The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 18: Prayer

Prayer may mean different things to different people. For many, it is essentially a meditative act: a kind of philosophical reflection on existential themes, a relaxation practice, a "grounding" moment, a way to name fears and hopes, to confess or grieve, to feel less alone. Some who pray believe they are holding a conversation with God, though the manner in which God is understood to "speak back" is usually figurative—a new idea, an inclination, a redoubling of confidence, a wave of emotion that feels like guidance. Others do not expect God to speak back at all; they are content simply to vent, confess, grieve, or reflect within a reverent frame. In this it resembles classical psychoanalysis, where the listener is largely silent and the act of speaking—slowly, honestly, repeatedly—becomes the mechanism.

In fact, understood this way, prayer is close to the purest instance of the mechanism I set out earlier in this book. Recall Jerome Frank's four elements shared by all forms of healing: a confiding relationship with a helper, a setting set apart from ordinary life, a rationale the sufferer believes, and a ritual that enacts it—with faith supplying the expectation that it will help. Prayer has every one of them. God is the perfectly patient, perfectly available listener; the sanctuary, or simply the bowed head and the closed eyes, is the setting; the theology supplies the rationale; the words themselves are the ritual; and faith consolidates the whole. Whatever good prayer does for a person, in other words, it does through the same channels that make psychotherapy work—which is precisely why it can steady and console even if no one is listening on the other end.

But many people also pray for things—for an outcome to change, for an illness to heal, for a surgery to go well, for a war to end, for a relationship to mend. That kind of prayer is different. If it were literally effective, it would mean that events in the physical world were being altered—that something in the ordinary chain of causation was being nudged off course on request. And if that were happening consistently and repeatably, you would expect to see clear clusters of unusually good outcomes wherever people pray the most, or wherever the "right" kind of prayer is most common. You would expect the world to look, in its more devout regions, as though the rules of physics were being bent to order. I am not aware of any such pattern.

When researchers have tried to test this carefully—especially with intercessory prayer, praying for someone else—the results have produced no solid, repeatable signal. The best-known example is the STEP trial in cardiac bypass patients: people were randomly assigned to receive or not receive intercessory prayer, with a third group told with certainty that they were being prayed for. Overall, prayer did not reduce medical complications. The one statistically reliable effect ran the wrong way—and it was not about whether people were prayed for but whether they knew it. Among patients who all received prayer, complications struck 59% of those told with certainty it was happening, against 52% of those left uncertain. One plausible reading is psychological: being told "people are praying for you" can quietly raise the stakes. What if I don't get better? What would that mean—about me, about my faith, about God? For someone already frightened and vulnerable, that extra layer of expectation and scrutiny, the sense that a spiritual test is under way, may add stress rather than comfort.

The same logic can be run at the scale of whole societies. If prayer—or divine favour more broadly—were an instrumental force that altered physical reality, then the most devout regions ought to enjoy a measurable dividend: higher rates of recovery, fewer disasters, lower mortality, all else being equal. No such supernatural dividend appears. If anything, when prosperous democracies are compared, the more secular ones tend to score at least as well as the more religious ones—often better—on the standard markers of societal health.

I want to be careful about what this does and does not show, because the serious scholarship points in a particular direction. Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, comparing societies worldwide, argue that the causal arrow runs largely backward: it is existential insecurity—poverty, danger, fragile institutions—that drives populations toward religion, and the security and prosperity that reduce human suffering that erode the felt need for it. On that reading, secular societies are not healthy because they are secular; they are secular because they had already become safe. The cross-national comparisons are in any case correlational and run at the level of whole nations, so they cannot by themselves establish what causes what. (The most-cited of them, by Gregory Paul, was offered explicitly as "a first look," and was sharply criticized for exactly this.) But notice that none of this rescues the supernatural claim—it buries it. If devout populations enjoyed real divine protection, the secular societies should be visibly worse off, and they are not, on any reading of the arrow. Whatever genuine benefits religion confers—and they are real: comfort, cohesion, a shared story for making sense of loss—appear to travel through ordinary social and psychological channels rather than through any bending of the physical world.

