The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 31: Conclusion

In conclusion, religious beliefs—and organized group religion in particular—have been part of human civilization for thousands of years. Culturally, religion can bring real benefits: it helps communities gather to celebrate and to grieve, to contemplate morality, to show gratitude, and to meditate. Religious faith is consolidated by human tendencies to be loyal—to family, to ingroups, to longstanding beliefs learned and practiced since childhood, and to idealized figures—with God for many believers functioning as an inner representation of perfect goodness, power, or protection. Religions are further consolidated by many of the most enjoyable and meaningful human activities: a great deal of the world’s art, music, literature, and architecture is rooted in religion. Religions also help many people cope with the deepest, most painful, and most frightening experiences of life, such as facing the deaths of our loved ones, or facing our own mortality.  Some of the greatest human leaders, standing for peace, justice, and a better society, have been religious leaders. And religious services can be a medium through which people meet friends or potential partners, sometimes with a better-than-average chance of meeting someone with whom they might share values, also with that person in some sense vetted by the church community. The congregation itself can even act as a kind of village matchmaker.

For all of these reasons, I do not think society presently has good secular alternatives to religion taken as a whole. We have secular versions of pieces of it—music, psychotherapy, volunteer organizations, civic ceremonies, lectures, support groups, sports clubs, humanitarian projects—but not many institutions that gather together, in one place and over generations, family history, ancestry, ritual, moral reflection, structured weekly services, practical community support, beautiful buildings, shared songs, and common knowledge. Religion has had thousands of years to root itself in calendars, holidays, funerals, weddings, neighbourhoods, and family memory. Because of that, I do not think it is practical—or usually wise—to speak as though religion could simply be replaced, or as though it should be discouraged wholesale.

But none of this changes my main thesis. Religions and other spiritual or mystical systems still hold beliefs that are not literally true. This is where the problem lies: not that people gather, sing, grieve, serve, reflect, and care for one another, but that these healthy and meaningful practices are so often fastened to false claims about reality. These beliefs are often taken literally, and dogmatic adherence to them—public profession of them, loyalty to them—is frequently required as a sign of belonging. Some of these fictions may be inconsequential much of the time; many people can live decent lives without a precise understanding of biology, astronomy, geology, genetics, or ancient history. But the darker side has to do with the extremity of group loyalty: ingroups and outgroups form, religion becomes an emblem of identity, and mistrust, exclusion, and maltreatment of outsiders can follow. Dogmatic pronouncements can also become oppressive to the group’s own members, particularly when people are pressured into literalistic interpretations of sacred texts, or when “faith” becomes a moral duty rather than an honest way of grappling with uncertainty. Furthermore, spiritual or mystical beliefs about causality can lead to dangerously poor judgment about important life decisions, yet the spiritually guided person can feel supremely confident while making these decisions.

The lack of accurate education about the way the world works is finally detrimental to any individual, group, or nation. It is like a pilot of an airplane who does not understand how the engines work, and assumes that planes fly due to magic. Most of the time this may not seem to make much difference to the safety and navigation of the plane—until the weather changes, until something unexpected happens, until you need a sober understanding of what is real in order to respond well. A culture can coast for a long time on comforting stories. It is when conditions become difficult that false models show their true cost.

So I think it is valuable that we live lives in which we strive toward understanding deep truths—about ourselves and about the world—and that we do not settle too easily for fictional belief simply because it is comforting. I would distinguish very clearly between respecting religion as culture, and giving institutional privilege to dogma. It is particularly troubling to me for children to be indoctrinated with rigid beliefs, especially if they are not also exposed to accurate information about the world in terms of science, history, and culture. And it remains troubling to me that there should be public financial support for religious groups, in the form of tax breaks and other privileges, unless these are clearly restricted to the charitable components of religious outreach rather than the promotion of dogma or political influence.

We certainly know that holding religious belief is not necessary to be a moral, kind, loving, gentle, humble person. In fact, in some cases religious beliefs can obstruct these positive qualities and add to the world’s problems. And it is possible to face the most difficult aspects of human life—grief, loss, pain, and death—while behaving honourably, peacefully, and nobly, without requiring belief in some eternal reward. In fact, moral behaviour done for its intrinsic good, rather than being motivated by fear of punishment or hunger for reward, seems to me a deeper ethical foundation. Such a stance does not require religion, but it does require effort: working on living well, striving to become a better person, and trying to be a stabilizing and humane influence on others.

In discussing religion, it is important to empathize with people who hold religious or spiritual beliefs. Respectful understanding of how and why people believe as they do matters—especially if the goal is genuine dialogue rather than tribal combat. This matters all the more if one hopes that religious culture itself can move in a healthier direction. It is also valuable to search for common ground, particularly with regard to values. Most religious people value integrity, loyalty, altruism, compassion, truthfulness, lawful behaviour, fairness, family, care of children, hard work, and the willingness to stand up for what is right even at risk to oneself. In a discussion about religious belief, it can help to emphasize these shared values, because it appeals to unity rather than escalating the feeling that one is an outgroup member disrespecting a sacred tradition.

And that brings me back to the question that started many of these reflections: how to face transience without leaning on supernatural reassurance. I sometimes think of simple things: a firework, a meal, a fire, a cup of hot tea. These things are transient; they disappear. Yet their constituents are still present—they have merely dissolved and dispersed into the surrounding space in a different form. The structure ends; the ingredients remain, rearranged, carried away by a current of increasing entropy. We can’t expect the cup of tea to survive unchanged forever, and we can’t expect the firework to glitter permanently. In fact, it is normal—and even required for its enjoyment—that it be transient. A lot of religion tries to deny this, or to soften it with a story about eternity. I think there is another path: to accept that things end, to grieve honestly when they end, and still to love them fiercely while they are here.

At the same time, we should not belittle myth, ritual, reverence, or the imaginative life. We would not discourage people from reading novels or watching films. In fact, part of what makes such art powerful is our willingness to enter into it with imagination—with a kind of suspension of disbelief—so that it can enlarge our emotional and moral life. The fact that a story is fictional does not make it worthless; often fiction contains deep truths about human nature, morality, grief, courage, and love. But we do not take a novel as a literal account of astronomy, geology, or medicine. We do not treat a play as an infallible instruction manual for public morality. And we would not normally build rigid tribes around a work of fiction, declaring outsiders corrupt, impure, or damned because they cherish a different story. I think religion is healthiest when its myths are approached in something like this spirit: as powerful cultural stories, moral frameworks, poetic language, and shared rituals—not as literal science, not as a basis for hostility to outsiders, and not as a justification for suspending critical thought.

There are examples of keeping the healthiest aspects of religion—the focus on values, morality, kindness, altruism, charity, humility, meditative self-care, self-improvement and sincere amends-making, caring for and accepting care from community members, enjoying beautiful music, art, and architecture, and cultivating gratitude and reverence—while not becoming captive to narrow dogma, false beliefs about science, or denigration of outsiders. Some interfaith movements aim to cultivate peace and mutual respect across traditions. Some branches of modern religion are simply less dogmatic and more open to science and cultural pluralism. I think that is the direction to hope for. The task, in my opinion, is not to uproot religion, but to help move it away from dogma, away from tribalism, and toward universalism and humanitarianism. If religion is going to continue to shape family life, art, ritual, and common knowledge—and I think it will—then let it do so in a way that is humble before science, honest about uncertainty, and generous toward all human beings, not just the home tribe.

References

The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 28: Religion and Common Knowledge

Picture a crowded church at the moment the congregation rises to its feet. Each person hears the same words and sees the same gestures. Each person sees everyone else hearing them too. This is more than shared belief. It is belief made public, or what game theorists call common knowledge: not merely that everyone knows something, but that everyone knows that everyone knows it, and so on without end. A five-dollar bill has value only because I expect you to value it, you expect me to value it, and each of us assumes that strangers will value it as well; without that shared expectation it is just a piece of coloured paper. This is largely what ceremonies are for. A public rite works not only by sending a message from the altar to each person, but by letting each person see that everyone else received it at the same moment.

