A Secular Person’s Advice on How to Convert Secular People

We discuss the most effective arguments for converting non-religious people to religion, focusing especially on kids who were raised religious but became secular. We talk about what doesn't work, like Bible passages or hell threats, and what does work, like pointing to poor outcomes in secular culture and providing community amenities. We also cover topics like targeting people in vulnerable states, logic vs. emotion in arguments, dating markets, and more.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] I hope that people are able to use this to convert people more effectively. And to hopefully do a better job at evangelizing to your kids. You know, as we say, the first 18 years of a kid's life are your chance to pitch your culture to them.

And if you don't do a good job, they're going to leave. Exactly. And then your culture will die, your traditions will die,

Simone Collins: and your people will die. Everyone you've ever loved will disappear to history. Everything that every ancestor before you has worked to do will be for nothing

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. So this video is going to be an interesting topic, but it's what I've been thinking about when I've been looking at, so people who don't know me Simone, like my favorite radio station, then you'll point this out. They are. Always like Christian talk radio. I really like listening to like long Christian apologetics.

I, despite being a secular person, I really culturally identify with these groups. I really just like listening to them. I find the, the, the lessons [00:01:00] that they're teaching are often broadly applicable to my life. Totally. We as a society like if we're talking about like the structures, like the core enemy.

Right now in society and now there's another enemy that we're gonna have to deal with eventually. So we sort of have the two enemies of Tism. Steep enemy. Yes. The core, the core enemy right now is sort of woke in the mind virus, the cult, whatever you wanna call it, that's taking over society right now and.

Religious traditions act as a very good structural protection against that for many individuals minds. Now, the second enemy is the religious extremists who want everyone on earth dead except people who think like them, or converted, which, from my perspective, you know, if you've... If you completely erase my kid's culture, then, you know, they might as well, not might as well.

I mean, I would appreciate them updating the culture on their own based on their ideology, rather than just like whole class accepting what somebody else is telling them. Right. But anyway so, so that's the future enemy. And, and groups like that, you know, these low [00:02:00] technology, extremely aggressive groups that they want everyone who doesn't think like them dead they are growing and when.

The, the woke castle falls that that will be the next. Multiple populations because there's many groups like this. You know, they exist across religious traditions. That will be the next group that we're that we're fighting. But even to fight them, we need to preserve an alliance and a large population of mentally healthy religious individuals who still have traditions, who still have some sense of culture.

And one of the ways that we have done this with our family is essentially take the scraps of our ancestral traditions and rebuild a sort of secular religious framework, which we often talk about. That is not what we're going to talk about on this video, because I would also like not just people to do what we're doing, but also succeed.

in evangelism. And when I [00:03:00] say succeed in evangelism, I think the single most important person that you will evangelize to in your entire life is your children. 100%. And, and so when people think about evangelism, they do not often think about their own kids. They think about going out and trying to convert other people.

But if you look at statistics, there was a set of statistics that we were sharing in a recent video. The game is just completely different now. And I'm going to put this statistic here again, because it's just so like, it's not like things are a little different. You know, if you look at belief in

gen X right now, people who, who share believing in God without a doubt.

So these are people who believe in God, without a doubt within Gen X, you're looking at like 65 percent with engine Z. You're looking at like 33%. This is actually 2018. It appears to still be dropping. So you're dealing with something entirely different now. And as I pointed out in previous generations, as we pointed out in the previous episode on this, you could have just like peer [00:04:00] pressured them.

Right. Or you could have assumed that they wouldn't be getting outside ideas constantly, but now it's possible for your kids to deconvert and not tell you that they've deconverted and you never find out. And we've seen that a decent, we've seen this persistently with very conservative, wholesome families.

Like, like the epitome of wholesomeness, you know, I'd say like the most good old boy type families you could imagine.

These are the families where I see this happening the most. And it happens the most within these families because these kids are often raised with manners and to care about their parents feelings and like are emotionally mature and they don't want to hurt their parents. You know, they're just like, look, I have no.

And, and that's the thing that leads to the most dangerous type of deconversion. People think that the type of deconversion that you need to be afraid of is the type of deconversion in which your kid ends up

Simone Collins: hating you. Like the obvious rebellious teen who's like, My hatin mom, and like... You know, like actively talks about,

Malcolm Collins: I hate my religion and that was why a lot of people deconverted [00:05:00] before these kids do not hate their religion.

