending they share nothing, because religion does vastly more. It marks birth, marriage, and death and offers comfort in grief, while also shaping the moral codes that guide entire societies, and it has organized communities, art, and charity across centuries. Most fandoms likely fade within a generation of their idol’s retirement, whereas religious traditions have outlived the very empires that once spread them. If we want to understand why faith holds such a grip on so many people, we have to take that larger function seriously instead of treating faith as a fandom in older costumes.
The second difference matters just as much: how each one protects itself. An idol is a living person who ages, makes mistakes, retires, and can be photographed leaving an apartment at the wrong hour. Every fandom is therefore exposed to falsification events, moments when reality breaks into the image and forces the devoted to choose between their story and what they can see.
That exposure likely helps explain why the devotion surrounding stars who died young often grows rather than fades. Death completes the image, because the departed can no longer age, disappoint, or be caught, so they start to resemble the saints whom many traditions venerate only after death, once their lives can no longer be revised.
A deity takes this protection to its limit, as it can never be falsified, cannot be photographed, never ages or retires, and its silence can always be interpreted, whether as patience, as mystery, or as a test. When an idol fails, the fandom must confront a human being who disappointed them, but when a prayer goes unanswered, the failure can always be explained. This structural immunity is the other reason fandoms fade while religions endure. Before we get to how that works, though, it’s only fair to look honestly at what faith gives, because few frameworks survive for thousands of years without serving needs that we deem valuable.
Function of Faith
To understand what faith gives, we can start from a simple observation about any relationship, whether between two people or between a person and a framework, namely that it only lasts as long as something keeps it alive. A friendship tends to last as long as it meets needs on both sides, and a belief system likewise persists for as long as it serves the needs it was adopted for. Faith has persisted across nearly every culture and era we know of, which suggests that the needs it serves are real and strongly felt. (Detailed explanation: Not every researcher agrees that persistence proves usefulness: some argue that religious ideas spread partly as a byproduct of ordinary mental machinery, such as our readiness to detect intentions and agents behind events, whether or not they serve any need of their own (Boyer, 2003)1.) Hence, dismissing faith as mere foolishness would be unkind as well as inaccurate. It would also leave us unable to answer the one question that matters most to anyone considering an alternative: can those needs be met another way?
That question reaches far beyond theory, because even a belief that seems private shapes the standard of evidence a person carries into the voting booth or the doctor’s office, as well as into the financial decisions that affect their family. The way we come to hold one conviction tends to shape the way we come to hold the next, and often without anyone noticing, a society’s habits of believing turn into its habits of governing.
To have this conversation without talking past each other, a few words need sharper edges first, since “faith” is used in very different ways, this book included.
Take something as plain as thinking that your train leaves at ten past eight. That is a belief, meaning anything we hold to be true about the world, including ourselves. Everyone holds countless beliefs, and what separates people is how those beliefs were built and whether they can still change. Once you hold a belief firmly enough to act on it and accept costs for it, say by quitting a stable job because you are sure your business idea will work, it has become a conviction. On its own, however, the word says nothing about where that firmness comes from. A conviction can be earned through careful examination, but it can just as well be borrowed, inherited, or simply felt.
Faith, in the sense this chapter examines, is a particular kind of conviction, one whose firmness goes beyond what its evidence can support and which is held in such a way that no available evidence is allowed to revise it. Think of someone who is certain a lucky charm keeps them safe on the road. Every safe arrival counts as proof, while every accident gets explained by the day they forgot the charm, or by how much worse it would have been without it.
Such convictions typically rest on claims that cannot be tested at all, or favor the improbable over the probable. They draw their strength from a source rather than from anything that can be checked, be it a scripture, a tradition, an authority, or a powerful inner certainty. Two marks define faith in this sense: disproportion, as the confidence outruns the support, and protection, as the conviction is shielded from the very evidence that could correct it.
We ought to keep this narrower meaning apart from the other ways the word is used. When you meet a new colleague and assume decent intent and baseline competence until their conduct proves otherwise, you extend what this book calls good faith. This provisional assumption is made at the start of an interaction to improve the likelihood of productive cooperation and is withdrawn once it proves misplaced. Being revisable by design is exactly what separates it from faith in the narrow sense. The same holds for the fragile faith that realistic optimism starts from, like the hope with which you begin a new training plan before you have any results. It either earns the status of a reliable conviction through repeated success or is abandoned when it fails. Even the everyday phrase “I have faith in you” usually refers to trust built on a track record.
Since all three stay exposed to evidence, each of them can be lost, and that possibility is part of what makes them reliable. The conditioned faith in equal worth sits closer to the narrow sense, because it is taught as a taboo before its reasons can be grasped. We will return, however, to why its reasons, unlike those of most faiths, can still be stated and examined.
Two people can sound equally hopeful about humanity. The first believes it can improve when it is equipped with the right tools, a position grounded in observation and open to change if the evidence turns against it. The second holds faith in an inherent goodness of humanity, a conviction that persists no matter how many atrocities history records or how much contrary evidence piles up. On an ordinary day, both may lead to hopeful behavior, yet only the first can learn anything from a bad one.
Faith also isn’t the same as stubbornness, which holds on to a belief because letting go would cost pride or comfort. Someone who keeps defending a bad investment long after the numbers have turned, mainly because admitting the mistake would sting, is being stubborn. Stubbornness imitates the firmness of conviction while being anchored in the ego and not in the reliable.
At the opposite end from both stands self-inquired conviction, a conviction whose firmness was earned by questioning its premises, including our own values and goals, and which stays open to revision whenever those premises shift. Since it is the alternative this entire argument is building toward, we will return to it at length. For now, it is enough to keep in mind that the strength of a conviction and its source are two separate questions, and that much of the confusion surrounding faith comes from treating them as one.
Someone might object that this definition stacks the deck, because faith described as conviction shielded from evidence is bound to fail any test of evidence, and a believer would have a point. This is why I mean the definition as a test rather than a verdict. Many believers hold their convictions in a way that would bend if the evidence did, or with no more confidence than their reasons support, and wherever that is the case, what follows does not describe them. It describes a way of holding beliefs wherever it occurs, be it in a church, a fandom, or a laboratory. You can decide for yourself which of your own convictions it fits.
With that out of the way, what does faith actually do for the people who hold it?
Its success rests on three gifts that arrive together: purpose, conviction, and restriction. The human mind struggles in the gap where no direction is visible, and faith closes that gap with a purpose that is handed down rather than built. It also supplies a conviction strong enough to act on without the exhausting labor of doubt, one that can carry a person through hardships that would break a more hesitant mind. Restriction, the third gift, comes as a set of duties and prohibitions that narrow the field of choices. While it is easy to dismiss it as the price of faith, principles work as self-imposed restrictions too, and upholding a suitable one is a worthwhile trade. Fixed rules also spare us the burden of deciding everything from scratch, the same wish that makes ready-made formulas so attractive in every other area of life. (Detailed explanation: Habits and fixed routines let behavior run with little deliberate effort [habit automaticity] (Wood & Rünger, 2016)1. Whether exerting self-control drains a limited mental resource [ego depletion], the idea behind “decision fatigue”, is more doubtful: two large preregistered multi-lab studies found the effect to be small or close to zero (Hagger et al., 2016; Vohs et al., 2021)2,3.) A believer who knows what is expected of them on any given day is spared a great deal of deliberation, and that relief is real.
Faith also offers belonging on an extraordinary scale. A shared creed hands strangers an immediate common language and a weekly gathering gives isolated people a reason to leave the house. A congregation can grow into a network of support that shows up with food when someone falls ill and with helping hands when someone moves. Since members share their foundational beliefs, socializing within such a community can feel smoother and less fraught than in a world where every conversation risks a clash of premises.
