To this point I think that you pull out the other possible variables that cause such harmful behavior well enough. I also agree that McGrath’s book does a very nice job of using the same atheist rhetorical style (I have engaged in more of these debates with atheists in the Atheist v. Christian Google group than I can ennumerate and McGrath nails the style perfectly).

I would recommend something a little more old-school and that is H. Richard Niebuhr’s Social Sources of Denominationalism where he discusses the difference in religious belief between the poorer and more marginal groups and the majority class that legislates what is normative. The former will tend towards more sectarian and literalist interpretations that lend a more “fundamentalist/reasonless/hyperstrict” belief system. The latter tend towards a root in education as the means of religious transmission. The former comes from the pulpit and the latter comes from the classroom.

So with the sect-church analysis that goes on well after Niebuhr, I think there are striking parallels between how a socially marginal person will tend to believe and behave more militantly versus an educated elite who will appropriate the margins of purity very differently.

To infer one more step it seems that the real cause is not religious belief or the kind of religious belief. Religious belief is more or less a given in most cultures to some degree. But the kind of behaviors that one exhibits in a religious worldview seem to be dependent on social issues that the religious behavior functions within. The problem seems to be the resources one has to live (housing, food, freedoms of speech and so forth). The more limited they become, the more exclusionary the religious behavior can become and be reinforced by those social conditions.

Now there are certainly a lot of rich folks who behave with equally rigid religious boundaries. But there again, I think we have to look at the social constructs first and the religious behavior second. And this is where the emergent church can do something quite tangible. By focusing on the social forces, the religious environment and behaviors can be held in different conditions that will promote different directions of development for those religious behaviors.

Drew Tatusko