They do not hate their traditions. They just weren't convinced by them and that is infinitely more dangerous because they're not going to tell you, they are not going to notify you that their traditions have dropped. And so let's talk about evangelism, right? So as people, like when I was younger, I was in.

You know, I, I didn't like the new atheists. I thought that they were always kind of pussies. But I would have been considered on the outside of that movement and

stuff like the subgenius movement and stuff like that. Right. And you were in, I mean, you were raised like Buddhist slash Mormon, but we're always sort of like atheistic growing up.

Like, what was your faith like in middle school and high school?

Simone Collins: If someone asked me, I probably would have said it was a mixture of Buddhism and Shinto, to be honest

Malcolm Collins: with you. Did you actually believe this stuff or was it just like an aesthetic choice?

Simone Collins: I felt most moved when at Shinto shrines. And like that felt the most natural to me from a faith perspective.

So in terms of like having [00:06:00] moving religious experiences, the most I'd ever experienced that was at Shinto shrines in Japan. So that's why I told people that it, it just felt right to me and that's it. There was no like thought behind it. And my, my parents had sent me to Dharma school and, and sort of tried to raise me Buddhist after at Mormon preschool, I started asking them about Jesus and God and they freaked out.

So yeah, I wouldn't say it was organized, but I, so I'm not a good example of like a religious kid who's lost their religion. I'm the perfect example of someone who was raised in soft culture, with soft culture, and was just broadly spiritual, but not really.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and I grew up in Texas, so I had a lot of evangelists and apologetics talk with me about this stuff, because I was always open about it.

So I've gotten to hear many of the arguments used, and so, I think that this provides a unique perspective where I can, like, totally, honestly, as someone who has never been convinced by these arguments, tell you which ones are the most convincing and how to structure [00:07:00] your debate around this stuff to be most likely to be effective at converting somebody or keeping somebody within the faith that might otherwise deconvert, right?

Like, like a young kid who doesn't really believe it anymore and you basically need to evangelize to them to get them to believe it because, you know, the default culture around it doesn't. Right. So the first thing I would say is in terms of how you, well actually I'd ask you, have you ever had any moments in your life where somebody came up to you with a religious tradition and you were really convinced by their argument around it?

What was that argument? Never, never, never. Have you ever been really unconvinced? Like somebody came up to you and you're like, this is just not working at all. You think this is convincing, but it's not.

Simone Collins: Many Mormon friends like would give me the Book of Mormon, but. And like exposed me to like really great experiences like going to see Christmas carols at the local, like, ward.

But it was, yeah, they never tried to aggressively [00:08:00] convert me or tell me about their religion. So, no, I don't think I was ever.

Malcolm Collins: Well, so that's the first one that I often see. Somebody giving somebody else a Bible. Or their religious book.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Like, that's gonna work. I've never heard of that working.

I've never heard of it working either. And then, like, even it goes to, like, the tradition of Gideon's Bibles, right? That, like, there was this concerted effort to put Bibles in drawers of bedstand tables in hotels.

That, like, someone's gonna, in a moment of desperation, pick it up and have some kind of moment.

No, I do think that what is much more convincing and we do know people who are converted this way is people of a certain religion and I see this especially with Mormons. Giving friends, neighbors, friends, kids, experiences adjacent to the Mormon community and those kids or those people just loving it, loving the community, loving the lifestyle, loving how wholesome and loving everything is and being convinced through that exposure to convert.

So I think being exposed to a, a religion's amenities [00:09:00] can be very compelling, but I don't think it has anything to do with

Malcolm Collins: faith. Well, hold on. I do think it has to do with faith, but we'll get to faith arguments that are compelling versus ones that aren't. Okay. But the book itself, this is a belief that I think comes from the, well, God will guide them to it.

Like God will guide them to it and open their heart. And I think when you're looking at stuff like this, like the way I would structure this, what's the, the... Non offensive way to say this. God really wants you to do the work on this. You know in terms of The people and and so this this like bible seeding I guess I call it It could conceivably like the way I could imagine it working as somebody is at like A bottom of the barrel situation and they come upon a, a Bible, right?