Regular participation in a religious community also seems to go along with better well-being and even a longer life. The benefit appears to stem mainly from taking part in the community and less from the belief, though ordinary social support explains only part of it, and whether secular communities can match it is still an open question. (Detailed explanation: Among about 75,000 American nurses followed for 16 years, women who attended religious services more than once a week had about a third lower mortality than those who never attended (Li et al., 2016)1, and a later systematic review rated the link between frequent attendance and lower mortality as strong evidence, with about a quarter lower risk of death across longitudinal studies (Balboni et al., 2022)2. The associations are much stronger for communal participation than for private belief or practice, yet social support explains only about a quarter of the mortality effect, and other forms of community involvement have so far shown weaker associations (VanderWeele, 2017)3. The broader link between strong social ties and longevity is well established (Holt-Lunstad et al., 2010)4.) Faith provides identity too, a (grand) story about who one is and where one belongs that can be worn openly. In its more individualized forms, it even provides an aesthetic, such as the crystals on a windowsill or the tarot deck on a shelf.
Faith also makes the invisible feel concrete. Performing a physical action connected to a hope, whether a ritual or the purchase of a product bought on a promise, makes that hope feel as though it is taking shape, and religions have optimized this. Bowed heads and folded hands, chanted words, candles and incense, and holy days attach invisible concepts to the body and to the calendar, until belief is something a person does as well as something they think. Sacred texts give abstract claims the weight of an object that can be held and handed down, and buildings do the same on a monumental scale. Stand in a cathedral that took generations to complete, or in a temple carved into a mountainside. Each stands as stone proof that countless people once considered the invisible worth more than a lifetime of labor. Few experiences make an abstract belief feel more real than standing inside one.
Faith also supplies moral order. No text could ever contain infinite pages describing every context and exception. In an age of hard labor and limited literacy, no ordinary person could be expected to reason through every moral question from first principles. A clear list of sins and virtues therefore arguably simplified the burden of organizing a society. Belief in watchful, moralizing gods may even have helped large societies of strangers cooperate, since people who believe they are always observed might behave more honestly when no human is watching, although that idea remains contested.
History offers concrete examples of such order at work. In the late tenth and eleventh centuries, church councils in parts of France launched what became known as the Peace of God. It used spiritual sanctions such as excommunication to protect clergy, peasants, and church property from the violence of armed nobles. Medieval thinkers even developed a concept, synderesis, to describe an innate grasp of the most basic moral principles, recognizing that conscience didn’t have to be invented from scratch by each individual. (Detailed explanation: The proposal that belief in watchful, moralizing gods helped large societies cooperate [Big Gods hypothesis] is set out by Norenzayan and colleagues (Norenzayan et al., 2016)1. In supporting experiments, subtle reminders of God made people share more money with anonymous strangers (Shariff & Norenzayan, 2007)2, and children told that an invisible “Princess Alice” was watching cheated less (Piazza et al., 2011)3. Yet a preregistered replication of the God-reminder effect failed (Gomes & McCullough, 2015)4, and while a meta-analysis found that such reminders raise generosity mainly among people who already believe (Shariff et al., 2016)5, a reanalysis suggested the effect may largely reflect publication bias (van Elk et al., 2015)6, and two later preregistered experiments found no effect of subtle reminders even among believers (Billingsley et al., 2018)7. The Peace of God was proclaimed at councils such as Charroux in 989, which threatened with excommunication anyone who robbed churches, stole peasants’ livestock, or attacked unarmed clergy (Head, 1999)8. The term synderesis goes back to a passage in Jerome’s commentary on Ezekiel, and Thomas Aquinas described it as a natural habit by which the mind grasps the first principles of moral reasoning (Eardley, 2021)9.) Akin to the taboo against weighing human lives, such an unquestionable moral wall can act as a crude but effective anchor, particularly for children and for societies that lack the means to teach the reasoning behind it.
Faith also offers hope, and with it patience. Belief in fate, or in a divine plan, gives people a reason to keep waiting through stretches of life that offer little variation or visible progress. By giving hardship a meaning, it can make that hardship feel bearable. A patient living with chronic illness, for instance, may draw real strength from the belief that their suffering serves a purpose. That strength can turn into a resilience that makes their days easier to get through. (Detailed explanation: Drawing strength, support, and meaning from faith in hard times [positive religious coping] is linked to better psychological adjustment to stress (Ano & Vasconcelles, 2005)1.)
Faith is perhaps at its most powerful when it answers the question of death. Almost every major tradition offers some account of what happens afterward, be it judgment and a reunion in heaven or a cycle of rebirth. For someone grieving, the belief that a loved one is at peace, still watching, or waiting to be met again can soften a loss that would otherwise feel unbearable.
Heaven also works in a way that is easy to overlook. Much like a horizon, it gives a direction that organizes an entire life. The difference is that nobody expects to reach a horizon, while the believer expects to arrive. Whoever strives toward it receives daily confirmation that they are walking a meaningful path, and that sense of alignment brings motivation that makes ordinary days feel worthwhile.
Alongside comfort comes significance: while the universe, by any physical measure, has no particular interest in us, many traditions place humanity at the center of creation and each individual within reach of a creator who hears their prayers and holds a plan for their life. In a sense, this is the staged intimacy of the idol industry raised to a cosmic scale. The comfort it offers is immense, as however ordinary a person’s circumstances, they become the protagonist of a story that matters. It likely also explains why discoveries that place humanity within the broader flow of nature, such as our shared ancestry with other animals, can feel, to those raised on that story, more like a demotion than like information.
Faith offers clarity, too. Much like conspiracy theories, it can replace a chaotic world that is hard to grasp with a simple and even exciting explanation, sparing the believer the discomfort of admitting that a question currently exceeds their understanding, or anyone’s. (Detailed explanation: When people feel they have little personal control, they endorse a controlling God and orderly institutions more strongly [compensatory control], suggesting that such beliefs can restore a sense of order (Kay et al., 2008)1, a motive also linked to conspiracy beliefs (Douglas et al., 2017)2. A preregistered replication in the Netherlands and the United States, however, found no increase in belief in a controlling God after a threat to personal control (Hoogeveen et al., 2018)3.) Closely related is the relief of mystery. Once an outcome is attributed to forces beyond human grasp, the phrase “it is beyond me” becomes a place to set down the weight of responsibility. Unlike the previous functions, this one carries its cost on its surface. As with comfortable pessimism and convenient optimism, any belief that releases us from responsibility will be most tempting exactly when that responsibility is most uncomfortable to carry.
Science, by design, doesn’t set out to meet any of these needs directly. The scientific method aims to describe reality accurately and deliberately avoids prescribing meaning, because doing so would compromise its commitment to describing things as they are. Still, it would be inaccurate to claim that science contributes nothing here. Medicine relieves suffering that was once only endurable through prayer, and shared projects give people a sense of purpose larger than themselves. Meanwhile, the prosperity built on discovery has given billions of people the time and security to search for meaning in the first place. Science simply meets these needs indirectly, as side effects of understanding the world. Faith promises them up front.
A religion, in the sense this chapter uses, is a shared framework that supplies purpose and an account of how the world works, if not also what it should become. It grounds at least part of its foundation in faith, typically in forces or truths beyond the reach of (current) observation. Spirituality can then be understood as faith without a binding institution. Astrology, manifestation, energy healing, witchcraft, shamanism or a personal sense of destiny and fate are individualized sets of beliefs and practices that may lack hierarchy and scripture, yet share faith’s marks of disproportion and protection. While an ideology doesn’t need the transcendent to function, it can still be held with faith. The critiques that apply to a religion’s structure therefore apply equally to any ideology that shares it, and the other way around. This also explains why a political faction that abandons consistent principles turns into an unaccountable religion, since, in politics, inconsistency is how a protected premise shows itself. Any framework, with or without a god, can therefore function like a religion, and none of them needs to be held consistently.
