The class will please come to order. Our text today is “The Law of Cultural Dominance,” formulated by David Kaplan in Cultural Evolution, published fifty-two years ago, and noticed too little since. I find online that I quoted it in a scholarly article in 1977 and noted a couple of other citations through the decades. We happy few who profited from it have an insight which helps explain much in religious change. Here it is: “That cultural system which more effectively exploits the energy resources of a given environment will tend to spread in that environment at the expense of less effective systems.”<\/p>\n
In the United States, Pentecostals, conservative evangelicals, African American, Latino\/Latina Americans, Latter-Day Saints, Korean Protestants, and other prospering religious groups know this Law without having read Kaplan. For one illustration: the energy resources associated with mass media\u201d\u201dradio, TV, movies, and now the internet are available to all, but mainly the kind of groups I mentioned have “exploited” them efficiently….<\/p>\n