And they're like, okay, now I'm open to being converted. Because that is one of the times in somebody's life where they are most likely to be converted is when they are at rock bottom. And that's where you get, you know, burn again, Christian phenomenon, but [00:10:00] you're better off if you're targeting rock bottom people, targeting them through institutions.

So like AA is a great evangelistic vehicle, even though it does a ton of harm, you know, and I think we'd argue in another video that it probably kills more people a year than any organization in the world. Because it hides access to the Sinclair method and Naltrexone in the United States, even though it's.

secures alcohol in

80 percent of cases. Alcoholism and yeah, it's, it's absolutely insane, but, but they would call those people

dry drunks.

 Specifically dry drunks is a term. Used by extremists within AI. For individuals who found a way to quit drinking, Or moderate their drinking. that was not AA because they believe that will, if you found a way to quit drinking it, wasn't AA, then you didn't get all the extra ideology. The AA was meant to impart to you. And so you still may as well be a drunk, which I think really reveals their hand, which is what they meant is. Um, they weren't able to [00:11:00] use your alcoholism to convert you to their weird cult.

Malcolm Collins: We can get into this in a whole other video, but it is a convincing evangeletic tool. And I think that even better tools could be built that focus on those communities.

Even Scientologists figured this out. I mean, if you look at one of the things that Scientologists focused on was like addiction centers and alcohol rehabilitation centers. Because that is where you could sort of stamp someone into these harder iterations of your cultural tradition.

Simone Collins: Well now, there must be a bunch of cults out there that use rock bottom to convert people that like host halfway houses or something.

Are there not? There have to be.

Malcolm Collins: There are. There are, I mean, a lot of cults focus on these, these communities. And it's because it's effective. Now it's, it's interesting that it is often groups that you and I, like if we were evangelizing a belief system, we would be less interested in doing. I mean, one of the, one of the things that everybody hates about Keopolis is the concept of the elect.

That, that. We have and that we have our [00:12:00] current iteration of that belief. But the, the core aspect of that is, is we don't believe that winning all people to our way of thinking is equally valuable. Right. And the very fact that somebody is at rock bottom means they are of lower utility to us than other individuals.

And I would prefer that my kids never hit rock bottom for me to convince them of a cultural practice. And I, Would also prefer, you know, as we bring people in that there, I hate to say it, but like the amount of utility we get from a person is correlated with their level of, you know, the level to which they have their life together, the level to which they're an intellectual list.

And what's really cool with the. Rock bottom people that these faiths do do is they can build them back up, but building them back up requires a preexisting sort of, cultural set of support networks. Now the Mormon thing is really interesting because that is how your friends were evangelizing to you.

They were taking you to Mormon community events. God, I love [00:13:00] them. Yeah. They being smart Mormons knew that that's how Mormons, I think today, most frequently converted.

Simone Collins: Well, it might have converted me if I were the type of person who actually wanted to be around people.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, yeah. You intentionally hate being around people.

And

Simone Collins: yeah, it's horrible. But like, if, if I'm a normal person and I don't want to feel alone and I don't want to feel isolated and I was exposed to that, I would immediately be like, Oh, the solution is so easy. I just convert. I just joined the LDS church.

Malcolm Collins: And this is really interesting to me where we've had another video on this.

about the genetics of religion. And this is how you can get genetic vortexes where if Mormonism is disproportionately converting people who are, extroverts, like really out there. They like being around people that Mormons are going to be more extroverted on average than a cultural group like ours.

which is like intensely introverted. I mean, Scrooge is the typical Calvinist, right? From, from the Scottish. Bah

Simone Collins: humbug, ladies and gentlemen.

Malcolm Collins: What? Bah humbug. Bah humbug, right? [00:14:00] Yeah. But you know, so, so I, I I see that. So let's talk about other arguments that I have found very uncompelling, or, or, or first I want to give you a way of framing this question in your head, if you're a religious person.

Think about other religions that have come close to converting you, and if another religion has never come close to converting you, then look to see if they use arguments and apologetics that mirror your arguments and apologetics that you are frequently using. So an example here that I frequently see Christians use is look at all of the things the Bible predicted, right?

