Soft Cultures
If hard cultures are the Rocky Mountains, soft cultures are the Appalachian Mountains, weathered by the centuries into softer peaks. Though presently decaying, most soft cultures started as hard cultures and shifted over time, asking less and less of adherents in terms of rituals and practices and thereby appearing more “socially vanilla” to mainstream cultures. Because they also ask progressively less from adherents in terms of time commitment and financial support, their ability to offer meaningful social services and safety nets erodes with each passing decade.
The shift from a hard to soft culture is often marked by a transition away from a disdain toward external loci of control (i.e., a tendency to look down upon those who blame external factors for their shortcomings) as adherents begin to adopt more neutrality on the topic.
Religions that withstand the test of time typically see their member base periodically bud off into more extreme, new iterations (hard cultures) that pass the torch of these religions to new generations while the larger base succumbs to soft culture and dies off through lower birth rates and/or higher attrition.
Some cultures have even developed specific mechanisms to encourage this budding process and reintegrate the buds with the central organization. Consider the Catholic Church’s various religious orders, which re-inject the wider religion with a hard culture mindset. Essentially, the Catholic Church—a large, long-lived soft culture—cultivates small-but-strict religious orders and slots individuals sharpened within them into senior roles within its central bureaucracy. This practice is analogous to taking stem cells from a fetus and re-injecting them into an aging individual’s spine to combat deterioration that naturally comes with age. However, as we see with Catholic religious orders, the Church must constantly allow new ones to be created, as any order that becomes sufficiently old, large, and wealthy will begin to face the same problems all soft cultures do. Think of this like a large corporation that creates an internal incubator in which people are encouraged to “think with a startup mindset.”
Examples of Soft Cultures
- “Spiritual but Unaffiliated Christians”
- Reform Jews
- Unitarian Universalists
Characteristics of Soft Cultures
Soft cultures are often the most “pleasant” to grow up within as a child. They’re what we often think of as the “vanilla” cultural subset because, at any given point, soft cultures are often the most dominant cultural subsets, population-wise, in any given region. They have a high rate of attrition between generations and, in a modern context, soft cultures almost always have a birth rate below repopulation level (i.e., below two children per woman).
While most soft cultures’ populations are derived from families who historically practiced hard forms of those cultures, they also refortify their ranks by bleeding from adjacent hard cultures that have remained strict (e.g., an Evangelical Protestant converting to a Spiritual Christian).
Note: When it comes to protection against viral memes, soft cultural religions fare dramatically worse than atheistic soft cultures. An often-misattributed quote asserts that “once people stop believing in God, the problem is not that they will believe in nothing; rather, the problem is that they will believe anything.” This is true to an extent; when people still believe in God but believe in him “casually” (as measured by frequency of church attendance), they become extremely susceptible to predatory memetic sets (conspiracy theories and the like). This susceptibility is not seen in atheist populations. Scott Alexander presents a nice exploration of the data around this phenomenon.[[73]](#_ftn73) That said, atheists and agnostics have worse birth rates than theistic soft culture adherents on average (who themselves have lower birth rates than members of hard cultures).[[74]](#_ftn74)