Memetics regards religion itself as memetic, and Richard Dawkins has often discussed religion.
Some fundamentalist evangelical religious movements act
predominantly to swell the reach of their faith-meme. These movements
devote a large amount of time to evangelical activity.
Many of the world's most successful religions demonstrate memetic
modification over time — the theologies of the 21st century differ to a
greater or lesser extent from the theologies of previous centuries.
Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Mormonism (and their descendants) have
all developed through variation, modification and memetic recombination
from a shared monotheistic meme: Zoroastrianism appears to have
functioned as an important and widely-shared religious ancestor (see
Lawrence Mills, Our Own Religion in Ancient Persia, Chicago, 1913),
contributing through Judaism to Christianity, Islam and their many
derivative religions.
The Religious Right in the United States of America attaches
conservative political views to Christian religious evangelism (“meme
piggybacking”), and fundamentalist Christianity has associated a
particular set of politico-social ideas/memeplexes with a separate set
of religious ideas/memeplexes that have “replicated” very effectively
for many centuries. For other examples of piggybacking involving
religious memes, note the conversion-histories of the Hungarians and of
Kievan Rus': adoption of Catholicism and Orthodoxy respectively
entailed perceived cultural, political and diplomatic benefits and
adherence to perceived mainstream civilization.
In Western countries, universities evolved from medieval religious
institutions devoted to learning. Of the nine colonial colleges in the
British colonies of North America, eight had affiliations with
religious institutions. Many US colleges separated themselves from
their seminaries, because the First Amendment to the United States
Constitution prevents federal funding of religious organizations. One
can think of American academia as an offshoot religion that eliminated
less adaptive memes (beliefs in the supernatural) in response to a
selective pressure (funding restrictions).
A tendency exists in memetics to disparage religious memes,
beginning at least as early as Dawkins's openly-expressed atheism.
(Dawkins in The God Delusion (2006) calls all religious memes “mind
viruses”.) Author Neal Stephenson speculates that traditional religions
act as mental immune systems to suppress new (and potentially harmful)
memes. Some compare this process to a scenario where the action of a
virus (here a religion or a “bundle” of religious memes) proves
ineffective and maladaptive if it kills its host(s), or to where the
presence of less-harmful bacteria on the skin prevent infection by
more-harmful organisms. For example, popular Christianity forbids both
murder and suicide, and its precise definitions of heresy ensure that
properly-educated Christians have difficulty in accepting new religions
or new viewpoints which advocate such actions.
Susan Blackmore has made a case that the study of Zen meditation in
itself comprises a process of meme “pruning”, i.e., a means to remove
experiential clichés that reduce the value of life. This has not
exempted Zen itself from serving as a source of highly mobile memes,
such as “the sound of one hand clapping” koan or exclaiming “mu”.
Daniel Dennett used the idea of religion as a meme (or as a set of
memes) as a basis for much of his analysis of religion in his book
Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon.
Personal and intangible experiences which might seem “above” memes
may rather have subconscious roots in memes absorbed during a lifetime.
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