Okay. It must be a true book. It must be a divinely inspired book because it was able to predict so many things that were going to happen in the future. The problem is, is that Muslims say the same thing.

Simone Collins: Yeah, I mean it's just, it's one of those like Nostradamus things where like you can kind of make anything work, [00:15:00] right?

Malcolm Collins: Well, I would say that some of the things that people will claim the Bible can be predicted are very compelling, right? You can look up videos on it, look at the debates on this. Making me think. But I would say that they are not more compelling.

Oh. Then the things that the Koran predicted, and that's the problem is you need to look to see if the other side is using a similar argument and then ask yourself when you look and you say people saying, well, the Koran is accurate because it predicted all these things in the future. Why did you dismiss that when you looked at that and you just said, no, I dismiss this.

Why did you dismiss it? Did you dismiss it because you just were not going to be convinced by that type of argument? Then what that means, the secular people won't be convinced by that type of argument. Or, did you dismiss it because they did a bad job arguing for it? And then find out exactly how they did a bad job arguing for it, so you don't [00:16:00] make those same mistakes in your own evangel evangeletics.

Another example of how this method can be used. Is if a tool in your evangelism is personal experiences that. At the divine, for example. You prayed to God and he revealed himself to you, or you had some experience with God. Then look at people who use personal experiences of the define to justify other phase. Go through different iterations of that for the. Experiences that you find most compelling.

And that are most likely to convince you to switch phase, because those will be the experience of the divine within your own faith.

That will be most likely to get those from outside your face to switch face.

Malcolm Collins: What I will say, Is I have never heard of this model of evangelization working on somebody. The, my book is true because it predicted things in the future seems to only work within it is like an inter community circle jerk. It doesn't seem to work or, [00:17:00] or strengthening the face of people within the community.

It, it doesn't seem to be very effective on people outside of the community. Well, it

Simone Collins: seems to me like it's one of those things that wouldn't be a good conversion mechanism because if that level of just like, Oh my gosh, data could change someone's mind, then they would be too capricious to stick to any religion.

Like it wouldn't be. A high retention tactic, because then all you have to do is find some other weird data set from some other belief system and it would theoretically convince this person to switch over. We also have to look at groups like the flat earthers who, you know, pretend to be very data driven, but then, you know, when presented with.

Pretty compelling data even from their own experiments. They're like, well, I'm not convinced. So well,

Malcolm Collins: I do think it can be compelling for inter family retention. I

Simone Collins: think it's just one of those things that you like. Do you remember when you, I had to write essays in college or high school before, before chat GPT did this [00:18:00] for everyone.

And you had just sort of, you had your thesis already and then you just had to hunt down additional supporting arguments because you were supposed to have three or something in your stupid essay. So then you would just hunt down additional, like, and here's another reason why I was suddenly convinced to do this thing.

And so it wasn't. That you actually believed it. You just needed additional things that seemed like kind of sufficiently plausible, right? So it's not, I really don't think it's a genuinely compelling argument

Malcolm Collins: to anyone. You've never had it used on you, clearly. No. And you haven't dug into it. I've dug into it.

I can see how it could be compelling if you already believe the religious structure, but for the same reason that you are dismissing it when Muslims do it? That's why secular people are going to dismiss it when you do it. Yeah. An argument that has always actually been pretty compelling to me. That was one of the most compelling when I was younger, which is the, well, you know, you get an eternal reward if you follow our religion.

If you don't, there's nothing right. So even if it's only an infinitesimally small probability, forget the name of this argument

[00:19:00] It's Pascal's wager.

Malcolm Collins: but

infinitesimally small probability that it's true that, that you should believe it. The problem is, is that other religions exist. Right. And so then I'm like, well, so then how am I choosing among the religions that all claim to offer this to me?

The other problem with this argument is that it assumes that the opposite of religious inspired like reason to exist is a nihilistic reason to exist. Whereas I would say I never had a nihilistic perspective on reality. Do you know

Simone Collins: what this reminds me of? You know, that scene in the mummy

Lord, protecting Bach over me As a shepard batures over his flock Come on drill Sne Snake on the edge Ch Half on e Knock

Okay [00:20:00] Chow Chow, who's that? Bow wow wow! Chow

Simone Collins: I feel like that's kind of what you're describing here.

