the craziness of religious beliefs can function as a barometer for how strong the community is—how tightly it’s able to circle around its sacred center, how strongly it rewards members for showing loyalty by suppressing good taste and common sense. The particular strangeness of Mormon beliefs, for example, testifies to the exceptional strength of the Mormon moral community. To maintain such stigmatizing beliefs in the modern era, in the face of science, the news media, and the Internet, is quite the feat of solidarity.
