Martin Marty—Which Religions Tend to Hold Cultural Dominance?

from TitusOneNine by Kendall Harmon

The class will please come to order. Our text today is "The Law of Cultural Dominance," formulated by David Kaplan in Cultural Evolution, published fifty-two years ago, and noticed too little since. I find online that I quoted it in a scholarly article in 1977 and noted a couple of other citations through the decades. We happy few who profited from it have an insight which helps explain much in religious change. Here it is: "That cultural system which more effectively exploits the energy resources of a given environment will tend to spread in that environment at the expense of less effective systems."

In the United States, Pentecostals, conservative evangelicals, African American, Latino/Latina Americans, Latter-Day Saints, Korean Protestants, and other prospering religious groups know this Law without having read Kaplan. For one illustration: the energy resources associated with mass media—radio, TV, movies, and now the internet are available to all, but mainly the kind of groups I mentioned have "exploited" them efficiently....

Read it all.