Just like keep switching

Malcolm Collins: around. Yeah. Well, no, I, it is, it is, well, and I think it's, it's probably not a compelling reason from a, like, if you look at how religion is structured, if you're like, well, I got into this religion so I could get into heaven. Yeah. Well, that almost is self canceling.

Yeah. And honestly, when I think back to what religion used to be in the past, you know, why people were part of it, it was because of the community cohesion and amenities.

And also you like, weren't allowed to not be a part of that religion. I don't think it was necessarily like, oh, I know I'm going to go. I mean, definitely. Internal punishment played a role in people's adherence to religion, but the reason they were part of those religions was that was the community. That was the dominating culture.

It wasn't this vague threat because they had a ton of other options.

And other similar logical argument is the cosmological argument. This is .

The argument where you say, well, then [00:21:00] what created the universe? What was the reason for the universe existing? , This argument feels very compelling if you're coming at it from a religious standpoint, like if you already believe in God, However, if you don't believe in God, your immediate and reflexive response to this argument is. Well, you can't just say, okay, what created the universe?

And God created the universe. Cause then you have to ask, well then what created God? Now this doesn't feel to a person who already believes in God, like a good response to the argument because they see God as being something. Wholly different than like the way the universe operates. However it is immediately.

What's going to come to mind in a secular person's brain so much so that I have never heard of anyone converting to Christianity or any religion because of the cosmological argument. , and I have never seen it being discussed as a particularly compelling argument within secular circles. , so I totally forgot about it while I was creating this video. And so it's just E [00:22:00] regardless of its. , internal consistency or logical strength.

It is not a good tool for conversion. It's almost like reading Bible passages to someone to try to convert them. Of course, from your perspective, if you already within a faith. Those are a very compelling source of evidence, but to somebody outside of the faith, they're just. Random words basically, same with the cosmological argument.

It is incredibly compelling to people who already are with interfaith, but incredibly uncompelling to people who are not already within a faith. Well, well, another thing that really drives people away from religion is when people are like, Oh, well, you know, I'll be laughing when you're burning in hell or whatever, right? Like what you actually see with a lot of these communities, they think that they can like.

Malcolm Collins: I don't know, be spite driven to get someone to convert. And this just only makes you look like a crazy person and like completely sociopathic and does not look like, like portray well the religious system. And now what's interesting is that this argument [00:23:00] is one. that I mostly hear from just Evangelical Protestants.

Like, I don't see that from Mormons and stuff like that. Like, there isn't the, I will take pleasure in you being punished when you're wrong about this. But I suspect it's a mechanism that is mostly used to keep people in this thing inter, inter family. Because when you have looked down on people as, like, stupid for having other belief systems, you're maybe less...

likely to deconvert, but the problem is, is it may have worked historically, but if you look at the rates that people are leaving the church now, it's clearly not working right now. Now a system that works really good for conversion where I've seen bringing people into a faith or back into a faith is after a loss, like the loss of a loved one or something like that.

And this seems to be tied to like the rock bottom moment thing and keep in mind that we already have a lot of ceremonies that are. adjacent to this. So most people when they're having their funeral, it's, it's at a religious institution, right? Right. When they're having their like this is an opportunity [00:24:00] to pass on these ideals to somebody.

And so I've seen that be pretty good at converting people. You

Simone Collins: know, another way to put this is when you need something to be true, you can be converted to a religion. Like when you really need to believe that. Your lost loved one has gone to heaven and you'll be reunited, or you really need to believe that there's something more to life than, you know, what you are experiencing now, I think that's when you're uniquely likely to convert and people who've just had a loved one die or have hit rock bottom are more likely to be in that category.

Yeah. They need it to be true. It's not where they're convinced. It's where they, they're, they are ready. They will happily convince themselves if they have an easy enough template to work with.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And so cultural arguments work really good. Whereas logical arguments like emotional and cultural arguments are high tier at converting.

Whereas very low [00:25:00] tier are logical, logical and

Simone Collins: threatening. So this is why real Calvinists as we would define them have just. ceased

Malcolm Collins: to really exist. They were almost completely utilized logic to try to convert people. It's true. Even today, the Calvinist evangelists are just like completely like logical structure driven.

