Is Being A Martyr A Good Thing?

I love my husband's cousin. She's 18, bright, full of life and has the whole world in front of her. We'll call her Leah. She wrote the following on Facebook yesterday:
'The tortured's love for the torturer. This is God's love. It conquers the world.'
I felt I had to keep my mouth shut. She's very religious, idealistic and young. Her mother is religious but in a quiet way. Her mother accepts Butch and I as atheists without open judgment and we never talk about religion out of respect for each other. The relationship is more important than fighting over differing world views. By default we have the same relationship with Leah, but lately she has started putting uncomfortable, self-sacrificing, mindless bible verses on Facebook. This is really hard to take. I want to say something but I want to be courteous of my relationship with her.

So on Heaving Dead Cats' Facebook page I put the following:
‎'The tortured's love for the torturer. This is God's love. It conquers the world.' (someone I know wrote that as their status update. What does it mean to you? If you were a religious person, would YOU find comfort in that?)
I got several responses. No one liked it. Barbara was kind enough to Google it, though, and commented with the quote in context:
"And then there is the love for the enemy- love for the one who does not love you but mocks, threatens, and inflicts pain. The tortured’s love for the torturer. This is God’s love. It conquers the world.’”

Leah eventually told me she read the quote in a book called Crazy Love by Francis Chan. "Crazy, relentless all-powerful, radical love." Eek. I feel queasy now. A self help book about how to fall in love with God.  I won't even go there with how insane it is to fall in love with an invisible, intangible nothingness. My love of coffee is more meaningful.

Suffer The Martyr And They Will Come

Humans are funny creatures. I am forever marveling over how the mind of our species has evolved and how it thinks.

This guy, Joe Henrich, is an evolutionary anthropologist in British Columbia, Canada. He wrote a paper about how religions owe their success to their martyrs, which I found on New Scientist.

According to Mr. Henrich, if a religious leader is willing to sacrifice himself in a costly manner for his belief, this gives him credibility and helps that belief spread. If no one is willing to make a significant sacrifice for a belief, even young children will pick up on this and withhold their own commitment.

The more costly the behavior, the more likely it is to be sincere. If someone is willing to give their life, then it is for an ideal they believe in. This is even more important if the martyr is a high-status priest or leader.

Then, once people believe, they are more likely to perform similar displays themselves, such as vows of chastity or poverty. Henrich created a mathematical model to test this self-enforcing loop that can stabilize and help a system of beliefs persist over time.

This explains why religions have such costly renunciations. For example, the Romans persecuting the early christians actually may have led to the spread of those beliefs be letting their early believers to be martyrs. It is an ultimate credibility-enhancing display.

This is also shown in other social movements like utopian communes like the Shakers and the Hittites. The stricter the demands on their followers, the more likely the system would persist. Henrich says, "You can see the changes in action. The number of those costly commitment rituals increases over time."

This is still a hypothesis, and needs to be tested. But it sure does seem to explain things. If Henrich is right, then it explains why evangelical churches in the US are increasing in number, while it would predict that more liberal, less demanding churches would lose their flock because it would reduce their followers' commitment.

Henrich says, "To be a member you've got to walk the walk and talk the talk. And this transmits deeper faith to the children."

Personally this seems disturbing and macabre but it does explain a phenomenon that has baffled me in regards to religions. This is definitely an area of research that I'd like to see developed.

Here is the pdf of the paper: The evolution of costly displays, cooperation, and religion. Inferentially potent displays and their implications for cultural evolution. By Joseph Henrich