Religion is among the most powerful engines of common knowledge. A private belief is real but socially weak, because no one can see it; what ritual does, through spoken prayer, shared song, and the visible badges of membership, is turn “I believe” into “we can all see that we believe.” This matters because we are sensitive to being the odd one out, and the worst position of all is uncertainty—not knowing whether others believe, or whether others have noticed our own hesitation. Ritual removes the doubt. It is like signing a contract under a spotlight, with the whole room watching. And, as I argued earlier, the more costly and awkward the display, the harder it is to fake.

But the same logic explains the silences of social life as much as its ceremonies, because people do not always want a thing made common knowledge. A family may know perfectly well that one of its members is drinking himself to ruin, yet the talk glides around it for years, because once the words are said the knowledge becomes a fact everyone must act on. A congregation may be quietly full of doubt about a doctrine while each member, assuming the others are more convinced, says nothing—and the silence keeps up an appearance of unanimity that no one actually feels. A community often survives not by answering every question, but by managing which questions may be asked out loud.

The moment a doubt is spoken plainly, it stops being a private flicker and becomes a public event that demands a response. This is the whole force of The Emperor’s New Clothes: the child discovers nothing; he simply says aloud what everyone can already see, and so turns private knowledge into the far more dangerous public kind. This fairy tale reminds me of present-day partisan movements, in which many people surely harbour private misgivings about their own side’s conduct or its leaders, yet will not say so, because to speak would be to risk exile from the only community they have. But all partisan movements value heroism—for me, one essential component of heroism is the willingness to speak your private knowledge of the truth to a group that might, at least at first, reject you for it.

These effects travel along the lines of our friendships. Nicholas Christakis has shown that behaviour and mood spread through social networks—friend to friend to friend, out to about three degrees of separation—so that we are shaped by people we will never meet. A church congregation, seen this way, is a web of friendships with rituals attached. Few people are reasoned into faith; far more often a trusted friend draws them toward a group where belief is already on display. Doubt moves the same way in reverse—not usually through an argument, but through watching someone you respect begin to question the story. This is why religious authorities have always feared open dissent far more than private unbelief: the private doubter is containable, the visible one is contagious.

It is also why the “New Atheist” writers, such as Richard Dawkins, who treated religion as a set of false claims to be knocked down one by one, so often failed to move people: the thing they were attacking was not just an idea but a social world. To leave a faith is not merely to change your mind about the age of the earth; it is to risk becoming a stranger to your own people, and in the harshest communities to be cast out. The mind treats that as a real danger. It is also why some politicians perform piety their private lives do not support: the photograph with the holy book is aimed not at God but at the crowd. Common knowledge can make kindness visible, and it can do the same for contempt—a shared scorn for outsiders is far more dangerous than a private grudge, because cruelty comes easiest when made public, repeated together, and rewarded.

The secular approach to challenging religion cannot only be to refute supernatural claims. It is also to build other, non-religious ways of making our shared virtues visible to one another. Religion carries a rich fabric of shared ritual, one that can hold beauty, morality, memory, and belonging together at once. This is where secular life falls short.

References

Christakis, N. A., & Fowler, J. H. (2009). Connected: The surprising power of our social networks and how they shape our lives. Little, Brown.

— A synthesis of the authors’ research on social contagion, proposing the “three degrees of influence” rule: that behaviours, moods, and states—obesity, smoking, happiness, cooperation—spread through networks of friends to roughly three degrees of separation. How far this reflects genuine transmission rather than the clustering of similar people is still debated, but the broad claim that conduct is socially contagious is well supported.

 

Chwe, M. S.-Y. (2001). Rational ritual: Culture, coordination, and common knowledge. Princeton University Press.

— The foundational application of the game-theoretic idea of common knowledge to ceremony and ritual. Chwe argues that public rites—coronations, holidays, communal worship, even Super Bowl advertising—work not merely by conveying a message to each onlooker but by letting each onlooker see that all the others receive it at the same moment. 

 

Pinker, S. (2025). When everyone knows that everyone knows…: Common knowledge and the mysteries of money, power, and everyday life. Scribner.

— Pinker’s recent, book-length account of common knowledge: the difference between privately knowing something and everyone publicly, mutually acknowledging it. He shows how it underlies coordination (driving conventions, paper currency, rallying behind a leader), how we generate it through signals such as laughter, tears, and blunt speech, and how we often labour to avoid it through hypocrisy, innuendo, and declining to name the elephant in the room. 

 

Pinker, S., Nowak, M. A., & Lee, J. J. (2008). The logic of indirect speech. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(3), 833–838. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0707192105

— The peer-reviewed research behind that book’s account of indirect speech: a game-theoretic analysis of why people so often communicate through innuendo, euphemism, and the veiled request, arguing that indirection preserves “plausible deniability” and keeps mutually suspected facts from hardening into common knowledge. 

A note on sources (handled as references rather than formal citations): the concept of common knowledge was given its modern philosophical form by David Lewis in Convention (1969) and analysed in game theory by Thomas Schelling and Robert Aumann; The Emperor’s New Clothes is Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of 1837.

Next Chapter

The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 27: Consciousness

There are many unanswered questions about how the universe works, and part of the wonder of science is the recognition that for every advance in understanding there are always new horizons of the unknown to explore. One existential frontier, for me, has to do with consciousness. Whatever the eventual physical account of why we have conscious, subjective experience—of memory, drives, sensations, emotions—it remains to me genuinely miraculous that such experience occurs at all.

Philosophers have a name for the puzzle: the “hard problem” of consciousness, a term coined by David Chalmers to mark the gap between the “easy” problems, which concern how the brain performs its various functions, and the genuinely hard one, which is why all that functioning should be accompanied by an inner life at all—why the lights are on inside rather than the processing simply going on in the dark.

Consciousness exists on a continuum. It has plainly been sculpted by evolutionary forces, and it is subject to enormous variation: it is diminished or gradually altered by sleep, fatigue, anaesthesia, intoxicants, and neurological disease. None of that  dissolves the mystery; it only maps its edges.

It is worth considering whether consciousness might be a property of nature itself, rather than only of a nervous system such as the brain. This is the view philosophers call panpsychism—that experience, in some rudimentary form, is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world, out of which the rich consciousness of brains is composed. Religious traditions have their own versions of this intuition—the ancient “world-soul,” the Hindu Brahman, or, less precisely, the Christian Holy Spirit—though each points to something that wills and acts, where panpsychism claims only that experience pervades the world. But it is a minority position, and it faces hard objections. A cousin of the idea has entered neuroscience, in Giulio Tononi’s “integrated information theory,” which treats consciousness as a graded quantity present, in principle, wherever information is integrated.

Some scientists have gone further and proposed specific mechanisms. The great physicist Roger Penrose—working with the anaesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff—has argued that consciousness arises from quantum processes in the microtubules of neurons, in a theory they call orchestrated objective reduction. I find such theorizing genuinely interesting and worth following, but it is definitely a minority view. In any case, I am not sure the result would change my view of the matter. Even a precise and complete physical explanation would not lessen the miracle.

I find consciousness more miraculous than free will. Whether we possess genuine free will is contested, and may yet turn out to be an illusion; but the fact of having experience at all is the one thing that cannot be doubted—it is the rock Descartes was left standing on when everything else had been doubted away. So even if the universe were entirely deterministic—or superdeterministic, the more radical thesis, associated with the physicist Gerard ’t Hooft, that even our choices of what to measure are fixed in advance—there would still be human consciousness, and it would still deserve a feeling of wonder and awe.