Well, it's true. It's just a, a thing was the tradition and it's why the tradition was always so prone. You know, again, you look at the Calvinist during the colonial time, they were doing things like crossing out in their books. All of the parts that they thought disagreed with modern science and stuff like that.

Right. Like. It was incredibly, it makes it incredibly susceptible to changing secular patterns but, but it makes it also incredibly unsusceptible to immoral action. Where I think historically, if you look at the groups that were generally the most morally upstanding they're typically the groups that, that had these belief systems.

But so there are like a good site, like people would be like, why do you follow it if it's so weak in this one way? And it's like, [00:26:00] well, because like, I know when, you know, for example, when slavery was going on in the South, like my family was standing up for that. They were fighting against it. They were putting themselves at risk every day.

They were the ones who immediately left the cities and set up guerrilla operations. And, and that's a very rare thing. And it's something that I hope to preserve. It's something that I think to an extent we are doing right now as people with, you know, high level degrees and stuff like that and making ourselves essentially unemployable by being publicly conservative outside of anything we do for ourselves.

It's, it's really, and unfundable by many VCs. But, um, the most compelling argument I have seen work, and we've mentioned this in the other video, but I think it's really important that people note this, is just going to them and pointing out what's happening in the secular world, which is the ultimate cultural argument.

Simone Collins: This is interesting because this is also associated with one of the most compelling and effective political campaigns that that took place in [00:27:00] terms of converting voters for a particular candidate that was tested in a peer reviewed way was a message that did not say anything bad about the opponents or anything good about the candidate of choice, but rather just say, here are.

Basically the Republicans in office right now, here's what they've done. Simple, no, no images or anything, just like just that text. And that was enough to convince people. So to your point, just saying like, Hey, here's what's happening. With the counterfactual, like here's our default. Are you going to do something

Malcolm Collins: with side rate right now?

Here's the mental health rate in the progressive community. Here's the, you, you just cite it all. And it is really compelling that whatever they're doing isn't working. And as I said, with engine Z, I have seen this to be an incredibly compelling argument, but it is. Interesting because it's not the argument that many evangelists were taught to use because it historically was not a usable argument.

It's only really been a feasible [00:28:00] argument for like the past 15 years or so. You previously, they could say things like, look at that secular world having all that free sex. I bet they're really unhappy about that. But if you were like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, where was this where you said I could get all this easy sex?

Yeah. Now, you know, 10, 20 years on, you're like, look at all these people whose lives have been actually destroyed. Like, this seems to not work in the way that everyone said it would work. Where they're like, well, if you just do whatever you want, whenever you want, so long as it doesn't hurt other people and you devote your life to reducing suffering in the world population and you will be affirmed for being whoever you want to be.

That these things are going to lead to a productive and happy life. And it's like, well, clearly we now have the data when that group is the dominant cultural group in society. And we can see it's demonstrably worse at just about everything in regards to mental health. So, that's, that's can be really compelling.

And then you're like, yeah, but then they don't [00:29:00] really believe the religious stuff, right? Like, I haven't really convinced them. I've convinced them to follow traditions, but I think you'd be surprised how easy it is to sort of fall in with the belief system once you're following the traditions. You look at the religious system that Simone and I sort of built for our family And we 100 percent believe it now, right?

Like we are sold into the idea of like the inevitable God. The, the the omniscience, the future police, all this stuff. Like we are bought into it. However, whatever word you want to use for it. And. We love it. Like it works really well, but it was completely constructed by us. And that shows how, just by following even a set of like rules and structures that we built for ourselves, and we know we built for ourselves and we know that we invented just thinking, okay, what's the most compelling way we can structure this that we end up actually believing it, like that's just how the human mind works now, people could say, well.

If you know you invented it, why because our belief system says that we would have [00:30:00] been inspired to create it by the actual deity. So it was a divine revelation, even if we think that we were just being creative and trying to come up with the most creative way, because that's the way it would have convinced us to see the truth, but it's, it, it, it works on us, but really what.

Converted us was, all of the rituals was the way that we related to daily events through this religious lens. Yeah. And that was convinced by a cultural argument that came to us ourselves. So you could say, okay, well. How do I end up with somebody not ending up like you guys, right? Like, how do I end up, I could go to them and say, look, whatever the secular world is doing, isn't working.

