The Meme Machine

RELIGIONS AS MEMEPLEXES 193
compliance, and they used the beauty, truth and altruism tricks to help their
spread. That is why they are still with us, and why millions of people’s
behaviour is routinely controlled by ideas that are either false or completely
untestable.
No one designed these great faiths with all their clever tricks. Rather, they
evolved gradually by memetic selection. But nowadays people deliberately use
memetic tricks to spread religions and make money. Their techniques of
memetic engineering are derived from long experience and research, and are
similar to those used in propaganda and marketing; with radio, television and the
Internet, their memes can spread far further and faster than ever before. Billy
Graham’s style of tele-evangelism is a good example. He starts by evoking fear,
reminding people of all the terrible things happening in the world and of their
own impotence and mortality. He presents science as having no answers and as
a cause of the world’s ills, and then persuades people to surrender to the allpowerful
God who is their only hope of salvation. The experience of surrender
raises powerful emotions and people turn to God in huge numbers.
Other evangelists use healing to spread the Word. ‘We have seen how
perfectly normal psychological processes can make people feel better, even
when they are not actually cured, and this is a powerful incentive to take on the
God memes that often accompany the healing. The trip to Lourdes is expensive
and difficult. Expectations are high. Spiritualist healers are kind and plausible,
and really do seem to care about your troubles.
Some use fake healing. In the 1980s, Peter Popoff and his wife Elizabeth
brought millions of Americans to God, and millions of dollars to the Popoffs,
through their healing missions. Their vast audiences sang and prayed, and
watched seriously ill people stagger onto the stage, raising powerful emotions as
the Popoffs appealed for donations. As Peter correctly diagnosed illnesses and
announced the sufferers cured, people forgot that an hour before Elizabeth had
wandered through the audience collecting prayer cards on which people write
their names, addresses, ailments and other crucial facts. She took these to the
computer database backstage and beamed the information to a receiver behind
Peter’s left ear (Stein 1996).
Miracles of all kinds have been used to convert unbelievers. Jesus walked on
water and brought a dead man back to life, nineteenth-century spiritualist
mediums created spirit forms made of ‘ectoplasm’, and the advanced
practitioners of transcendental meditation claim to levitate. Some people