Each of these functions casts a shadow as well, and those shadows will occupy much of what follows. The restriction that grants strength can become a cage and belonging can become conditional on conformity. The same hope that sustains a patient can, in other hands, persuade an oppressed population to endure injustice in exchange for a reward promised after death. History offers ample examples of faith serving those in power as readily as it served those in need, which we will look at in their own place. For now, the point is narrower, namely that the needs faith answers are real, and anyone who wants to offer an alternative has to answer them too.
One factor is missing from that list, and it may be the most decisive of all. Most people do not choose their faith after weighing it against the alternatives; they receive it, usually long before they are able to weigh anything at all.
Think back to the questions children ask, the ones this book began with, such as why the sky is blue, where the sun goes at night, or how birds can fly while we have to walk. As any parent knows, such questions rarely come alone, because one answer invites the next. A curious child can exhaust the knowledge of even a well-read adult within minutes, especially when the honest answer requires concepts the child can’t grasp yet.
Religion offers a very efficient response to this flood. A single framework can answer where the world came from, why people die, what happened to a grandparent who is no longer there and why lying is wrong. Its answers are simple enough for a child to hold and consistent enough to repeat, and they are delivered with a certainty that ends the chain of questions instead of extending it. For a tired parent at the end of a long day, that’s an enormous relief, while the child gets a world that is easy to grasp and makes sense.
For the parent, it also does something more subtle. In the eyes of a small child, a parent who can answer every question seems to know everything. When those answers are presented as coming from a higher source, the faith reinforces the parent’s authority while the parent’s authority reinforces the faith, each lending the other an air of omniscience that neither could sustain alone.
Children seem to be built to trust what adults tell them, or maybe it is just again the desire to fill the gap with something rather than nothing. A child who demanded independent proof for every warning about everything would likely not have a good time for long, which is why the young mind defaults to accepting the testimony of the people it depends on until another more reliable provider or way to provide takes its place. This trust shouldn’t be mistaken for a weakness, since it is how each generation inherits the accumulated knowledge of the last, and it is not blind either. Even young children prefer informants who have been right before, and they seem more certain that germs exist than that God does, perhaps because adults mention germs as plain fact but speak of God with special emphasis.
Children, however, cannot check either claim for themselves. The explanation of why the stove is hot and the explanation of why an invisible being is watching arrive through the same channel. The capacity to question what one has been taught develops slowly through adolescence, and many adults never fully reach it. Long before a child gets there, the foundational beliefs have already been laid, woven into the same memories as bedtime stories and the voices of the people they love. (Detailed explanation: Children learn much of what they know about unseen things, from germs to God, from what adults tell them (Harris & Koenig, 2006; Harris et al., 2006)1,2. They are not indiscriminate, however: even preschoolers prefer informants who have been accurate before [selective trust] (Koenig & Harris, 2005)3, and children tend to be more confident that germs exist than that God or other special beings exist, possibly because adults mention germs matter-of-factly but assert God more emphatically (Harris et al., 2006; Harris & Koenig, 2006)1,2. The ability to weigh claims by the evidence behind them [evaluativist thinking] develops slowly (Kuhn, 1999)4; in one small study, no more than half of the non-specialist adults in any group reached it in any domain of judgment (Kuhn et al., 2000)5.)
Stories can carry either kind of lesson. Many old fairy tales wrapped harsh truths about the world into fantastical form, from the stranger who isn’t what he seems to the price of greed. The channel itself is neutral, which makes it worth asking of the stories we tell children today whether they teach how to reason about the world, or only what to believe about it.
Weaving beliefs into those early memories matters because of how readily the mind bundles what it experiences together into a single package. The warmth of a holiday dinner and the songs sung together are stored side by side with the doctrine that framed all of it. Years later, questioning the doctrine can therefore feel like questioning the warmth, even when much of what made those moments precious had little to do with the doctrine itself.
How a faith is passed down often shapes a child’s relationship to authority as much as its content does. Whenever a child asks a question that exposes a gap or a contradiction, the response reveals what kind of authority they are dealing with. “Because I said so,” “You will understand when you are older,” or “As long as you live under my roof, you follow my rules” are phrases heard in many households, religious or not. Each of them teaches the same lesson: power can stand in for reasoning. Once the authority being defended is presented as divine, the stakes usually rise further. A parent who struggles to admit being wrong about small things may find it even harder to admit that the framework their life is built on contains a flaw, and the child’s question gets closed without an answer.
Children take these patterns in, so they may learn that admitting fault is weakness and that dialogue threatens control, or that authority is best kept through rigidity instead of reflection. When these children later find themselves in positions of power, whether as parents or as leaders, some go on to repeat the very behavior they once resented. Authoritarian habits can carry on through behavior modeled in early relationships as well as through ideology.
Within a community bound by shared belief, doubt takes on a different meaning than in a laboratory. A scientist who questions a result is doing their job, while a child who questions the faith of their family is, in the eyes of the people around them, questioning the family itself. As the child depends (entirely) on that family, the incentives are clear even when nobody states them: curiosity that threatens belonging is dangerous, and the safest course is to keep it quiet. Doubt is rarely forbidden outright, but it is made expensive enough that, by adulthood, most people learn to stop spending it.
Religion isn’t unique in this. Political loyalties get passed down in much the same way. This shows in the voters who explain their choice by noting that their family has always supported a particular party. (Detailed explanation: Parenting styles do pass partly from one generation to the next [intergenerational transmission of parenting], although prospective studies tend to find only modest continuity, leaving considerable room for change (Belsky et al., 2009)1. Parents pass on both party identification and religious affiliation to a substantial share of their children; political transmission is strongest in politically engaged households with consistent cues (Jennings et al., 2009)2, and religious transmission is strongest when the relationship with the parent is warm (Bengtson et al., 2013)3.) Nor is every religious upbringing closed to questions, since many families and traditions encourage children to wrestle with their faith. A simple moral anchor can even be a gift to a young child, as long as it is eventually accompanied by the reasoning behind it. The problem only arises when the anchor is never explained and asking for an explanation is treated as betrayal.
Over the years, this early weaving produces a particular stickiness, as conviction and belonging fuse until it becomes hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. Friendships and family, weekly routines, a sense of identity, and the memory of many, if not nearly all, significant life events, from births to weddings to the funerals of loved ones, may all end up tied to the same framework. Faith acquired in childhood, however, adds one decisive variable: the person never joined it in the first place and simply grew up inside it. Their moral development and their earliest experiences of love and belonging were all shaped within its walls, which is why questioning it can feel like disowning one’s own history.
People who have come to doubt rarely stay because they expect a greater reward from staying. They stay because walking away from something they have invested so much in feels like an unbearable loss, as though leaving would retroactively turn decades of devotion and sacrifice into wasted time. Nor is the loss only abstract, as depending on the community, leaving can cost relationships, standing, a marriage, or a place at the family table.
Faced with that price, many choose a quieter path, adapting themselves to the system rather than the system to themselves, keeping their doubts private while attending the gatherings and saying the words. They become part-time believers of a different kind, devout in public and uncertain in private, sustaining a framework they no longer fully hold because the cost of leaving seems higher than the cost of pretending. (Detailed explanation: Because disbelief still carries a stigma, many people seem to hide it even in anonymous surveys: an indirect estimate put the share of atheists among American adults at about a quarter, far above the 3 to 11 percent found in standard polls, though with considerable uncertainty (Gervais & Najle, 2018)1.) From the outside, their faith looks unbroken, while from the inside, it has turned into something closer to a debt, which they keep paying in small installments of silence.
Protected Premise
Someone might object that if any framework can function like a religion, then so can science, and so can the philosophy this book has been building. After all, scientists also hold foundational commitments and can defend their theories with an emotional intensity that rivals any sermon. Iterism, too, asks its readers to adopt certain habits of mind and to measure their lives against its standards. So why should one set of commitments be called faith, while another gets to be called something better?