But you know, how do I convince my kids not to just go out on their own and try to create something totally new like you guys did? And I actually think that the probability of this happening is incredibly low. It's low because, like, we're doing this because we are from a very specific, in our thing on, like, how religion and genetics co evolve.

We are from a very specific genetic [00:31:00] vortex, which is a very weird one that has historically done this. Read the Puritan spotting thing by Starslight Codex, where he's like,

One of the ways you know one of these people is they're constantly trying to create new religious traditions. So, yeah, no, it's, it's just a normal thing that our cultural group does, but if I came from a cultural group that was more aligned with like a Catholic worldview or an Orthodox worldview or a Jewish worldview, it would be, I think, tremendously easy to convert me into those worldviews using those cultural arguments.

It's just that there is no religious tradition that is really common in the world today that aligns with my personal predilections and world perspectives. So I was wondering if you had any final thoughts.

Simone Collins: No but I, I do, I do think that amenities is what I think is most convincing by a long shot and by amenities, I mean like the community, the lifestyle, the experience, what you get, be [00:32:00] it a spouse or friends or company or a sense of meaning and belonging.

I don't think it's.

Malcolm Collins: Anything else? Well, dating markets are really important. Yeah, dating markets. That's, yeah. We know people who converted to Mormonism just because they couldn't find a husband and they're like, okay, this seems to be the best way to find a husband today. And I think that this is going to become increasingly common, which means that you as a religious tradition do need to be building a functional and healthy dating market can be an incredible conversion tool.

Yeah. But you need to focus on it. You know, you need to really put in the infrastructure for that and, and, and then evangelize how well it works because people will come for that.

Simone Collins: I also think a really important thing to note is that up until extremely recently, Religion was not something you could choose.

It was something that you had to live with. And it was part of the framework of your reality, your community, and your life. So there was no other alternative. Now that we live in a world in which there are [00:33:00] so many alternatives, again, that's why I'm so obsessed with amenities. It's about the amenities. If people can choose, they're going to choose the one that leads to the best life and the best outcomes.

That's it. And well, okay, either. So if they're going to choose a hard religion, they're going to choose someone with the best life and outcomes that, or they're just going to go so soft in like of all the religion. All together and just sort of die off. So,

Malcolm Collins: yeah, well, and this is why we take sort of the elitist like approach where we're not, you know, we're not going

Simone Collins: after the soft people.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, if you are primarily targeting you know, people at rock bottom situations and stuff like that, it will create the wider stream cultural perception that people don't want to be a part of that group, right? Like, oh, that's a low status group. Whereas if you make it difficult to convert difficult to claim to be a part of the group and you target like really high tier, whether they're earners or intellectuals or anything like that you will have that veneer of in, in penetrability as well as, and [00:34:00] status, as well as a value to your kids of like, why would I leave this cultural tradition if it's so hard to convert into it?

This is something Jews have done really well historically. You know, the, the turning away a person three times when they try to convert and stuff like that. Yeah. Yeah. Well, any other thoughts?

Simone Collins: I would just say the only other thing that really matters is your original point that I want to hammer home, which is this is about really converting your kids.

And that there doesn't seem to be from the evidence you looked at, at least when doing when writing the pragmatist guide to crafting religion. That suggests that growth through evangelism works growth through providing cultural amenities does, which is why groups that, for example, ran orphanages or schools had fresh converts, even if they didn't have children like through their family structures, because they didn't believe in sex or something.

But this, you know, conversion is not really a meaningful way to grow. Even when you look at some of the most evangelistic. Religions like the Mormon and religion where we have people going on on missions, they're not durably [00:35:00] converting that many people ultimately through their missions. Now they are through like I would say, cultural ambassadorship.

But that is a very different thing. So I would just say that that's the other thing is that. If you are interested in conversion because you think that is the only way that your religion is going to grow, then you need to just start providing some incredibly needed amenity to a group that is otherwise being abandoned by society because that seems to be the only way that, that conversion has worked at scale for groups that are not.

Growing primarily through reproduction, right?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, I think show them with your better life, you know? And so what she's mentioning is we ran the numbers with, with Mormons because these Mormons will say, well, we converted this many people a year, but that includes people who like you know, said, oh, I converted so they can use the Mormon soccer field.