Some would say that the phenomenon of consciousness is a manifestation of the divine. I can be at peace with that—perhaps even taking it as a definition of the word “divine.” It is close to what Spinoza meant by Deus sive Natura, “God, or Nature.” When Einstein was asked whether he believed in God, he answered that he believed in the God of Spinoza—the lawful harmony of what exists, rather than a deity who concerns himself with human affairs. If consciousness is what one chooses to call divine, then the divine is not a being standing above nature, but the astonishing fact that nature has come, in us, to experience itself.




References

 

Chalmers, D. J. (1995). Facing up to the problem of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2(3), 200–219. http://consc.net/papers/facing.html

— The paper that named the “hard problem” of consciousness, distinguishing the “easy” problems—how the brain discriminates, integrates information, and controls behaviour, all amenable to mechanistic explanation—from the hard one: why such processing is accompanied by subjective experience at all. Chalmers argues that no functional account closes this gap. 

 

Goff, P. (2019). Galileo’s error: Foundations for a new science of consciousness. Pantheon Books.

— The leading contemporary defence of panpsychism for a general readership. Goff argues that physical science achieved its power precisely by bracketing consciousness out of its picture of matter—Galileo’s “error”—and that treating experience as a fundamental property of the physical world is the most parsimonious response to the hard problem.

 

Koch, C. (2019). The feeling of life itself: Why consciousness is widespread but can’t be computed. MIT Press.

— An accessible presentation of integrated information theory by one of its foremost proponents, defending the view that consciousness is a graded, intrinsic property of any system whose information is sufficiently integrated—a scientifically framed cousin of panpsychism, with the striking implication that consciousness is far more widespread in nature than we assume.

 

Penrose, R. (1994). Shadows of the mind: A search for the missing science of consciousness. Oxford University Press.

— Penrose’s argument, drawing on Gödel’s theorem, that human mathematical understanding is non-computable and that consciousness must therefore involve physics beyond present theory; later developed, with the anaesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, into the orchestrated objective reduction (Orch-OR) model, which locates the relevant quantum processes in neuronal microtubules. Ingenious, but a minority view, widely criticised on the ground that the brain is too warm and noisy to sustain the coherence it requires.

 

A note on primary and historical sources (handled as references rather than formal citations): the claim that one’s own consciousness is the single thing immune to doubt is from René Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy (1641); the identification of God with nature—Deus sive Natura—runs through Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics (1677); and Einstein’s profession of belief in the God of Spinoza, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of nature rather than in the fates of human beings, was made in a 1929 reply to a New York rabbi.

Next Chapter

The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 26: religiosity & narcissism

The combination of religion with a narcissistic style is not hard to find. Yet, some forms of faith are bound up with humility, service, and genuine care for others. The darker pattern emerges when belief fuses with status-seeking, certainty, and a sense of group superiority. Then people insinuate—or simply assert—that their beliefs, their culture, and their moral footing are better than those of outsiders. Confidence is mistaken for virtue; self-importance masquerades as conviction; and the group may come to reward precisely the traits it ought to distrust. Psychology has a name for the particular shape this can take. We tend to picture the narcissist boasting of brains or power, but researchers describe a second variety—the communal narcissist—who pursues the very same cravings for grandiosity, esteem, and entitlement through the communal and moral domain instead: not “I am the most brilliant person” but “I am the most caring, the most trustworthy, the most righteous.” Religion, with its rich vocabulary of virtue, offers such a person an almost ideal stage.

Sanctimony is the close cousin of this: moral language used not primarily to discern right from wrong, but to signal superiority, enforce conformity, or punish dissent. In its mildest form it is mere performative piety; in harsher forms it becomes a social weapon. Here, too, there is a body of research. Philosophers and psychologists have lately analyzed a pattern they call moral grandstanding—the use of public moral talk to win admiration, status, or dominance. Its defining feature is instructive: grandstanding is identified not by the content of what is said, which may be entirely admirable, but by the motive behind it, which is the wish to be seen as moral. The words can be righteous while the engine is vanity. And the listener feels the difference—ordinary people come away feeling belittled, corrected, and morally diminished, less because a truth has been clarified than because someone wished to stand above them. It is worth noting that this research grew up largely around secular and political discourse—the call-out, the social-media pile-on—a useful reminder that none of this is the property of the religious.

A different but overlapping pattern is rigidity. Some people are deeply uncomfortable with ambiguity, with exceptions, with shades of grey, or with the possibility that decent people might disagree in good faith. They are drawn to fixed rules, sharp boundaries, and a kind of moral bookkeeping. Psychologists call this disposition a high need for cognitive closure—a craving for firm answers and an aversion to the unsettled—and it travels closely with dogmatism and with the authoritarian temperament discussed in earlier chapters. In religious life it can harden into scrupulous rule-mindedness: a chronic compulsion to monitor, confess, correct, classify, and control. In its clinical extreme this is a recognised condition, religious scrupulosity, a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder in which the sufferer is tormented by the fear of sin. The relationship is telling, and it holds for the whole of this chapter: religiosity does not, by itself, manufacture these tendencies—a person does not become obsessive because they are devout—but where the disposition already exists, religion can give it language, structure, and social reward, supplying the very content on which the anxious mind then fixes. Families and communities shaped by this mentality can grow tense, cautious, and punitive—more anxious to avoid wrongness than to cultivate goodness.

To be clear, then, none of these are "religious" traits. They are human traits—communal narcissism, grandstanding, the need for closure—all of them found in the ordinary, largely secular population, surfacing wherever there is status to be won or certainty to be craved. But religion can bless them with sacred language, allowing vanity to pass for conviction and control to pass for virtue. The irony is that the religious traditions condemn this temptation most fiercely from within. It was the conspicuously pious for whom the Gospels reserved their sharpest words—the Pharisee who prays, "God, I thank you that I am not like other men," and goes home less justified than the sinner beside him who could not lift his eyes. And the rabbis were no gentler with their own: the Talmud, too, mocks the Pharisee who wears his good deeds for show, sparing only the one who serves out of love of God. (The caricature of the Pharisees is, in fairness, unjust to what was a serious movement of piety and the root of rabbinic Judaism—the failing was never uniquely theirs.)

At its best, religion labours to humble the ego and enlarge compassion. At its worst, it hands the ego a halo, and makes severity look holy.

 

References

Gebauer, J. E., Sedikides, C., Verplanken, B., & Maio, G. R. (2012). Communal narcissism. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103(5), 854–878. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0029629

— Introduces the “agency–communion” model of narcissism, distinguishing the familiar agentic narcissist (“I am the most intelligent”) from the communal narcissist, who pursues the same grandiosity, entitlement, and craving for esteem through the moral and communal domain (“I am the most helpful,” “the most trustworthy”). The precise mechanism by which vanity can wear the costume of virtue.

 

Grubbs, J. B., Warmke, B., Tosi, J., James, A. S., & Campbell, W. K. (2019). Moral grandstanding in public discourse: Status-seeking motives as a potential explanatory mechanism in predicting conflict. PLOS ONE, 14(10), e0223749. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0223749

— A six-study empirical investigation of moral grandstanding (a concept introduced by the philosophers Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke), finding that the disposition to use moral talk for status is associated with narcissism and predicts heightened conflict. The studies were conducted largely on secular political discourse, underscoring that the pattern is general rather than peculiarly religious.

 

Miller, C. H., & Hedges, D. W. (2008). Scrupulosity disorder: An overview and introductory analysis. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 22(6), 1042–1058. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.janxdis.2007.11.004

— A comprehensive review of scrupulosity—a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder marked by pathological guilt and obsessive doubt about sin, with compulsions of repetitive prayer, confession, and reassurance-seeking. Religiosity does not cause the disorder, but in a devout sufferer it supplies its content—an illustration of religion shaping a pre-existing disposition rather than creating it.

 

Tosi, J., & Warmke, B. (2016). Moral grandstanding. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 44(3), 197–217.

— The philosophical paper that introduced the term “moral grandstanding”—the use of public moral discourse for self-promotion. Its central claim is that grandstanding is defined by motive, not content: the same righteous words may or may not be grandstanding, depending on whether they aim at moral truth or at the speaker’s own status.