My answer is that it has far more to do with how a framework treats itself than with what it contains. Every worldview rests on foundations of some kind, and what separates one kind of framework from another is the motivation behind protecting them. A framework that is protected for the stability it provides will defend its premises against evidence, because their value lies in staying unshaken. A framework that is used for its accuracy, on the other hand, values its premises only as long as they keep producing reliable results. It (actively) wants them tested, as every test either strengthens them or shows where they need to be rebuilt.
Two words that are commonly used interchangeably can capture this difference. A tenet is a foundational claim that holds a framework together while staying open to examination. A dogma is a foundational claim treated as beyond question, so that challenges are answered by reinterpretation instead of re-evaluation.
Science runs on tenets such as empirical inquiry, falsifiability, and replication, and it keeps them only as long as they keep delivering. A scientist who defends a theory against all evidence out of pride has therefore simply stopped practicing the method, which reveals no flaw in the method itself. (Detailed explanation: Philosophers of science have noted that working scientists do shield a theory’s core assumptions for a while, adjusting their auxiliary assumptions instead; what separates healthy science from dogma, on this view, is whether the protected theory keeps predicting new facts that are then confirmed [progressive research programme] or only explains away its failures after the fact [degenerating research programme] (Lakatos, 1970)1.) A believer could say the same of a cruel crusader, that he simply stopped practicing the faith. The point is not (necessarily) that science attracts fewer bad actors, but that its method contains a way of catching them that doesn’t depend on anyone’s goodwill: a result others cannot reproduce loses its standing, however prestigious its author. A faith that places its foundations beyond question has no equivalent procedure for the foundations themselves.
This book is held to the same standard. Should any of its conclusions be held in the face of better evidence just because they are mine, or because a reader has grown attached to them, they would stop being tenets and become dogma, at which point they ought to be discarded.
The most effective protection a premise can have is to be unfalsifiable, meaning that no possible observation could ever show it to be wrong. At first glance, this looks like strength, because a claim that can never be disproven seems unassailable. Yet, its immunity to disproof only means that nothing could ever measure it, much like a bridge whose load capacity can’t be tested, which nobody would call the strongest bridge in the world or want to be asked to cross.
Frameworks built on faith rarely rely on unfalsifiability alone, though. Over centuries, they’ve developed layered defenses, and the first is ambiguity. A teaching phrased loosely enough can be read in many ways, which lets people with vastly different views believe they share the same conviction. The less precisely something is defined, the more people can pour their own hopes into it, and the larger the illusion of agreement grows. Ambiguity also makes a framework more adaptable to its audience, since a doctrine that commits to nothing specific can speak to the farmer and the professor alike, with each of them hearing what they need.
That ambiguity enables a meaning assigned after the fact. As long as a belief never commits to a specific reason or mechanism in advance, any outcome can be explained in hindsight. Take a horoscope that speaks of “unexpected changes,” which will find confirmation in almost any week, or a tarot reading that warns of conflict and can be matched to the next disagreement, however minor. Prayer follows the same pattern, as an answered prayer confirms the faith, while one that goes unanswered can be explained by timing, by a hidden purpose, by fairness, or by a lesson the believer was meant to learn.
This pattern is the mouse from Josh’s story once more, with the maze drawn around its path once the run is over. Since every outcome fits, the belief is never tested, and because it is never tested, it can feel more certain with every passing year.
Science has developed an important safeguard against this habit: a well-designed study declares its question, its hypothesis, and often its method of analysis before any data is collected. Many researchers now go a step further and register their hypotheses and analysis plans publicly in advance, so that no one, themselves included, can redraw the target after seeing where the arrow landed. (Detailed explanation: When students received the same generic personality sketch, largely drawn from a newsstand astrology book, they rated it as a highly accurate description of themselves [Barnum effect] (Forer, 1949)1. Publicly recording hypotheses and analysis plans before seeing the data [preregistration] is meant to separate genuine predictions from explanations constructed afterward [postdiction] (Nosek et al., 2018)2.) Therefore, a claim earns credibility by stating beforehand what would count as success and failure, and by then accepting the result. A belief that refuses to state such conditions has passed no test whatsoever and has just avoided taking one.
This principle is also why the soundness of reasoning matters far more than the apparent correctness of a single conclusion. In mathematics, an answer reached through faulty logic is marked wrong even when the final number happens to be right, because the method will fail another time. The same principle applies to how we judge our past decisions, as we saw with the hazards of hindsight, where the very same decision seems better reasoned once it happens to turn out well. Faith-based reasoning rewards this: when a believer’s conviction happens to line up with a good outcome, the outcome is taken as proof of the conviction, even if the reasoning behind it could have led to disaster.
The most consequential defense, however, concerns who gets the credit and who gets the blame. In faith-based frameworks that promise outcomes in exchange for belief, success is credited to the faith and failure is charged to the believer. If a sick person recovers, their prayers were heard, and if they don’t, they must have lacked conviction, carried hidden sins, or misunderstood what they were asking for. Spiritual movements promising that positive thinking attracts positive outcomes follow the same structure, as every disappointment can be traced back to insufficient belief. (Detailed explanation: Surveyed across ten countries, majorities of Pentecostals in every one of them agreed that God will grant good health and relief from sickness to believers who have enough faith [prosperity gospel] (Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, 2006)1.) Structurally, this is the logic of a manipulative relationship, in which the manipulator is owed gratitude when things go well and the victim is at fault when they go badly. Since the framework can never be wrong by its own rules, the only variable left to blame is the person who trusted it, if not an external scapegoat.
You can expose this structure with a single question: what would have to happen for (parts of) the framework to admit that it was wrong? If the honest answer is nothing, then no outcome can ever count as evidence against it, and the believer has been placed in a game they cannot win.
The difference shows most clearly in how each kind of framework reads failure. In science, a failed experiment is information. A medication that doesn’t work or a theory that predicts wrongly each narrows the field of possibilities and points toward a better attempt. The failure belongs to the method when the execution was flawless. Many religious interpretations, by contrast, read adversity as punishment or as evidence of sin, a framing linked to worse mental health, if not resentment, outcomes that rarely help anyone solve the problem in front of them. At its most dangerous, this framing can persuade people that suffering must be endured even when help exists, or that a miracle is more worth waiting for than a treatment that has a low probability of success. (Detailed explanation: A meta-analysis of 49 studies found that, besides the benefits of positive religious coping noted earlier, reading hardship as punishment or abandonment by God [negative religious coping] was linked to more anxiety, depression, and distress (Ano & Vasconcelles, 2005)1. Among medically ill older patients, such religious struggle even predicted higher mortality over two years (Pargament et al., 2001)2. Of 172 US children who died between 1975 and 1995 after their parents relied on prayer instead of medical care, 140 had conditions for which treatment would have given a survival rate above 90 percent (Asser & Swan, 1998)3.)
We don’t need a divine examiner to find meaning in difficulty, because hardship carries value of its own, and our struggles can belong to the variation that makes a life worth living and the development that lets us live it better, rather than being hurdles placed by someone who wants to test us. Realistic optimism lets us draw strength from them without needing to believe they were assigned.
Another protection operates at the boundary between faith and knowledge. Throughout history, faith has often occupied the spaces science had not yet explained, from the movement of the planets to the origins of disease and the appearance of lightning. As understanding advanced, those spaces shrank while the explanation retreated into whatever gaps remained. When science seems to confirm a religious sentiment, the confirmation is welcomed as evidence of divine greatness, yet when it contradicts a scripture, the passage is commonly reinterpreted as metaphor. This asymmetry is structural, since science keeps its results open to revision while faith decides beforehand which conclusions must survive. One cannot honestly follow the scientific method while deciding in advance that a particular deity must exist, any more than a judge can claim impartiality after settling the verdict before hearing the case.
If it is to stay compatible with science, a deity must be defined as existing beyond anything science could measure. Many theologians had placed God beyond measurement long before modern science came along, but whatever its origin, that placement also works as a protection. The moment such a being were brought within the boundaries of physical reality, its claims could be tested against evidence. The comfortable story that faith and science merely answer different questions would then dissolve into direct competition, much as the ancient insistence that the Earth sits at the center of the universe once did. (Detailed explanation: The view that science and religion govern separate domains, facts on one side and meaning and values on the other [non-overlapping magisteria], was popularized by the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould (Gould, 1997)1.)