Right.

So then we tried to look at people who are actually still tithing after a certain period of time, because we were trying to see like, okay, do these people actually stay in the church? And the number, they're just incredibly low.

In fact, I would argue that more people [00:36:00] deconvert because of their mission trip that are converted because of a mission trip. I think that's safe to say, yeah. The biggest flaw in the Mormon faith right now is actually the mission structure, and that if they focused more on this wholesome community building, they would do better.

This is one of the problems that the evangelical Christians and the Calvinists also had is that they created very, I mean, Footloose is basically about like tell the people who don't even let their children dance, right? Like it's it's it's it was had a very bad image in terms of cultural amenities

They were just seen as as rich and stoogey, right?

Simone Collins: No fun. Yeah, they wouldn't even enjoy their money. What was the

Malcolm Collins: point? Yeah, you know evan either scrooge being the typical stereotype. It was in this this community. Which we talk a lot about in the book and we provide a lot of evidence for a lot of people who like aren't familiar with cultural stereotypes thinks he's supposed to be Jewish when he's like from Scotland very clearly he's not but yeah so and he doesn't fit any of the other Jewish stereotypes but he fits almost every Calvinist stereotype

Who were much [00:37:00] more common during the period when the book was written

I should also point this out because people not familiar with Calvin history. Texts may not know this, but Ebeneezer is the classical Calvinist name. If you're talking about Calvinist stereotypes, to the extent we're in the Puritan spotting checklist, I've mentioned earlier that Scott Alexander did. One of the points is how many male relative somebody has with the name. Ebenezer. It would be like naming a character. Levi Goldstein.

Malcolm Collins: but so that did really bad like like Calvinism as a tradition is almost Perfectly, poorly structured to convert people using cultural arguments, but so is evangelical Christianity.

Like they did a pretty bad job outside of their big events and stuff like that, which is why the iterations of it that are growing most right now are the mega churches and stuff, which provide this totally unique experience which I think appeals to you know, a specific desire was in people that is very different than the desire that was fed by historic, austere the type of people who were, were grossed out [00:38:00] by opulence and big displays of really anything which I think we would fall into.

Now there was a final thing I wanted to say here, because I thought it was really interesting in what you were touching on. It was Mormons, I want to say. Yeah, well, I was going to say the other thing I've noticed within Mormons, and this could be a whole different video, is I've noticed that one of the reasons their culture is collapsing so quickly right now, because they are falling really quickly in terms of fertility rates, in terms of deconversions, is this extraversion that the community was selecting for, that we mentioned for earlier in this, created a sort of a I'd say probably even a genetic predilection due to the people who they were disproportionately converting to be really susceptible to things that like social media status games.

It created a community that as soon as social media penetrated that community, as soon as the, especially the wives within this community began to be able to play these social media status games. It was. Incredibly unresistant to this less so than literally any [00:39:00] cultural tradition in the world, and that's why it went from being one of the stronger cultural traditions to one of the weaker cultural traditions.

I don't think it had anything to do with the culture itself. I just think it had been selecting intergenerationally for extroversion and community status games in a way that was much more aggressive than other cultural groups. And then when people were able to masturbate these instincts, And that's true.

In, in really unhealthy ways through social media, it hit that community really hard.

Simone Collins: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Malcolm Collins: Which is interesting because our community would be one of the most resistant to social media, which may provide an avenue for us growing again, specifically because of that. But I mean, there's not many of the people was, I guess, the genetic predilection to even like the type of.

Theological structure that we're pitching. So it would stay small for now

Simone Collins: for a while. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Anyway, love you to death Simone. And I do hope that people are able to use this to convert [00:40:00] people more effectively. And to hopefully do a better job at evangelizing to your kids. You know, as we say, the first 18 years of a kid's life are your chance to pitch your culture to them.

And if you don't do a good job, they're going to leave. Exactly. And then your culture will die, your traditions will die,

Simone Collins: and your people will die. Everyone you've ever loved will disappear to history. Everything that every ancestor before you has worked to do will be for nothing. Okay,

Malcolm Collins: bye everyone!

Simone Collins: Bye!

Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe