Super-Soft Culture
While it is easy to accidentally frame “atheism” as the opposite of hard cultures, secular cultures can actually be quite “hard.” Soft cultures are better thought of as closer to the “genetic default” human culture. The softest of soft cultures is close to what humans would believe if left to develop a culture a priori on a desert island without any (cultural) evolutionary pressures (hard cultures don’t tend to form until large groups of humans start living in close proximity, such as in cities). Through the Baldwin effect, “the process of becoming more genetically adapted over time to perform a novel behavior that was originally only learned,” religious traditions that were common among early human tribes were eventually etched onto our unconscious minds like centuries-old grooves in a dirt path, which pull the wheels of a cart into them making them incrementally deeper.
People who have allowed their culture to erode into super-soft culture begin to settle into a kind of default, instinctive, universal cultivar.
Characteristics of Super-Soft Culture
Super-soft culture is exemplified by:
- Generic spiritualism with a pantheon of gods
- A heavy focus on self-categorization (things like horoscopes and blood type tests)
- Rituals designed to lead to good luck
- Ceremonies tied to forgetting an adherent’s identity while dancing
- Attributing agency to inanimate objects or animals
- Attributing power to intention (“the power of wishy thinking”—in which a person thinks a outcome becomes more likely because they visualized it (sometimes with the caveat that this is more likely to happen if they then forgot that they visualized it or combined with some form of ritual)[[75]](#_ftn75)
- Attributing power to fetishes (in the traditional sense of the word fetish: “the veneration of objects believed to have magical or supernatural potency,” often things like crystals though sometimes even pop-culture items like collectable figurines)
What does our ancestral, instinctual culture look like, theologically speaking? What will a mind unencumbered by tradition or science manifest in terms of values and worldviews? We think the purest expression of super-soft culture in modern society is something called “pop culture paganism.”
Essentially, once a pop subculture reaches a certain population threshold, a portion of adherents begin to believe that the fictional characters venerated by that community are a pantheon of real, all-seeing deities. These extreme adherents often choose one or two among these characters to whom they dedicate themselves, just as some Greeks and Romans dedicated themselves or their families to a particular deity, worshiping and supporting them disproportionately.
For example, Snapewives, aka Snapeists, took Harry Potter fan culture to the next level through a belief that Snape is a real spiritual guide who they could channel and with whom they could maintain romantic relationships (they argued that J. K. Rowling ultimately channeled Snape when writing the book series). Lokiwives followed a similar route, venerating Loki from the Marvel universe.
Snapewives will do things like meditate on Snape when they are sick until he sends them inspiration for a “potion” to “brew” which will improve their health or look for signs from Snape in their day-to-day lives to know what choices to make. Most also maintain shrines to Snape in their homes.
Of course, this is not limited to fandoms with fictional characters. For example, a person may use the four members of Metallica—instead of the four elements—as a point of focus when performing pagan magic.[[76]](#_ftn76)
Essentially, something in the backs of our brains makes us want to see any figure that is commonly venerated and which takes up a lot of our mindshare as a god. For a historic corollary we can look at the “hero worship” of the likely real-life combatants in the battle of Troy who were practically deified through their legends.
Women who fall into these ancient cultural grooves also often sexualize the entities they see as deities and perform elaborate binding or marriage rituals with them (known as Godspousery—seen in both Snapists and Lokiwives). We may see this as bizarre when regarding it from a modern cultural perspective, but similar traditions are seen throughout religious traditions, from the marriage of Catholic nuns to Jesus (a tradition without an male equivalent in Catholic priests—suggesting it is not just “symbolic”) and the rampant sexualization of Greek Gods, who were are known for frequently having sex with mortal women.
It would not surprise us if it was quite common in ancient Greece for groups of women to believe they shared the same God as a lover in addition to their husband. (If you find this chain of logic interesting, we strongly suggest you fall down the rabbit hole of people who have researched pop culture paganism and related subcommunities.)
As the internet enables pop culture deities to metastasize, superfans have developed increasingly sophisticated belief systems, forming something akin to full-blown theologies that strongly resemble those found in some of humanity’s earliest cultures.
Consider the following framing of pop culture paganism by one believer:
“The way I see it, pop culture figures are essentially thoughtforms on the astral plane. The more energy we in the mundane world pour into them, the bigger and stronger they get in the astral. … The entities that I call deities are generally very, very old and very, very strong—to the point that they can function entirely independently of the energies fed to them from people. I see pop culture figures as being lesser than deity in that they are still almost entirely dependent on the incoming energies from people for their existence. As such, while I might respect and even venerate a pop culture figure, I wouldn’t worship it. To me worship requires a sense of subordination to the thing being worshiped that I just don’t feel for pop culture figures.”[[77]](#_ftn77)
While some may dismiss people incorporating known fictional characters into their religious cannon, we see this phenomenon in even modern cultures that follow more ancient religious traditions. For example, some people of Papua New Guinea assign spiritual significance to The Phantom, a comic book character, and feature him alongside deceased ancestors on things like battle shields.[[78]](#_ftn78)
As another example, the Dalit population of India recently began to build temples to a new Goddess “of English” modeled after the Statue of Liberty but holding a pen in her hand instead of a torch (to represent literacy) and a copy of the constitution granting them equal rights in the other.[[79]](#_ftn79)
Heck, in modern American society, the way some people living on autopilot react to celebrities and carry around tokens featuring their likeness could be thought of as very similar to this kind of hero worship and fetishism.
Just as water receding from a lake begins to reveal the topography underneath, bit by bit, starting with the peaks, evolutionarily derived religious and cultural traditions begin to incorporate parts of this “default” culture, bit by bit, as they soften. That all successful[[80]](#_ftn80) cultivars come from traditions that are heavily derived from this biological default should give pause to any wishing to argue the default is well optimized for intergenerational durability in any competitive, technologically advanced environment. (There would not have been pressures allowing deviations to outcompete it if that were the case.)
As we see it, super-soft culture is based on cultivars that evolved in environments nothing like our current social environment—however a spiritually inclined individual could just as well argue that the universalism of super-soft culture is evidence of some underlying truth.
As one of this book’s editors, Lillian Tara, puts it:
“The truth is that humans need faith! If you give them nothing to hold sacred, to have faith in, they will find something anyway. Instead of metaphysical virtues, these empty religions imbue the material world with disproportionate value in an unconscious, desperate attempt to find meaning. It’s like using a broken compass because you need direction—any direction.”
As to why women seem uniquely predisposed to fall into super-soft culture vis-a-vis men: The difference appears to be biological in nature. One could argue that women experience more discrimination and that these communities appeal to disadvantaged individuals. However, we do not see higher participation in them among any other metric of disadvantaged-ness (other than LGBT individuals), and most of the women recorded participating in pop-culture paganism are solidly middle class or upper class.
In statistical analyses, women are almost always more likely to be religious and spiritual along almost any metric, so it is not as though this biological difference is limited to this one area. One interesting study argues that women are not necessarily more spiritual; they just happen to engage with spirituality more emotionally.[[81]](#_ftn81)
It may very well be that social stereotypes somehow socialize women to act this way. Even early feminists and suffragettes argued that women should be allowed to vote because they were biologically more spiritual than men. This kind of benevolent sexism may be more likely to stick around in the background of a society without people noticing, all while influencing the way even the most “feminist” of women see the world.