Even within a faith that encourages reflection, inquiry often stops at a certain point. Believers may examine their own conduct and debate moral questions, yet in many traditions the process halts the moment it would require questioning the doctrine itself, which creates a blind spot.
When a decision goes wrong, a faith-based framework usually asks whether the action conformed to the rules, pushing judgment toward a binary of right and wrong. What it rarely asks is whether the rule fit the situation, or whether the real mistake happened long before the decision. A decision can be the best one available at the time and still need revising later, and the most useful lessons often lie in the lead-up. A framework that can’t question its own rules can only ever tell the believer that they followed them or failed to, which is rarely enough to learn from.
These defenses rarely work alone, as ambiguity creates room for after-the-fact explanations and blaming failure on the believer keeps the framework clean, while the retreat into the unmeasurable keeps it out of reach. One of them, however, calls for a closer look, because it is both the most effective and the most revealing: the way sacred texts are interpreted.
Many traditions present their sacred texts as the unchanging word of a perfect source. At the same time, those texts have always required interpretation, and believers are often encouraged to study them, debate them, and search for deeper layers of meaning, which produces a peculiar tension. The faithful are told to submit entirely to a will presumed to be absolute and beyond human questioning, and yet they are expected to interpret that will correctly. Although many traditions excuse honest error, a misreading that touches the core of the faith can still be treated less as a mistake and more as an offense whose consequences may extend into eternity. (Detailed explanation: Several traditions explicitly excuse honest error: Catholic teaching holds that when ignorance cannot be overcome, the wrong it leads to cannot be imputed to the person (Catholic Church, 1997)1, and a well-known hadith promises a reward even to the judge who reasons carefully and errs (al-Bukhārī, n.d.)2.)
A common piece of advice holds that anyone who wants to rise should learn to produce great results from vague instructions. In a workplace, such advice can make sense, as a misunderstanding costs a revision and teaches a lesson. Apply it to a framework where misreading the instructions may cost you your salvation, and it becomes absurd. If the will behind the text is perfect and wants to be followed, why is it expressed in a form that demands constant human reinterpretation, when the price of getting it wrong is so high? One might expect a message from an all-mighty source to transcend the limits of language and the fallibility of its readers.
History suggests the opposite, as some of the bitterest conflicts in the history of faith arose between people who agreed on the source and disagreed about what it meant, rather than between believers and unbelievers. Schisms, persecutions, and wars have been fought over how to correctly follow the same supposedly unchanging truth. Most of us would agree that conflicts arising purely from miscommunication are among the most avoidable of all. Yet, a framework built on an absolute truth that can only be reached through interpretation all but guarantees them. Worse still, disputes that begin as differences of reading can harden into separate identities, each with its own grievances, until the original misunderstanding lies buried beneath centuries of resentment that no clarification could ever undo.
Interpretation serves another function as well, letting a doctrine change while keeping up the appearance that it never has. Over centuries, practices are dropped and emphases shift as new convictions come in, yet each change can be presented as a deeper understanding of what was always meant. Scriptures assembled over long periods can shift noticeably in tone and moral focus from one part to the next while still being read as a single, consistent voice. This flexibility likely helps traditions survive across cultures and eras, but it has limits: a tradition can reinterpret almost anything except its foundations, since discarding those would mean losing the identity that grants it authority.
Some traditions have made this process explicit, such as Islamic jurisprudence, which developed formal methods for applying its sources to new circumstances, including independent juristic reasoning, known as ijtihād, and reasoning by analogy, known as qiyās. (Detailed explanation: In classical Islamic legal theory, independent reasoning [ijtihād], with analogy [qiyās] as one of its main tools, applies to questions the revealed texts do not settle explicitly, never to overriding them (Hallaq, 1997)1.) These methods are a serious attempt to bring structured reasoning into the application of faith. To that extent, they resemble the careful extension of principles to new cases that any legal or scientific system requires. Their limit lies in what they may not do. The reasoning can extend the texts held to be divine, refine their application, and debate their meaning, but it cannot conclude that they are mistaken.
Interpretation also reveals a less obvious double standard. When a doctrine that preaches compassion excludes people because of whom they love, or a teaching built on mercy punishes those who choose to leave, the contradiction is commonly resolved through appeals to interpretive nuance, a subtler reasoning said to reconcile the tension for those who study it properly. The doctrine is granted complexity, yet that same nuance is rarely extended to the individual whose life doesn’t fit the rule and whose circumstances and reasons get flattened into a single verdict.
Ambiguity isn’t harmful in itself. Teachers who answer a question with a better question, writers who leave space for readers to draw their own conclusions, and the open-ended problems that scientists and philosophers wrestle with every day can all rely on it to some extent. We tend to hold on to conclusions we reached ourselves far more firmly than to conclusions handed to us. That is the very reason to guide someone through their own reasoning rather than handing them an answer. Ambiguity grounded in logical coherence can therefore train the very capacities this book values.
What matters is what the ambiguity is for. Productive ambiguity, a stylistic choice in service of understanding, invites a reader toward conclusions that can still be checked. Protective ambiguity, a structural requirement in service of survival, shields a claim from ever being checked.
That distinction also explains why bad actors fare so differently in different frameworks. Science has its share of fraudsters and of people who bend data to fit their ambitions, and its institutions don’t always catch them quickly. Yet, no scientist holds an authority that places their claims beyond replication, and sooner or later, findings that fail to replicate lose their standing, whatever their author’s reputation. (Detailed explanation: Self-correction is real but slow: when 100 published psychology studies were repeated, only about a third produced significant results again, and the effects were about half as large on average (Open Science Collaboration, 2015)1. Fields also tend to open up after an eminent life scientist dies prematurely, as researchers from outside the star’s circle publish more in the areas they once dominated (Azoulay et al., 2019)2.) In frameworks where authority flows from a claimed connection to the divine, from a position in a hierarchy, or from special access to hidden knowledge, a bad actor can wrap personal interests in the language of revelation. Questioning them then becomes questioning the faith, and removing their influence can take far longer than it should, if it happens at all.
There is also a test for how secure a framework feels about its own foundations, one that can be applied to any belief system without exception. Consider how people react to someone who denies gravity: nobody organizes protests or demands that the skeptic be silenced. If someone truly insists that gravity doesn’t apply to them, we simply let reality make the argument, ideally from a safe height.
Claims that are reliably true do not need to be shielded from questions, because every honest test is another chance for them to show it. Of course, even well-established findings need people to explain and protect them, so the question is whether a claim’s defenders answer critics or silence them, and not whether the claim has defenders.
That logic applies just as well to anything claimed to be all-powerful or undeniably beneficial. An omnipotent being does not need mortal enforcers to protect its reputation, and a practice with obvious benefits can answer its critics through demonstration. When believers respond to criticism with hostility, they may (unintentionally) reveal, at least in part, a fear that the evidence isn’t enough, though the hostility may also reflect a value held as sacred. (Detailed explanation: People whose confidence in an important belief was shaken argued for it more vigorously (Gal & Rucker, 2010)1, and personal uncertainty can push people toward more extreme conviction [compensatory conviction] (McGregor et al., 2001)2. Hostility can also arise without doubt, however, when a value is held as sacred and merely questioning it feels like a moral violation [sacred values] (Tetlock, 2003)3.)
That test, however, only holds its value when applied evenly. Political movements that respond to criticism with intimidation, fandoms that flood a critic’s inbox with abuse, and scientific institutions that protect a prestigious colleague instead of examining the evidence all fail it in the same way. Today, in many societies, the reaction rarely takes the form of violence and more likely arrives as public shaming or the withdrawal of belonging, while the mechanism stays the same. Any framework that needs its critics silenced, and cannot answer them, is telling us how fragile it believes itself to be.
The same would hold for this book, should its defenders ever prefer silencing objections to engaging with them. Engagement, however, is owed to objections, not to their repetition.
If protection and use mark the two ends of a spectrum, we might ask what a tradition near the other end looks like. Certain schools of Buddhism, particularly in their more philosophical and less devotional forms, place unusual emphasis on testing teachings against one’s own experience. One frequently cited discourse even advises against accepting teachings merely because of tradition or the authority of a teacher. Its message, however, is often overstated, since it also asks whether a teaching is praised or censured by the wise. (Detailed explanation: The Kalama Sutta (Aṅguttara Nikāya 3.65) is often called a charter of free inquiry, but it also asks whether a teaching is praised or censured by the wise, and it was addressed to newcomers rather than as a rejection of all authority (Bhikkhu Bodhi, 1988)1.) Many of the tradition’s practices invite introspection and observation rather than obedience. Over the past decades, meditation in particular has become a subject of study in psychology and neuroscience, with mindfulness-based programs now used in clinical settings to help with anxiety and recurrent depression.
What happened next tells us a lot. The parts of the tradition that could be tested were tested, and what held up has been absorbed into modern practice, stripped of its metaphysical framing and offered to anyone, regardless of belief. (Detailed explanation: Pooled data from randomized trials show that mindfulness-based cognitive therapy lowered the risk of depressive relapse over 60 weeks compared with usual care, and even compared with other active treatments such as antidepressant medication (Kuyken et al., 2016)1. A review of 47 trials found moderate evidence that mindfulness meditation programs modestly ease anxiety, depression, and pain, though only low-strength evidence for stress itself (Goyal et al., 2014)2. The founder of mindfulness-based stress reduction has described how its practices were drawn from Buddhist meditation but deliberately taught without their religious and cultural framing, so that they could enter mainstream medicine (Kabat-Zinn, 2011)3.) What stays distinctly religious tends to be what can’t be tested, or was protected from testing, such as doctrines of rebirth and karma.
If what many people admire in Buddhism is its spirit of self-examination and its testable insights, what keeps the remainder in the category of religion and out of philosophy? Part of the answer likely lies in cultural or aesthetic attachment and historical framing, the same kind of bundling in which we accept a package whole because untangling its parts feels unnatural. Another part is that Buddhism, too, is not one thing, and many of its living traditions are heavily devotional. Either way, the testable parts keep leaving for the open world of inquiry.
As for the objection this section began with, science isn’t exempt from the temptation to protect its premises, as scientists do protect core assumptions and individual scientists fall into that temptation regularly. What sets science apart is that a protected assumption has to keep earning its protection by predicting what had not yet been seen, and that the method is built to catch those who shield an assumption that has stopped earning it. The more uncomfortable question, then, concerns the rest of us. When we look honestly at how we treat the one framework that keeps our lives running, we may find that most of us are believers of a very particular kind.
Part-Time Practice
To see what kind, think about your own morning. Your alarm rings at a time that stays accurate because it is synchronized, directly or indirectly, with atomic clocks, some of them orbiting far above the planet. The water from your tap is safe to drink because chemists, engineers, workers and public health officials spent generations learning how to keep it that way. Your coffee was grown on another continent, shipped across oceans, and roasted at carefully controlled temperatures. On the way to work, wearing the clothes that were made with tools, you cross a bridge that holds because the principles behind it have been tested countless times, in a vehicle whose brakes and tires obey the same physics. By the time most of us in wealthy countries reach our first conversation of the day, we have already placed our safety and comfort in the hands of the scientific method dozens of times, usually without giving it a single thought.
Our reliance on it is so complete that it has become invisible, since science doesn’t ask to be thanked and rarely shows up in the stories we tell about our days. Yet, if we were to subtract its contributions from an ordinary life, very little of that life would still be recognizable, and a considerable part of it would not be left.
Some of these foundations were laid surprisingly recently. For most of history, disease was blamed on bad air, imbalanced bodily fluids, the food we ate or divine punishment. In the 1840s, however, Ignaz Semmelweis, a physician at a Viennese maternity clinic, noticed that women attended by doctors who came straight from performing autopsies died of fever far more often than women attended by midwives. Once he introduced handwashing with a chlorine solution, the death rate dropped dramatically. (Detailed explanation: In the First Obstetric Clinic of Vienna’s General Hospital, staffed by doctors and medical students, mothers died of childbed fever [puerperal sepsis] far more often than in the Second Clinic run by midwives; after Semmelweis introduced handwashing with chlorinated lime in 1847, mortality in the First Clinic, which had averaged about 10 percent and peaked far higher, fell to about 2 percent, the level of the midwives’ clinic (Best & Neuhauser, 2004)1.) He couldn’t yet explain why it worked, since the microorganisms responsible hadn’t been identified. Many of his colleagues rejected his findings, partly because they found it hard to accept that physicians themselves were carrying death from one patient to the next. Only over the following decades, as other researchers established that microorganisms cause disease, did his observation find its explanation. Germ theory, which it had anticipated, went on to help build the world we now take for granted.
Living standards rose dramatically once fewer epidemics swept through cities and less time was lost to recurring illness, with far more children surviving into adulthood. (Detailed explanation: In historical populations before modern medicine, nearly half of all children died before the age of 15 (Volk & Atkinson, 2013)1; by 2022, fewer than 4 percent of children worldwide died before their fifth birthday (United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (UN IGME), 2024)2.) The energy that sickness and grief used to drain could now go into education, work, and creativity, which in turn fueled further discoveries. Much of the prosperity we live in today rests on chains of insight like this one, where each link was forged by people willing to test an idea against reality and to accept whatever the test revealed.
The same holds for far less essential comforts, because while art itself doesn’t depend on technology, recording an orchestra, animating an entire world, or streaming a film across continents within seconds is only possible thanks to advances grounded in scientific methodology. These advances have also made knowledge about the arts more accessible than ever, as tutorials and digital tools now let someone in a small town learn music production or filmmaking from their bedroom. Since mass production and efficient technology keep driving costs down, what was once a privilege of the few becomes available to the many.
For all of this, science commonly receives only part of our loyalty. The same person who trusted engineering on the morning commute may thank a higher power for arriving safely. A couple who met because two trains happened to run on schedule may describe their encounter as fate, as though the timetable and the decades of planning behind it were merely a stage for destiny to perform on. Someone may check a weather forecast built on satellite data and atmospheric models and then their horoscope a moment later on the phone, giving both similar weight. In the moment, it might not feel contradictory, because we switch between trusting evidence and trusting something else many times a day, mostly without noticing.
Imagine a devotee who pledges allegiance to one god for the first half of the year and to a different one for the second, all while working toward a single long-term goal. If a breakthrough arrives the following year, there is no way to say whom it is owed to, because the inconsistency has hidden the link between cause and effect from the very person looking for it.
Unless one framework is held steadily for long enough to see what it produces, it becomes impossible to tell which of the two contributed to the result, or whether either did. In the modern world, we switch far more often than once a year, routinely from one hour to the next. This leaves us in a kind of permanent fog where successes get credited wherever that feels most comforting and failures get blamed wherever that feels least threatening.
Science so often loses this competition for credit at least partly because of how each framework speaks. A scientific claim is phrased in probabilities and hedged with conditions, accompanied by an account of its own limits. What it really says is that it contributed to an outcome, while offering to show how and under which conditions. A supernatural explanation can claim the entire outcome while pointing to an influence no one can see, and in the marketplace of comfort, an honest probability rarely competes well against a confident absolute.
The inconsistency runs deeper once science delivers a conclusion we would rather not hear. People who never questioned the chemistry of their drinking water or the physics of an airplane may suddenly discover a passion for skepticism when a study challenges their diet, their habits, their politics, or part of what formed their identity. (Detailed explanation: Rejection of science tends to be selective rather than general [motivated rejection of science]: people dispute the specific findings that threaten their worldview, identity, or interests while accepting others (Lewandowsky & Oberauer, 2016; Hornsey & Fielding, 2017)1,2. In several US samples, religiosity rather than political conservatism predicted skepticism of vaccines, conservatism predicted skepticism of climate change, and neither drove skepticism of genetically modified food (Rutjens et al., 2018)3. Greater science literacy can even widen such divides instead of closing them, at least on topics already split along political or religious lines (Kahan et al., 2012; Drummond & Fischhoff, 2017)4,5.) Here, the occasional scientific error turns into proof that science as a whole is unreliable, and a single retracted paper outweighs the countless tested foundations that keep their lives running.
Not every field warrants the same confidence, of course. A bridge rests on physics that has been tested for centuries and a diet study on far shakier ground, and the method itself asks us to weigh the two differently. What it does not allow is reserving our doubt for the findings we dislike. Skepticism of this kind works less like a consistently applied method and more like a tool that gets picked up only when a conclusion feels inconvenient. It is aimed at that conclusion alone and set down again as soon as the conversation returns to the safety of the familiar. Laypeople aren’t alone in this habit. Experts can practice their discipline part-time as well, and a specialist who applies rigorous standards within their own field may dismiss a neighboring or newer one using exactly the arguments that were once aimed at their own.
Picture a clinician who spent years fighting for the recognition of attention disorders in adults, a condition long dismissed as a childhood phase or a convenient excuse, and who then waves away an even newer area of research with the same skeptical reflexes their own field once had to overcome. Having gone through that diagnosis myself, I find that one hard to watch. (Detailed explanation: ADHD was long regarded as a disorder of childhood, and European experts still describe adult ADHD as underdiagnosed and undertreated, partly because of that outdated view (Kooij et al., 2019)1.) From the inside, such irony is rarely visible. Each of us tends to treat our own expertise as the measure of what is worth taking seriously and the areas just beyond it as speculation.
That part-time practice is what the title of this chapter points to. Holding a framework part-time means relying on its benefits while applying its standards only when it suits us, and by that measure, science may well be the most widely practiced part-time religion in the world. Strictly speaking, it fails every test of faith set out in this chapter, because its confidence is meant to track its evidence and it invites the tests that could overturn it. What makes it resemble one anyway is our relationship to it. Most of us in wealthy countries live on its fruits around the clock and invoke its authority whenever it confirms what we already believe, yet suspend it the moment its conclusions demand something of us. The comparison has its limits, as science, unlike most religions, doesn’t ask to be worshipped, and treating it with unconditional reverence would misunderstand its method entirely. If we want to keep benefiting from it, what it asks of us is less glamorous and more demanding: that we apply it consistently.
The irony of this part-time relationship sharpens even further once we look at where most of that doubt is broadcast from. Distrust of science likely spreads most readily on social media platforms, podcasts, video channels, and online forums, all of which exist only thanks to science. Beyond building these channels, science opened up literacy and access to knowledge on a scale earlier centuries couldn’t have imagined, putting the tools of criticism into more hands than ever before. Unlike most authorities in human history, it built criticism into its own design, as journals, peer review, replication, public debate, and increasingly open data exist precisely so that claims can be challenged. Calling such an enterprise untrustworthy while broadcasting that verdict through its own inventions seems to me a strange kind of logic.
The sources many people turn to instead rarely hold themselves to a comparable standard. Much of what circulates on talk shows and viral posts is loosely argued or tailored for attention, with little effort to refine ideas against criticism or to correct mistakes publicly once they are made. There are, of course, careful voices in every medium, and some of the best science communication happens in these formats. In some places, however, the pattern is hard to miss: although trust in scientists stays fairly high on average across the world, among some audiences and on contested topics, political figures are trusted more than the institutions that deliberately try to keep their conclusions separate from the preferences of whoever produces them. (Detailed explanation: On average, trust in scientists remains fairly high: a survey of about 72,000 people in 68 countries found a mean of 3.6 on a scale from 1 to 5 and no sign of a general crisis of trust, although in several European and North American countries people on the political right tended to trust scientists less (Cologna et al., 2025)1. In a US poll from January 2025, only 39 percent of Republicans trusted the CDC to make the right health recommendations, while 84 and 81 percent trusted Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., respectively (Kearney et al., 2025)2.) Not all distrust is plain ignorance, though. Where institutions once betrayed a community, the suspicion has a history, and a vaccination campaign that ignores that history may be scientifically sound yet fail anyway, because sound evidence still has to travel through trust. (Detailed explanation: In the US Public Health Service’s Tuskegee study, hundreds of Black men with syphilis were left untreated for about forty years so the disease could be observed; after the study became public in 1972, older Black men’s medical mistrust rose and their visits to doctors fell, which one analysis linked to a drop of up to 1.5 years in their life expectancy at age 45 (Alsan & Wanamaker, 2018)1.)
Keeping conclusions separate from the preferences of whoever produces them is what gives science a particular value. As its methods aim to set personal and ideological bias aside, its findings stay useful whatever one believes. Anyone can therefore use them, adapt them to different priorities, and build on them without first having to swear loyalty to a cause.
Its goal also sets it apart from most voices competing for our attention, because science sets out to maximize understanding, not profit or persuasion. Profit may follow as a byproduct, and sponsors certainly influence which questions receive funding and attention, a real distortion that ought to be scrutinized. (Detailed explanation: A Cochrane review found that drug and device studies sponsored by manufacturers more often report favorable efficacy results and conclusions than studies funded independently (Lundh et al., 2017)1.) Yet, the method itself is designed to maximize reliability, because only reliability produces lasting value. Consider a medicine that (regularly) cures disease, an engine that runs without failing, or a bridge that stands for a century. All of them generate wealth because they work, and work because the knowledge behind them held up.
Because anyone can use this knowledge, it can be misused as well. The chemistry that produces life-saving drugs can also produce poisons, and the engineering that builds durable machines can be turned toward products designed to break, just so they must be replaced. The openness of the method, however, works in our favor here too, because findings that are documented and verifiable allow misuse to be identified and corrected. When we are deceived, it is rarely by the knowledge itself and usually by the people who choose to apply or distort it.
When this knowledge is rejected selectively, the consequences also reach beyond the person doing the rejecting. Ignoring a truth doesn’t make it disappear; it only changes how and when it has to be faced, and often who ends up facing it. Someone who dismisses modern medicine in favor of an unproven remedy may come back to the hospital once that remedy fails, often later and sicker. In addition, they are rarely the only ones bearing the cost of that detour.
What makes such selective rejection survivable is the very system being rejected. A person can dismiss scientific reasoning about food and still eat safely in a country whose regulators acted on it. The European Union, for instance, banned the food additive titanium dioxide once its safety could no longer be established. Likewise, a person can refuse vaccination and still be partially protected, simply because enough of their neighbors did not. (Detailed explanation: Among patients with non-metastatic breast, prostate, lung, or colorectal cancer in a US national database, those who chose alternative medicine alone instead of conventional treatment had about 2.5 times the risk of death during follow-up (Johnson et al., 2018)1. In a study of breast cancer patients in Malaysia, those who used alternative remedies were more likely to delay seeing a doctor and receiving a diagnosis (Mohd Mujar et al., 2017)2. The European Food Safety Authority concluded in 2021 that the additive E171 could no longer be considered safe, because concerns that its particles could damage genetic material [genotoxicity] could not be ruled out (EFSA Panel on Food Additives and Flavourings (FAF), 2021)3; the European Union then removed it from the list of authorized food additives, with the ban taking full effect in August 2022 (European Commission, 2022)4. Once enough of a population is immune, a pathogen can no longer spread efficiently, which indirectly protects those who are not immune [herd immunity] (Fine et al., 2011)5.) Clean water, public healthcare, the tools firefighters use, infrastructure, and building codes shield believers and doubters alike, embedding the conclusions of science into the environment, so nobody has to agree with them in order to benefit.
If anyone were to reject science consistently, refusing not only the conclusions they dislike but everything grounded in the same method, their chances of thriving, if not of surviving, would likely collapse within a short time. Selective rejection persists precisely because it is inconsistent, as it borrows the safety of the very system it criticizes.
Such borrowed safety is fragile, because it lasts only as long as enough people keep contributing to what sustains it. It begins to wear thin once too many rely on it without helping to maintain it: individually, by refusing vaccines or ignoring early warnings; politically, by cutting funds for research and public health, dismantling the infrastructure that makes cooperation and access easier, if not possible, or voting against the institutions that enforce safety; and culturally, by eroding trust in expertise or postponing environmental action until the damage can no longer be ignored. The costs that others once carried almost unnoticed then begin to fall on everyone.
That same logic holds in private life, where a postponed truth is rarely an avoided one. Take a family that withholds news of a death from a relative they consider too fragile. They spare that person the shock in the short term, yet the truth itself doesn’t vanish and has to be guarded and managed. When it eventually surfaces, as truths usually do, the grief arrives late and is compounded by the realization that others decided what this person could bear.
Science, however, doesn’t deliver final answers, and what it offers is more modest and, in practice, far more useful, namely the most reliable interpretation available at a given time, always held open to revision. Some of its truths can’t be observed directly at all, as no astronomer will ever travel to a distant star, yet by analyzing the faint light that reaches us across vast distances, they can infer what it is made of and how it moves. Newton’s laws of motion and gravitation were accurate enough to guide artillery for centuries and, much later, to plan the orbits of the first satellites. These satellites were sent into a realm no human had ever experienced on the strength of predictions derived from observations made on the ground. Satellite navigation, however, is also where Newton’s framework reaches its limits. The clocks aboard those satellites tick at a slightly different rate than clocks on the ground, an effect predicted by Einstein’s theories of relativity. If it went uncorrected, positioning errors would pile up by kilometers every single day. (Detailed explanation: Because the satellites move fast, their clocks run slow by about 7 microseconds per day [special relativity]; because they orbit higher in Earth’s gravitational field, they run fast by about 45 microseconds per day [general relativity], a net gain of about 38 microseconds per day that the system corrects by design (Ashby, 2003)1. Since light travels about 300 meters in a microsecond, an uncorrected offset of that size corresponds to more than 11 kilometers of ranging error per day (Ashby, 2002)2.) Newton was therefore not completely inaccurate, since his truth was reliable within certain limits and was later refined to reach further.
Our tools of navigation tell the same story: a paper map was never entirely wrong, because it showed the general layout of the land, even when it was outdated or too coarse for precise positioning. Satellite navigation then made it more reliable, and live navigation added traffic and rerouting on top. Each step built on the same coordinates and spatial relationships while extending how precisely, flexibly, and broadly that logic could be applied. Science, likewise, refines and expands its past, and even the theories it abandons keep their value as markers of what doesn’t work, ruling out wrong turns for everyone who follows.
Some people frame their resistance to scientific conclusions as cultural preservation, as though science were a foreign force threatening their traditions. Longevity alone says little about reliability, which makes tradition a poor trump card. This framing also misreads where science comes from, since its ancestry stretches across civilizations. Greek mathematics built on Babylonian and Egyptian methods, scholars across the Islamic world preserved, translated, and expanded Greek texts while making advances of their own, and European scholars later drew heavily on those translations. (Detailed explanation: Between the eighth and tenth centuries, scholars in Baghdad translated a large part of the surviving Greek scientific and philosophical literature into Arabic (Gutas, 1998)1.) Empires rose and fell and cultures conquered one another, yet knowledge was rarely erased entirely and was more often absorbed and carried forward. Even at its most basic, whoever first sharpened a blade more effectively or found a way to preserve ink was running an experiment, testing materials and passing on what worked. In that sense, science belongs to culture as one of humanity’s oldest and most widely shared cultures, a living tradition of inquiry to which nearly every person has contributed in some way or another. Rejecting it as foreign therefore amounts to rejecting part of one’s own inheritance.
Since this shared culture doesn’t require agreement on values, it also lets people cooperate across deep divides. Two people can accept the same evidence that the climate is warming and still disagree sharply about how urgently to act, or about how to balance environmental protection against economic concerns. They disagree about priorities while sharing the observations, and their shared effort to understand the causes gives them common ground on which a debate about solutions can proceed.
That cooperation strengthens the knowledge itself. No single country could gather enough data from every ocean and industry on its own. Once weather records, satellite imagery, and field observations are pooled across borders, however, the resulting picture becomes far more reliable than anything one nation could produce. A single study can mislead, whereas a finding replicated across countries and cultures filters out much of the noise of artifacts, luck, error, and isolated cases. Reliable data is, in the end, little more than a large collection of individual anecdotes, gathered carefully and objective enough for the common pattern to emerge from the coincidental.
Individual studies can be biased and results rushed to publication, and institutions aren’t immune to pressure or error either. Even forensic DNA analysis, one of the most rigorous tools in modern criminal justice, has contributed to wrongful convictions when samples were contaminated, results misinterpreted, or confidence overstated. Yet, the same technology has also helped free many people who had been wrongly convicted, because evidence that is preserved and documented can be examined again, and that is the decisive difference. (Detailed explanation: In trial transcripts of 137 people later exonerated by DNA testing, 60 percent contained forensic testimony that misstated or went beyond the underlying data; most of it concerned blood-group analysis [serology] and hair comparison, but three cases involved DNA analysis (Garrett & Neufeld, 2009)1. Between 1989 and 2020, DNA testing helped exonerate 375 wrongly convicted people in the United States (Innocence Project, 2020)2.) Science makes no promise to be free of mistakes, only to keep the records that allow mistakes to be found and to treat finding them as progress. When held appropriately, our trust in it is a pragmatic trust in a process that has proven better at correcting itself than any alternative we know.
Seen this way, it gets hard to live by both frameworks at once. It’s hard to serve two masters when one says “I know” and the other says “I need to find out, and even then, I’ll only know provisionally.” Relying on the fruits of science for survival while attributing its outcomes to the supernatural turns the older framework into a source of comfort and belonging more than of explanation, something kept for what it gives while the explanatory work happens elsewhere.
That same standard applies to any framework that asks for consistency, including the one this book proposes. A conviction built on reasoning cannot be held fully while a protected corner is reserved where reasoning isn’t allowed, because that corner tends to expand whenever reasoning becomes inconvenient. Many great scientists were devout, which shows that the two can share one life, often by keeping the method out of a protected corner, though some, Newton among them, carried the method into scripture itself.
Science already does much of what we ask of a faith, and it does so for anyone. It applies to every person regardless of background, adapting to the needs of whoever uses it without imposing a single set of values. It heals the sick, restores sight to the blind, and lets the deaf hear, and over the past century and a half, it has helped more than double the average human life expectancy. (Detailed explanation: Global life expectancy at birth was roughly 30 years in the late nineteenth century (Riley, 2005)1 and reached about 73 years in 2024 (United Nations, 2024)2. Nitrogen fertilizer made through the industrial synthesis of ammonia [Haber-Bosch process] is estimated to sustain nearly half of the world’s population (Erisman et al., 2008)3.) Beyond that, it feeds billions and connects people across oceans in an instant, and it has carried human beings beyond the atmosphere and brought them (safely) home.
It does all of this without requiring blind faith, rewarding not only those who understand and apply its methods, but also the ones doubting and improving them. Its central creed, if it has one, is a confession of humility: I cannot say with certainty what is right, but I am doing my best to come closer to it. When it fails, it does not blame its followers for a lack of devotion. Its benefits even reach those who reject it, because they, too, eat its food, wear its fabrics, travel on its roads, and are healed and nurtured by its accomplishments, while most of us only belong to it part of the time.
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