Spatial Language

One small feature of religious behaviour, inherited from ancient practice, is its spatial language: "God above." People sometimes literally look upward when they pray. But "up" points in different directions depending on where you stand on Earth, and it changes minute by minute as the planet rotates, orbits the sun, and travels through the galaxy. A person in Australia looking up toward Heaven is facing the same direction as a person in North America looking down into the ground. It is a pre-Copernican metaphor, entangled with the older intuition that up is good and down is bad—one of the most basic ways the human mind maps value onto space.

Of course, looking upward is often figurative—but many people do take it quite literally, and if one were going to, it would be just as "valid" to look downward, or inward into one's own body. If God is omnipresent, shouldn't God be as present in the depths of the planet, or in our own cells, as in the sky? The gesture tells us less about the geography of a deity than about the structure of the human imagination.

A related embodied gesture appears in some fundamentalist worship: people in an entranced state reach forward with their hands during songs or prayer—eyes half-closed, rocking, repeating sacred phrases, the emotional intensity magnified by the synchrony of the crowd. This is a normal human ecstatic capacity, present in all cultures with or without religion. But the gesture still implies a location for God—reaching out to take God's warmth in one's hands, as though God were physically just ahead, perhaps at the front of the building. Again, the scene tells us a great deal about embodied human longing and very little about the whereabouts of a deity.

Prayer and Empathy

The moral structure of prayer often mirrors the moral structure of empathy. Many prayers are genuinely compassionate: people think of struggling friends, of relatives in trouble, of terrible events in the news, and ask for comfort, protection, and healing. But if prayer is believed to cause divine comfort to arrive, an uncomfortable counterfactual follows: had the prayer not occurred, would the comfort have been withheld? Shouldn't a loving deity comfort the suffering regardless of whether anyone happened to pray—especially since some of the worst suffering on earth happens in isolation, unwitnessed, with no one even aware enough to pray? It implies a troubling arrangement in which help depends not on who suffers most, but on who is fortunate enough to be noticed.

This is where it helps to recall Paul Bloom's critique of empathy, which I have reviewed at length elsewhere. Empathy, Bloom argues—provocatively, and against much received opinion—works like a spotlight: it is biased, and therefore often unjust. It is pulled toward those who resemble us, toward vivid stories and dramatic suffering, while it neglects the quiet, the distant, the stigmatized, and the statistically larger tragedies that arrive without a single tear-streaked face. Prayer tends to inherit the same distortion. We pray intensely for the salient and the familiar, and far less for abstract fairness, or for the invisible victims who never enter our field of attention.

Many prayers, of course, are not about others at all; they are wishes for oneself. There are battlefield prayers, prayers before surgery, prayers for money or a job or the return of an ex-partner, prayers for relief from pain, prayers over the outcome of a baseball pitch. As a meditative act this is entirely understandable. But it can set up a reinforcement loop of exactly the kind I described earlier in connection with other unfounded but comforting beliefs. If the prayer is followed by a good outcome, it naturally feels as though it worked, and the person is bolstered to pray again. If the outcome is bad, the failure is easily absorbed: perhaps the prayer was not sincere enough, or not faithful enough; perhaps God said no, or was testing them. Either way the practice is insulated from disconfirmation—validated whatever happens.

That is why prayer can "work" psychologically even when its supernatural claims are false. As meditation and reflection, it genuinely calms and organizes the mind. As a lever on the physical world it shows no measurable effect—yet it remains self-confirming, and that combination carries a hidden cost. It quietly places the burden on the believer, fostering the illusion that one's own spiritual effort is the decisive factor in how events unfold. We glimpsed the sharp end of this in the prayer trial, where the patients most certain of being prayed for fared slightly worse: once an outcome is felt to ride on the sufficiency of one's faith, comfort and pressure become difficult to tell apart.

References

Benson, H., Dusek, J. A., Sherwood, J. B., Lam, P., Bethea, C. F., Carpenter, W., Levitsky, S., Hill, P. C., Clem, D. W., Jr., Jain, M. K., Drumel, D., Kopecky, S. L., Mueller, P. S., Marek, D., Rollins, S., & Hibberd, P. L. (2006). Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP) in cardiac bypass patients: A multicenter randomized trial of uncertainty and certainty of receiving intercessory prayer. American Heart Journal, 151(4), 934–942. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ahj.2005.05.028

The largest and most rigorous trial of intercessory prayer, following more than 1,800 cardiac bypass patients across six hospitals. Being prayed for made no difference to complication-free recovery; the only statistically reliable effect was that patients who were certain they were being prayed for had slightly more complications (59%) than those who were prayed for but left uncertain (52%). The study was funded by the John Templeton Foundation, which supports research at the intersection of science and religion.

