The Failure of Religious Systems

This chapter describes how recent work across the social and cognitive sciences can address the question of how religious systems come to fail. It begins by discussing whether it makes scientific sense to talk about “religious systems” before outlining how the success or failure of such systems can be evaluated. A distinction is then drawn between the “mental-representational” and the “social” failure of religious systems. The contributions of the cognitive science of religion (CSR) are examined to explain the differential success of religious systems over time, such that some come to fail while others succeed. Then the relevance of CSR for explaining how and where religious systems lose influence altogether and various forms of nonreligion emerge, a process that has traditionally been called “secularization,” is outlined. The chapter closes with a case study outlining the applicability of the cognitive and evolutionary study of religion to the decline of Catholic belief, practice, and identification, as well as the rise in anti–Catholic Church social action, in early twenty-first-century Ireland.