“We Pretend We Are Christians”
By STEPHEN J. DUBNERThe Freakonomics e-mail inbox constantly produces interesting material. Like this one, from a reader we’ll call G.D.:
I loved your books! I have found my thoughts drifting to some of the subjects over the past few days, especially altruism and apathy. I was curious if any of the experiments took into account the subjects’ religious beliefs. I don’t know how one would logistically test that but it would be interesting to see how those claiming to follow a religious doctrine teaching altruism would do in the tests.
This thought led to another about myself. How would I do in the tests? We are agnostics living deep in the heart of Texas and our family fakes Christianity for social reasons. It’s not so much for the sake of my husband or myself but for our young children. We found by experience that if we were truthful about not being regular church attenders, the play dates suddenly ended. Thus started the faking of the religious funk.................
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