Bloom, P. (2016). Against empathy: The case for rational compassion. Ecco.

Argues that empathy—feeling what another feels—operates like a biased spotlight, favouring the near, the vivid, and the similar while neglecting the distant and the statistical, so that it frequently misguides moral judgment. Bloom proposes "rational compassion" in its place. 

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press.

The founding work of conceptual-metaphor theory, arguing that abstract thought is structured by bodily and spatial metaphors rather than floating free of them. Their "orientational metaphors"—GOOD IS UP, MORE IS UP, and their downward opposites—map value onto space in ways so basic we rarely notice we are doing it. 

Norris, P., & Inglehart, R. (2004). Sacred and secular: Religion and politics worldwide. Cambridge University Press.

Develops the influential "existential security" thesis through comparison of societies worldwide: populations facing insecurity and hardship tend to be more religious, while security and prosperity drive secularization. On this account the correlation between secularism and societal health reflects causation running largely backward—safe, prosperous societies tend to become secular, rather than secularism making them safe. 

Paul, G. S. (2005). Cross-national correlations of quantifiable societal health with popular religiosity and secularism in the prosperous democracies: A first look. Journal of Religion & Society, 7. (Open access)

A cross-national comparison reporting that the more secular prosperous democracies tend to have lower rates of societal dysfunction than the more religious ones—the source of the chapter's "no supernatural dividend" observation. As the author's own subtitle concedes, it is "a first look": the analysis is ecological and correlational, and was sharply criticised (notably by Rodney Stark) for the ecological fallacy and for selective measures. 

← Chapter 17 | Contents | Chapter 19 →

The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 17: Shepherding

A related religious metaphor—gentler on its surface than sacrifice, but, as we will see, not unrelated to it—is shepherding. Jesus is called the "Good Shepherd," and there are many other biblical passages that liken God to a shepherd. It is a beautiful image, and as a child I absorbed it in exactly that spirit: kindly pastoral artwork, a gentle man with a hooked staff, sunny hills, a flock of woolly friends, perhaps one little sheep who has wandered off and needs to be carried back to safety.

But it is worth pausing to remember what shepherding actually meant in that time and place. Sheep were not kept as pets. They were livestock: valued for wool and milk, yes, but also raised for meat—and sometimes for sacrifice. As we saw in the previous chapter, sacrifice was no tidy abstraction. In the rite set out in Leviticus and elaborated in the later rabbinic descriptions of the Temple, the animal was secured with rings before the altar, its throat was cut and its blood caught in a special container and dashed against the altar; the carcass was then hung from an iron hook, skinned, and its organs removed and burned.

A shepherd's role was not only protection and guidance; it also involved ownership, control, and—eventually—decisions about which animals would be killed, sacrificed, or eaten. In that light, "being shepherded" contains an unsettling double meaning: you are kept from straying, guarded from wolves, and held within the safety of the flock—but you are also being managed toward ends that are not your own.

And if we push the image just one step closer to lived reality, it gets darker in a way the children's illustrations never hinted at. Imagine being a sheep in the flock. Every so often the younger males—your brothers, or your cousins—are taken away. Perhaps they are led toward a little shed at the edge of the field, or down a path behind a stand of trees, and they are simply never seen again. The flock goes on grazing. The shepherd is still "protecting" the flock. But the protection is inseparable from a system in which some members are quietly designated for disappearance.

To be fair, the Christian image in particular tries to invert the usual arrangement: the "Good Shepherd" is portrayed as laying down his life for the sheep. That is morally striking. And the traditions are not naïve about bad shepherds, either: the prophets turn the very same metaphor into an indictment of corrupt leadership. Ezekiel devotes an entire chapter to denouncing the "shepherds of Israel" who feed themselves while the flock starves, who rule harshly and leave the weak uncared for, and Jeremiah does much the same—a reminder that the image was always double-edged, and could be turned against the powerful as readily as it sanctified them.