 

Webster, D. M., & Kruglanski, A. W. (1994). Individual differences in need for cognitive closure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67(6), 1049–1062. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.67.6.1049

— The paper introducing the Need for Closure Scale, which measures the dispositional craving for certainty and discomfort with ambiguity—expressed as a preference for order and predictability, decisiveness, and closed-mindedness. The construct is closely related to dogmatism and to the authoritarian personality, and predicts black-and-white thinking and intolerance of dissent.

 

A note on scriptural references (handled as primary sources rather than formal citations): the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, in which the ostentatiously righteous man is the one who goes home unjustified, is Luke 18:9–14; the wider Gospel critique of performing piety “to be seen by others” runs through Matthew 6:1–6 and Matthew 23.

Next Chapter

The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 25: Speaking in Tongues

Some religions feature unusual behaviours that are accepted as manifestations of divinity. One striking example is glossolalia—“speaking in tongues.” Every culture has rituals that gesture at transcendence or divine intervention in some form, and there is nothing remarkable in that. What is more concerning, in modern times, is the readiness to treat this particular behaviour as a literal case of God “speaking through” a person, rather than as the human psychological and social phenomenon it appears, on examination, to be.

So what do we actually know about glossolalia? It usually is not the dramatic thing some imagine—suddenly speaking a real foreign language one never learned. (That claim, properly called xenoglossy, is a different matter, and does not survive scrutiny.) What tongues-speakers produce is speech-like vocalizing: it has rhythm, emotion, and a kind of word-like flow, but it does not reliably carry stable meaning or grammar the way an ordinary language does. The foundational linguistic study, by William Samarin, examined the phenomenon closely and concluded that it is a “meaningless but phonologically structured human utterance”—patterned sound without lexicon or syntax. Tellingly, it draws heavily on the sounds and speech habits the speaker already possesses in their native tongue, favouring simple syllables and a narrow range of sounds: a voice improvisation that feels like language without functioning as one. Nor is it a supernatural gift; psychologists have shown that naive volunteers, given a little exposure and encouragement, can produce passable glossolalia on demand, and where it is expected, taught, and socially supported, it behaves like a learned skill. One point deserves emphasis, because a clinical description can be mistaken for a diagnosis: glossolalia is not a symptom of mental illness. The research is consistent on this—its practitioners are psychologically unremarkable, and Samarin was at pains to stress that the behaviour is normal, not pathological, and not reducible to trance. It is an ordinary human capacity, not a disorder.

From a psychological point of view, glossolalia is best understood as a learned vocal practice that can, under the right conditions, shade into an altered state of attention. Assemble the ingredients—music, group emotion, high expectation, authority cues, a shared vocabulary of the sacred—and a person can generate vocalizations that feel profoundly meaningful, and may experience the act as a surrender of control. That subjective sense has a measurable correlate: in a small but striking neuroimaging study, Andrew Newberg and colleagues found that, compared with devotional singing, speaking in tongues was accompanied by decreased activity in the frontal lobes—the seat of deliberate, intentional control—just what one might expect of a state the speaker describes as no longer steering. (The same study found no loss of the sense of self, so this is not the ego-dissolution reported in deep meditation.) But the experience is not uniform. Many practice it quietly, in private prayer, and describe it as calm or soothing rather than ecstatic. The phenomenon is therefore broader than revivalist spectacle—though spectacle is where its social force becomes most visible.

That force is easy enough to observe. Among the most widely circulated clips online are public performances of “tongues” by a prominent faith leader with close ties to a major political figure. A viewer encountering such a scene for the first time often passes through a small sequence of reactions—curiosity, unease, and then a sharper concern on realizing that the performer commands a large and fervent following and a measure of genuine political influence. There is a real puzzle here, and it is worth stating without condescension, since the people moved by such displays are no less intelligent than anyone else: how does a vocalization carrying no semantic content whatsoever come to be so persuasive? The answer, I think, is that it was never working as an argument in the first place.

This is where the social function matters most. Like the miracles discussed in an earlier chapter, and like the costly behavioural markers of the previous one, glossolalia can operate as a signal: it makes the group feel special, chosen, close to the divine in a way that outsiders “don’t get.” That feeling is intensely bonding. It strengthens loyalty, rewards conformity, and makes doubt feel not merely intellectual but socially dangerous—almost a betrayal. The experience itself becomes the evidence, and the shared intensity becomes the glue. This is also why argument has so little effect on it: one cannot refute a feeling, and the feeling is the point.

This can be turned to darker ends. A leader skilled in spectacle and emotional orchestration can deploy these displays as instruments of persuasion—not by offering reasons but by manufacturing awe, certainty, and the sense that “we are witnessing the sacred.” The danger was never the oddness of the behaviour. It is the ease with which the resulting conviction and allegiance can be redirected into worldly power—political authority, or the solicitation of money—under the banner of a divine mandate.

References

Goodman, F. D. (1972). Speaking in tongues: A cross-cultural study of glossolalia. University of Chicago Press.

— An anthropological and cross-cultural study arguing that glossolalia is a learned, ritually shaped vocal behaviour, often (though not always) accompanied by an altered or trance-like state, and occurring across many cultural and religious settings. A counterpoint to purely linguistic accounts, emphasising the bodily and social conditioning of the practice.

 

Newberg, A. B., Wintering, N. A., Morgan, D., & Waldman, M. R. (2006). The measurement of regional cerebral blood flow during glossolalia: A preliminary SPECT study. Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, 148(1), 67–71. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pscychresns.2006.07.001

— The first functional neuroimaging study of glossolalia. In five practitioners, speaking in tongues was associated with decreased activity in the frontal lobes compared with devotional singing—consistent with the speakers’ report of a loss of intentional control—while the sense of self appeared preserved. A small, preliminary study, but a suggestive neural correlate of the subjective experience.

 

Samarin, W. J. (1972). Tongues of men and angels: The religious language of Pentecostalism. Macmillan.

— The foundational linguistic analysis of glossolalia, concluding that it is phonologically structured but semantically empty—patterned sound that resembles language without being one—and that it draws on the speaker’s native phonology. Samarin stressed that the behaviour is learned, normal rather than pathological, and not reducible to a trance state.

 

Spanos, N. P., & Hewitt, E. C. (1979). Glossolalia: A test of the “trance” and psychopathology hypotheses. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 88(4), 427–434. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-843x.88.4.427

— An experimental and psychometric study testing—and largely rejecting—the claims that glossolalia requires a trance state or signals psychopathology. Together with the same group’s later demonstration that naive subjects can be trained to produce tongues on cue, it supports the view of glossolalia as a learnable skill practised by psychologically ordinary people.

 

A note on scriptural sources (handled as primary references rather than formal citations): the New Testament contains two distinct phenomena often conflated under “tongues”—the Pentecost narrative of Acts 2:1–13, in which the apostles are understood by speakers of many foreign languages (closer to xenoglossy), and Paul’s discussion in 1 Corinthians 12–14, in which the utterance is ecstatic and requires interpretation. It is the latter strand that corresponds to modern glossolalia.

Next Chapter

The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 24: Behavioural Restrictions

In some cases, religious groups prescribe particular foods, styles of dress, grooming habits, and behavioural expectations that are only loosely related to the ordinary moral concerns most people would recognize—kindness, honesty, fairness, nonviolence—if they are related at all. Sometimes these practices can be understood as ordinary cultural variations with obscure origins. But often the rules are treated as rigid and imperative, such that veering away from them is not merely unconventional but offensive—against the religious community, the family, or God. At times these restrictions make it difficult to live freely or comfortably.

One major function of these rules, in practice, is their signalling value: they make loyalty visible. Demanding, hard-to-fake practices show commitment to a group and its code. Recognizable styles of appearance and behaviour mark membership: they make it easier to find fellow members, easier to distinguish outsiders, and easier to notice who might be wavering. Such rules do not merely symboliez belonging; they make unbelonging more conspicuous and more costly.

Of course, many members experience these rules sincerely as discipline, modesty, reverence, or protection from vanity. Moralizing the rule is part of what gives it strength. But once a custom is linked to purity, holiness, or obedience, noncompliance ceases to look like preference and begins to look like sin.

These rules are the price of admission to a genuinely valuable community. In a study of eighty-three nineteenth-century American communes, the religious ones far outlasted the secular ones, and among the religious communes the number of costly requirements a group imposed predicted how long it survived. The burden, in other words, is not incidental. Burdensome rules improve group survival.

Over time, people can become deeply attached to these behavioural symbols. They can evoke powerful feelings bound up with the religion, functioning almost like a ring worn every day and night for years, beginning in childhood. The symbol stops feeling external; it becomes part of one’s emotional life. A person may then feel uneasy, exposed, or guilty without it, and feel relief when surrounded by others wearing the same symbol. In this way the group’s surveillance gradually migrates inward—the watchful outer eye becoming an inner one—until conscience itself begins to speak in the voice of the group. It is the same internalization discussed in an earlier chapter, where an imagined divine observer became a permanent inner companion: this is an external discipline taken so far inside that it is felt as the self.

But if the “ring,” so to speak, becomes massive and cumbersome—if it begins to hinder ordinary life—then what once felt meaningful can become a burden. It comes to resemble the peacock’s tail, which the evolutionary theorist Amotz Zahavi made the model for his “handicap principle”: a display is a believable signal of quality precisely because it is costly, since only a genuinely fit peacock can afford to drag such a thing through the world. By the same logic, a costly observance is a believable signal of devotion precisely because it carries a real practical price. The burden is part of the proof.

We see similar dynamics in many corners of modern culture—uniforms, fraternities, subcultures, luxury brands, corporate logos. Often these are harmless variations. The darker side appears when people do not wish to participate, when the rules become tools of control, or when symbols are used to police appetite, sexuality, courtship, self-presentation, and ordinary freedom. Then noncompliance is no longer treated as a harmless difference in style; it becomes a source of shame, suspicion, rejection, or punishment.

These burdens also tend not to fall evenly. In many settings, women, girls, adolescents, and sexual minorities are scrutinized far more intensely than adult men; their bodies and behaviour become the stage on which the community performs its idea of moral seriousness. At that point the rule is no longer merely symbolic. It has become a way of distributing power—and, as I noted in discussing the abuse of children, the heaviest enforcement tends to fall on those with the least power to resist it.

A related dark side of religious dogma is condemnation of, or discrimination against, people whose lifestyles the group does not endorse. At root this is often not uniquely religious at all. It is an ordinary human tendency—amply present in secular settings too—to exclude or denigrate those who are different, even when they are not harming anyone. Religion did not invent the tendency; but, as we have seen elsewhere, it can sanctify it, organize it, and lend it an air of cosmic authority.

Yet there are also humane strands within the same traditions that pull hard in the opposite direction. Alongside the purity language and the social policing there are scriptural moments that exalt mercy and love toward precisely those whom the surrounding culture was most inclined to despise: the parable in which a despised Samaritan, and not the respectable priest, proves to be the true neighbour; the insistence that in Christ there is “neither Jew nor Greek”; the prophets’ impatience with meticulous ritual in the absence of justice—“I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.” That tension is the revealing thing. At its best, religion asks people to transcend tribalism. At its worst, it turns tribal markers into sacred obligations.

 

References

Irons, W. (2001). Religion as a hard-to-fake sign of commitment. In R. M. Nesse (Ed.), Evolution and the capacity for commitment. Russell Sage Foundation.

— The foundational statement of the idea that costly, hard-to-fake religious observances function as reliable signals of an individual’s commitment to a group, easing the problem of trust among people who must cooperate. The theoretical seed of the costly-signalling account of religion.

 

Sosis, R., & Alcorta, C. (2003). Signaling, solidarity, and the sacred: The evolution of religious behavior. Evolutionary Anthropology, 12(6), 264–274. https://doi.org/10.1002/evan.10120

— A review of the evolutionary “costly signaling” theory of religion: demanding rituals, taboos, and sacrifices function as hard-to-fake signals of commitment and loyalty to a group and its moral code.

 

Sosis, R., & Bressler, E. R. (2003). Cooperation and commune longevity: A test of the costly signaling theory of religion. Cross-Cultural Research, 37(2), 211–239. https://doi.org/10.1177/1069397103037002003

— An empirical test using historical data on eighty-three nineteenth-century American communes. Religious communes proved far more likely to survive than secular ones, and the number of costly requirements a religious commune imposed predicted its longevity—an association absent among the secular communes.

 

Zahavi, A. (1975). Mate selection—A selection for a handicap. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 53(1), 205–214. https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-5193(75)90111-3

— The original statement of the “handicap principle”: costly, fitness-reducing displays such as the peacock’s tail are reliable signals precisely because only high-quality individuals can afford them. The biological version remains debated among signalling theorists, but it supplies the underlying logic—cost guarantees honesty—on which the costly-signalling account of religion is built.

 

A note on scriptural references (handled as sources rather than formal citations): the parable of the good Samaritan is Luke 10:25–37; “neither Jew nor Greek” is Galatians 3:28; and “I desire mercy, and not sacrifice” is Hosea 6:6, quoted by Jesus in Matthew 9:13 and 12:7—each an instance of a tradition’s own texts pressing against the tribal use of its rules.

Next Chapter

The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 23: Eschatology

Many religions have teachings about the “last things”—what happens after death, and, in some traditions, how history itself will end. This broader subject is called eschatology. What concerns me most here is apocalyptic belief, the idea that history is moving toward a dramatic divine climax. In some communities there is an almost excited anticipation of the world’s ending, paired with the idea of a glorious ascent of the worthy up to heaven—what many Christians call “The Rapture.” Those who hold this view usually assume, of course, that they will be among the worthy.

In one form of apocalyptic belief, the world is expected to deteriorate before it can be redeemed. This can foster a passive resignation about the world’s problems: these are the “end times,” so why bother? Why repair a house already slated for demolition?

Another form is more hopeful: a reforming attitude that reads history as something to be improved, even perfected, in preparation for what is to come. This has fuelled movements of real moral energy—the abolitionists and social reformers of the nineteenth century, the Social Gospel, the liberation theologies, the cadences of the American civil-rights movement with its confidence that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice.

Eschatology, in short, is not one thing. It can foster withdrawal or it can foster engagement; my concern in this chapter is with the first.

A 2022 Pew survey found that 39% of U.S. adults said humanity is “living in the end times,” and that this belief tracked with lower concern about climate change: those who thought we were living in the end times were less likely than others to call climate change an extremely or very serious problem (51% versus 62%), and among those holding the more catastrophic, premillennial view—that the world will deteriorate until Jesus returns—the figure fell to 40%. While some of this effect is due to political leaning rather than religious belief, the political scientists David Barker and David Bearce found that belief in Christian end-times theology independently predicted weaker support for action on global warming, even after political partisanship was accounted for—an effect they attribute to a shortened “shadow of the future,” the sense that there is little point in bearing present costs for a long-term benefit, since they believe that the world won’t be around to enjoy such long-term benefits anyway.

At its rare and lurid extreme, apocalyptic conviction can turn lethal. Heaven’s Gate, a fringe new religious movement that fused Christianity with UFO mythology, ended in the mass suicide of 39 of its members near San Diego in March 1997, timed to the passage of the Hale-Bopp comet, which they took for the sign of a spacecraft come to carry them to the “Next Level.” Such episodes are mercifully rare, and it would be unfair to let a doomsday cult stand in for the millions of ordinary believers who hold some version of end-times expectation and lead quiet, decent, engaged lives. The graver harm is not the spectacular one but the quiet one: letting the world itself deteriorate—a destabilizing climate, a fraying environment—and handing the damage to the generations that follow. It is like leaving your campsite fouled and your fire smouldering on the reasoning that the whole forest will soon burn down anyway—forgetting that the blaze may never come, and that the next people to pitch their tents are left to live in the mess you made.

Even if the world were ending, there would be something profoundly dishonourable in greeting it with passive resignation—or worse, with a quiet flicker of comfort—rather than with help. It would be like watching a building burn and making no attempt to reach the people trapped inside, while smiling inwardly at the thought that heaven is getting closer. The most beautiful actions we are capable of are surely those directed at improving a situation precisely when it looks bleakest, even hopeless. And here I return to a thread from the previous chapter. A truly admirable person does not do good in order to get into heaven; they do good because it’s the right thing to do—for the intrinsic worth of the act and the welfare of others, not for the prize you might earn after death. That was Rabia’s insight, set against the whole economy of reward and punishment, and it applies with equal force to the end of a single life and to the imagined end of the world. To labour for a world one will not live to see, or that one believes will not last, is not futility. It may be the purest form the moral impulse can take.

 

References

Barker, D. C., & Bearce, D. H. (2013). End-times theology, the shadow of the future, and public resistance to addressing global climate change. Political Research Quarterly, 66(2), 267–279. https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912912442243

— A multivariate analysis finding that Americans who hold Christian end-times beliefs are less supportive of governmental action on climate change, even after controlling for party, ideology, and other factors. The authors attribute the effect to a shortened “shadow of the future”—a reluctance to bear present costs for benefits one does not expect to see realised.

 

Cohn, N. (1970). The pursuit of the millennium: Revolutionary millenarians and mystical anarchists of the Middle Ages (Rev. ed.). Oxford University Press.

— The classic history of medieval apocalyptic movements, which shows that the expectation of an imminent end has more often produced upheaval and violence than passive withdrawal. A reminder that eschatological fervour is volatile and that its social effects depend heavily on the form the belief takes.

 

Pew Research Center. (2022). How religion intersects with Americans’ views on the environment. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/11/17/how-religion-intersects-with-americans-views-on-the-environment/

— The source of the survey figures cited here, including that 39% of U.S. adults believe humanity is living in the end times and that this belief is associated with modestly lower concern about climate change. The report is careful to note that the association is heavily entangled with political partisanship.

 

Zeller, B. E. (2014). Heaven’s Gate: America’s UFO religion. New York University Press.

— The standard scholarly account of the Heaven’s Gate movement, its synthesis of Christian millenarianism and ufology, and the 1997 mass suicide of its 39 members. Zeller situates the group within the wider landscape of American new religious movements rather than treating it as a mere aberration.

Next Chapter

The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 22: Heaven and Hell

Many religions have concepts of Heaven and Hell: Heaven an eternal state of perfect happiness, Hell an eternal state of punishment. Religious doctrines often counsel people to live appropriately during their life on earth, after which they will be judged and sent to one place or the other. In some doctrines the criterion is not even that one live a good life—be kind, avoid harming others, contribute to society, leave the world better than one found it—but whether one professes belief in a very particular way. On that criterion, one could be the kindest, most helpful person in human history and still go to hell for holding the wrong beliefs; or commit the worst atrocities imaginable, an all-round hurtful person, and still go to heaven for holding the right ones.

This concept functions to bolster group affiliation, combining threat and reward. It is like a company that offers permanent safety and support if you sign a lifetime membership, agree to promote the brand, and guarantee never to deal with competitors—but that also threatens to ruin you permanently if you break the deal. The contract would contain frightening clauses, so that the mere act of challenging company policy is branded with words like “heresy” or “apostasy,” discouraging anyone from questioning the status quo.

Such a system sits in contradiction to the spirit of fairness, grace, and justice—the striving toward a mature morality—present in religious doctrines at their best. An infinite punishment for a finite set of offences does not make sense. And the idea of punishing someone not for an act but for holding an idea, a belief, or a thought that fails to conform to a prescribed norm runs contrary to most people’s notion of a healthy society, and to the “bill of rights” ideals that many of us, religious or not, value highly.

To be fair, the version I have just described—eternal conscious torment, awarded on the basis of belief rather than conduct—is not the only conception of hell. Many theologians have recoiled from such strict doctrine and softened it. When a tradition’s own most serious thinkers find a teaching too monstrous to defend and quietly build exits from it, that is itself is informative. Yet, a great many religious people continue to understand hell in a literal, strict, belief-based, eternal version.

Pascal’s Wager

A classic argument enlisted to prop up religious belief is Pascal’s Wager. The reasoning runs roughly like this: if you believe and the religion is true, you gain Heaven and avoid Hell; if you do not believe and the religion is true, you face infinite punishment; and if the religion is false, there is little cost either way. Belief, therefore, is said to be the safest bet.

But the reasoning is invalid. First, the same logic applies to any number of mutually incompatible religions, each with its own scheme of reward and punishment—and many of them explicitly require that you renounce the others. Which religion exactly, are you meant to choose? Pascal’s own countryman Denis Diderot made the point with a shrug: an imam, he observed, “could reason just as well this way.” One could as easily invent a magical rabbit orbiting the moon who grants eternal reward, or a literal Santa Claus dispensing salvation at Christmas, or Bertrand Russell’s celestial teapot drifting between Earth and Mars. The wager does not tell you which claim to believe; it merely exploits fear.

Second, it is a poor moral foundation. It reduces belief to a calculation of self-interest: believe in order to profit, or believe in order to avoid pain. Yet that motive is precisely at odds with the lofty ethical language religions themselves prefer. If a deity valued sincerity, honesty, courage, and intellectual integrity, then a strategic belief adopted out of self-interest would look shallow and hypocritical—the very opposite of devotion.

Third—and this is the objection Pascal least escapes—one cannot simply decide to believe. Belief is not a lever the will can pull on demand; I cannot make myself believe that the sky is green by being offered a reward for it, and I cannot make myself believe in a god I find unconvincing merely because the stakes are high. Pascal saw the difficulty—his imagined sceptic protests, “I am so made that I cannot believe”—and his answer was to recommend going through the motions: attend Mass, take the holy water, and habit will in time “make you believe and deaden your acuteness.” But this rescue destroys the argument it was meant to save. A belief manufactured by deliberate self-conditioning, adopted for the payoff, is exactly the hollow, strategic faith that the second objection says a sincerity-loving deity would despise. William James put it best: such a God would “take particular pleasure in cutting off believers of this pattern from their infinite reward.” The wager thus impales itself—either belief cannot be willed, and the advice is incoherent, or it can be faked, and the faking is self-defeating.

Finally, the claim that there is “no downside” to belief is plainly false. Much o this book f this book concerns that downside: the psychological distortions, tribal loyalties, guilt, fear, dogmatism, social coercion, and political consequences that can follow from false sacred beliefs. Belief is not cost-free. It can shape an entire life, a family, a culture, a society.

Pascal’s Wager, then, is not a deep argument. It is a fear-based sales pitch dressed up as prudence.

* * *

Consider the arithmetic. On average, roughly two people die every second worldwide—about 7,200 every hour, on the order of five million a month. Only a fraction of them subscribe to any one particular belief system. So if one holds a strict doctrine of Hell tied to a strict criterion of “correct belief,” it follows that thousands of people every hour—many of whom lived gentle, kind, generous lives—are being consigned to eternal punitive suffering for failing to endorse the right doctrine, while many who behaved cruelly throughout their lives receive an infinite reward. Picture an all-powerful creator pushing more than one human being every second—many of them kindly elders who simply did not happen to hold the prescribed beliefs—into a flaming inferno.

If one genuinely believes this to be the fate of countless people, one is forced into a grim choice among three options: cultivate indifference to unimaginable suffering, accept a monstrous picture of how reality is run, or devote one’s life entirely to converting as many people as possible before they die. On this logic it would make little sense to spend a life rescuing people on the merely earthly scale—as a firefighter, a physician, a therapist, a humanitarian—since any such work would be trivial compared to the infinite catastrophe of eternal damnation. Proselytizing would be the only fully rational form of altruism; and if one wished to “save the most people efficiently,” one would target those with the shortest life expectancy, whose eternal suffering is nearest. So it would make sense to devote one’s life to proselytizing in nursing homes. Should one’s own child or friend stray from the correct religious belief, it would be reasonable—within this system—to regard it as the most horrifying contingency imaginable, infinitely worse than losing them to accident, assault, or disease, since the loss would be permanent. The telling fact is that almost no one, including the devout, actually lives this way. The doctrine, held with full conviction, would license a fanaticism that the overwhelming majority of believers visibly do not practice—which suggests that, at some level, very few truly hold it.

This is one reason the Heaven-and-Hell framework is so morally destabilizing. It rewards fear, coercion, and tribal control—it is the same machinery of “turn or burn” I described in an earlier chapter, now generalized to the whole of humanity—while quietly undermining the best of what religion also teaches: compassion, humility, grace, and love.

There is a sentiment I find ethically beautiful, and it belongs not to Mother Teresa, to whom it is sometimes loosely attributed, but in its purest form to a figure far older. In eighth-century Basra, the Sufi mystic Rabia al-Adawiyya was said to have walked the streets carrying a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. Asked what she was doing, she replied that she meant to set fire to Paradise and pour water on Hell, so that the two veils would fall away and people would love God for God’s own sake—neither from hope of reward nor from fear of punishment. Her famous prayer makes the same point: “O God, if I worship You for fear of Hell, burn me in Hell; and if I worship You in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise; but if I worship You for Your own sake, grudge me not Your everlasting Beauty.” It is the exact inversion of Pascal’s calculation, and the exact rebuke to the whole economy of threat and reward this chapter has described.

The same impulse surfaces across traditions: in Moses, who begs God to blot him out of the book of life rather than let his people be destroyed; in Paul, who could wish himself “accursed and cut off from Christ” for the sake of his kin; in the Buddhist bodhisattva, who forgoes his own liberation until every last suffering being is freed. To enjoy eternal bliss in full knowledge that others endure eternal torment would require a catastrophic failure of empathy; the impulse to forsake one’s own salvation and sit with the damned is, by contrast, a genuine transcendence of character. And note what kind of empathy it is. It is not the warm, partial sympathy that flows most easily toward those near to us and like us—the biased spotlight I questioned earlier in this book—but its opposite: a deliberate, reasoned compassion extended to the most distant and least deserving beings imaginable, the damned themselves. That is the form worth cultivating. It carries a final irony: the highest conceivable morality—an unconditional, self-sacrificial compassion—turns out to demand the rejection of the traditional boundaries of divine justice altogether.

References

Attar, F. al-D. (2009). Memorial of God’s friends: Lives and sayings of Sufis (P. Losensky, Trans.). Paulist Press. (Original work composed c. 1230)

— The principal early hagiography of the Sufi saints and the fullest source for the life and sayings of Rabia al-Adawiyya of Basra (d. 801), including the image of the torch and the water and her prayer rejecting worship motivated by reward or fear. Margaret Smith’s Rabi’a the Mystic (1928) remains the standard scholarly study.

 

Hart, D. B. (2019). That all shall be saved: Heaven, hell, and universal salvation. Yale University Press.

— A forceful contemporary case for universal salvation by an Eastern Orthodox theologian, arguing that eternal damnation is incompatible with the nature of God, of persons, and of freedom. Representative of the tradition’s own recoil from the doctrine of eternal conscious torment.

 

Hájek, A. (2022). Pascal’s wager. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Fall 2022 ed.). Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pascal-wager/

— The standard scholarly survey of the wager and its many objections, including the “many gods” problem and the question of whether belief can be willed at all. A clear account of why the argument, for all its historical importance to decision theory, fails as a reason to believe.

 

Kvanvig, J. L. (1993). The problem of hell. Oxford University Press.

— The leading philosophical treatment of the moral difficulties raised by the doctrine of hell, including the proportionality problem—how a finite life could merit infinite punishment—and the strategies theologians use to escape it.

 

Lewis, C. S. (1946). The great divorce. Geoffrey Bles.

— A theological fantasy advancing the “free will” view of hell, in which the damned remain by their own choice—its doors, in the book’s image, locked on the inside. The best-known statement of the idea that hell is self-chosen rather than imposed.

 

Pascal, B. (1966). Pensées (A. J. Krailsheimer, Trans.). Penguin. (Original work published 1670)

— The posthumous fragments containing the wager, in a single celebrated section, together with Pascal’s own reply to the objection that belief cannot be willed: act as if you believed—take holy water, hear Masses—until habit produces faith.

 

Russell, B. (1997). Is there a God? In J. G. Slater & P. Köllner (Eds.), The collected papers of Bertrand Russell: Vol. 11. Last philosophical testament, 1943–68. Routledge. (Original work written 1952)

— The essay, commissioned but never published in its day, in which Russell introduces the celestial teapot to illustrate that the burden of proof lies with the one making an unfalsifiable claim, not with the doubter.

 

James, W. (1956). The will to believe. In The will to believe and other essays in popular philosophy. Dover. (Original work published 1896)

— James’s qualified defence of the right to believe, which nonetheless skewers the wager: a faith adopted by mechanical calculation, he writes, would lack the inner soul of faith’s reality, and a deity might well take particular pleasure in cutting off believers of that pattern from their reward.

A note on scriptural and primary references (handled as sources rather than formal citations): the impulse to stand with the condemned appears in Exodus 32:32, where Moses asks to be blotted out of God’s book rather than see his people destroyed, and in Romans 9:3, where Paul wishes himself “accursed and cut off from Christ” for the sake of his kindred; the parallel Buddhist ideal is the bodhisattva vow of Mahāyāna tradition—exemplified by Kṣitigarbha—to forgo final liberation until the hells themselves are emptied.

Next Chapter

The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 21: Historical Atrocities

Humans have engaged in every manner of atrocity, and despite the horrors of the past century, we see repeatedly—across earlier centuries as well—how easily cruelty can be normalized, ritualized, and justified. The human capacity for harm is ancient. What is especially sobering is how often the major religions have managed to make cruelty feel righteous. Faith is not the sole author of human violence, but that it has proved extremely effective at sanctifying it.

Many historical atrocities have occurred under the banner of religion, especially when religious identity fused with conquest, state power, or tribal domination. Charlemagne’s campaigns against the Saxons (772–804) are an early example, fusing military conquest with forced Christianization. Saxon resistance was treated as defiance of Christian rule. Forced conversion was backed by severe legal penalties—including death for refusing baptism, as set out in the Capitulatio de partibus Saxoniae—and the suppression of Saxon resistance led to episodes of mass killing, including the notorious Massacre of Verden in 782, where 4,500 Saxons were reportedly beheaded in a single day.

The Crusades (1095–1291) likewise included mass killing justified in religious terms. The Rhineland massacres of 1096 saw crusader mobs fall upon the Jewish communities of Speyer, Worms, Mainz, and Cologne, forcing conversion or death. And when Jerusalem fell in 1099, Muslims and Jews were slaughtered.

The Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648)—which began as a struggle between Catholic and Protestant rulers within the Holy Roman Empire before widening into a broader conflict—became one of the most devastating catastrophes in European history. Ending with the Peace of Westphalia, it killed several million people and laid waste to wide stretches of central Europe, with some German territories losing a third or more of their population and the worst-hit areas more than half.

The Spanish Inquisition (established in 1478 and not abolished until 1834) built a machinery of religiously motivated coercion and intimidation. It targeted conversos—Jews who had converted to Christianity, often under intense pressure—and later Moriscos, Muslims who had likewise been baptized, as well as Protestants. The exact death toll is debated—modern estimates put the executions in the low thousands, far below the figures of popular legend—but the essential point is not: it was a system designed to enforce conformity through fear, punishment, and, in many cases, execution.

Other episodes fit the same pattern. The witch hunts of early modern Europe and its colonies, which I discussed in an earlier chapter, ran from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries and produced perhaps 100,000 trials and around 45,000 executions, the great majority of the victims women. These persecutions were not merely random superstition; they were tied to a specifically Christian demonology that linked “witchcraft” to heresy, to Satan, and to a cosmic struggle against evil. The same logic appeared in campaigns against peoples classified as pagan or heathen. In the Baltic Crusades, military orders such as the Brothers of the Sword and later the Teutonic Knights pursued conquest together with Christianization, and forced conversion was part of the programme. In Muslim history, the language of jihad was at times used to frame warfare—but it should be emphasized that jihad does not simply mean “holy war,” and in Islamic thought it has long encompassed moral and spiritual struggle as well.

Colonial movements in later centuries often used religious language—“civilization,” “salvation,” missionary uplift—as moral cover for extraction and domination. Leopold II’s Congo Free State (1885–1908) was not simply a Belgian colony but effectively Leopold’s personal possession. It was presented as a humanitarian venture that would end slavery and bring religion and modern life to the Congolese. In practice it became a regime of forced labour, hostage-taking, mutilation, and terror, likely causing millions of deaths, though the exact figure is disputed. It was wrapped in Christian and “civilizing” rhetoric, and missionaries were part of that colonial world—though many of them later helped expose the abuses.

The transatlantic slave trade and the slavery it fed (spanning roughly the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries) were likewise defended by many religious leaders and institutions, often through distorted readings of scripture. One recurring example was the so-called “Curse of Ham”—in fact Noah’s curse on his grandson Canaan, later twisted into a supposed justification for African slavery—even as other religious figures, the Quakers most prominently, became central to the abolitionist movement. The point is not that religion uniquely caused the exploitation, but that it was repeatedly available to sanctify it.

The same pattern appears in Canadian history. “Christianization” was one motive—alongside the state’s assimilationist policy—behind the residential school system. Church-run schools began earlier, but by the 1880s the federal government had adopted an official policy of funding residential schools across the country, and the last did not close until 1996. More than 150,000 First Nations, Inuit, and Métis children passed through these church-run, state-funded institutions, which were designed to sever children from their families and cultures and were marked by widespread abuse. Thousands died, and the records remain incomplete.

The Spanish conquest of the Americas, beginning with Columbus in 1492 and intensifying with Cortés’s overthrow of the Aztec empire in 1519–1521, likewise brought catastrophic Indigenous death and cultural devastation. Disease accounted for much of the mortality, but religious institutions were deeply entangled with the colonial project. Conquerors often invoked the Requerimiento—an official legal demand, drafted by Spanish authorities and read aloud before conquest, which asserted the Pope’s authority and Spain’s claim to the land, demanded submission to the Crown and acceptance of Christian preaching, and threatened war, enslavement, and dispossession for refusal. In practice it was frequently read—in Spanish or Latin—to people who could not understand a word of it, sometimes with no translation at all. To be fair, some clergy, most famously Bartolomé de las Casas, later fought publicly against the abuse of Indigenous peoples.

It would be a distortion, though, to leave the impression that this is a Christian failing in particular. The examples above are drawn largely from the Christian West, because that is the history I know best and the record most fully documented in the languages I read—not because other traditions have been innocent of the same logic. The pattern recurs across the religious world. Buddhist nationalist movements in Myanmar and Sri Lanka—the tradition most often imagined in the West as constitutionally peaceful—have in recent years inflamed mob violence and persecution against Muslim minorities. Hindu nationalism has been entangled with deadly communal violence in India. Warfare and persecution have repeatedly been waged in the name of Islam, which has also been riven by its own lethal divisions. The scholarly literature on religious violence now spans every major tradition; none has clean hands.

Of course, violence and atrocity have flourished outside religion as well, and the secular ideologies of the twentieth century—fascism, Stalinism, Maoism—justified horrors of their own on an industrial scale. So the claim here is not that religion is the uniquely guilty party in the long history of human cruelty. The claim is narrower, and I think harder to dodge: that religion has repeatedly proved able to take ordinary, decent people and persuade them that cruelty is holy—and that it has plainly not been a reliable protection against humanity’s worst impulses. Cruelty, as I argued earlier, does not originate in belief. But belief has been remarkably good at blessing it.

References

Goldenberg, D. M. (2003). The curse of Ham: Race and slavery in early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Princeton University Press.

— Traces how the Genesis story of Noah’s curse on Canaan was gradually transformed, in extra-biblical interpretation, into the “Curse of Ham” used to justify the enslavement of Africans. Goldenberg shows the racial reading is absent from the text itself and emerged later; Stephen Haynes’s Noah’s Curse covers its American afterlife.

 

Hochschild, A. (1998). King Leopold’s ghost: A story of greed, terror, and heroism in colonial Africa. Houghton Mifflin.

— The standard popular history of Leopold II’s Congo Free State, documenting the forced-labour rubber regime and its vast death toll, as well as the missionaries and reformers who exposed it. Hochschild calls the killing “of genocidal proportions” while noting it was not, strictly, a planned genocide.

 

Juergensmeyer, M. (2003). Terror in the mind of God: The global rise of religious violence (3rd ed.). University of California Press.

— A comparative study of religiously motivated violence across Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism, and Buddhism, arguing that the sacralisation of conflict is a cross-traditional phenomenon. No major religion has been exempt; for the Buddhist cases specifically, see also Jerryson and Juergensmeyer’s Buddhist Warfare (2010).

 

Kamen, H. (1998). The Spanish Inquisition: A historical revision. Yale University Press.

— The leading revisionist history, which dismantles the inflated “Black Legend” figures and places executions over the Inquisition’s full span in the low thousands. Kamen situates the institution within its political context without minimising its machinery of fear.

 

las Casas, B. de. (1992). A short account of the destruction of the Indies (N. Griffin, Trans.). Penguin. (Original work published 1552)

— The Dominican friar’s eyewitness denunciation of Spanish cruelty toward Indigenous peoples, addressed to the Crown. A foundational document of conscience from within the colonial Church, and the most famous contemporary protest against the conquest.

 

Levack, B. P. (2006). The witch-hunt in early modern Europe (3rd ed.). Pearson Longman.

— The standard synthesis of the European witch trials (c. 1450–1750). Careful regional accounting yields a consensus near 45,000 executions out of roughly 100,000 trials—far below the figures of popular legend—and locates the persecutions within Christian demonology and the law.

 

Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. (2015). Honouring the truth, reconciling for the future: Summary of the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.

— The official summation of Canada’s residential school system, which it characterises as “cultural genocide.” It documents the more than 150,000 children who passed through the church-run, state-funded schools, the thousands who died, and the incompleteness of the records.

 

Tyerman, C. (2006). God’s war: A new history of the Crusades. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

— A comprehensive single-volume history of the crusading movement, covering the Rhineland massacres of 1096 and the slaughter that followed the fall of Jerusalem in 1099, as well as the theology that framed holy war.

 

Wilson, P. H. (2009). The Thirty Years War: Europe’s tragedy. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

— The definitive modern history, which stresses that the war was as much dynastic and political as confessional, and assesses the demographic catastrophe—on the order of a quarter of the German population—without recourse to the most exaggerated figures.

 

A note on primary documents (handled as sources rather than formal citations): the figure of 4,500 executed at Verden comes from the Royal Frankish Annals; the death penalty for refusing baptism is set out in the Capitulatio de partibus Saxoniae (c. 782–785); the conquest demand is the Requerimiento of 1513, drafted by Juan López de Palacios Rubios; and the scriptural passage behind the “Curse of Ham” is Genesis 9:20–27, in which Noah curses his grandson Canaan.

Next Chapter