Still, the metaphor does something psychologically and socially important: it trains us to admire a certain kind of relationship—one in which docility is a virtue, "straying" is a moral failure, and the authority to define what counts as straying belongs to the shepherd. This intuition has a long intellectual lineage, and the vocabulary itself gives the game away: a "pastor" is literally a shepherd, "pastoral care" is the tending of a flock, and a "congregation" is, etymologically, a gathered herd. Friedrich Nietzsche gave the underlying suspicion its most savage form. He attacked what he called "slave morality"—a value system he attributed above all to Christianity, which (in his reading) inverts aristocratic virtues, rebrands meekness, obedience, and self-suppression as goodness, and treats the docile herd animal as the moral ideal. Michel Foucault, more coolly, gave the structure a name: "pastoral power," a distinctively Western form of authority, inherited from the Church, that governs not a territory but souls—caring, all-seeing, devoted to your welfare, and expecting obedience in return—and that was later secularized into the modern state's management of whole populations. Tellingly, even Foucault's admirers note that his pastoral idyll leaves one thing out: the slaughter.

Now I think the metaphor is more revealing than its gentle surface suggests. The phrase "sheep gone astray" recurs throughout scripture, almost always as a rebuke for human misbehaviour—but notice that the actual sheep who never stray do not thereby graduate into freedom. They remain in the flock, under management, until the flock's purposes require otherwise. Taken to its literal conclusion, the image idealizes a passive, domesticated existence in which obedience is the highest virtue and "straying" the cardinal sin; in which the protection on offer is inseparable from ownership; and in which the reward for a lifetime of perfect docility is to remain in a flock whose ends are set entirely by someone else. As a child, I never thought about any of this. The pastoral image comforts us, in part, precisely because it asks us not to look too closely at where the path behind the trees actually leads.

References

Foucault, M. (2007). Security, territory, population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978 (M. Senellart, Ed.; G. Burchell, Trans.). Palgrave Macmillan. (Original lectures delivered 1978)

Develops the concept of "pastoral power": a distinctively Western mode of authority, inherited from the Christian Church, that governs individuals as a shepherd governs a flock—caring, individualizing, and totalizing at once, and oriented toward obedience and salvation. Foucault traces how this logic was later secularized into the modern state's management of whole populations. Commentators have noted that his account conspicuously omits the slaughter that real shepherding entails.

Nietzsche, F. (1967). On the genealogy of morals (W. Kaufmann & R. J. Hollingdale, Trans.). Vintage Books. (Original work published 1887)

Nietzsche argues that a "slave morality," which he attributes above all to Christianity, inverts aristocratic values so that meekness, obedience, and self-suppression are recast as virtues and the docile herd animal becomes the moral ideal. The companion argument appears in Beyond Good and Evil (1886). The vocabulary of the "herd" (Herde) recurs throughout both works.

The "Good Shepherd" passage is John 10:11–18; the Lord as shepherd, Psalm 23. The motif of straying sheep appears at Isaiah 53:6, Luke 15:3–7, and Matthew 18:12–14. The prophetic use of the shepherd metaphor to condemn exploitative leadership is found in Ezekiel 34 and Jeremiah 23:1–4. The burnt-offering rite is described in Leviticus 1; the Second Temple details—rings to secure the animal, iron hooks for flaying, and the blood caught in vessels and dashed against the altar—are preserved in the Mishnah (Tamid 3; Middot 3:5; Pesaḥim 5:9).

← Chapter 16 | Contents | Chapter 18 →

The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 16: Sacrifice

Most religions have some form of sacrifice woven into their theology. Sometimes this involves literal offerings—killing and burning animals, or destroying valuable objects. Other times it is "bloodless": giving money, time, obedience, or the renunciation of pleasures through fasting, abstinence, or celibacy. In all these cases the underlying idea is the same: something costly is offered up, in the hope of securing meaning, favour, purity, forgiveness, protection, or belonging.

Some sacrificial motifs move disturbingly close to human sacrifice. In the Abrahamic traditions, the willingness of Abraham—Ibrahim—to sacrifice his son is presented as the peak test of obedience. In Islam it is commemorated each year at Eid al-Adha, the "Festival of Sacrifice," where the animal offering serves as a memorial of that story. And in Christianity the theme is carried into the central story of Jesus—a dramatic reframing of sacrifice into self-sacrifice, offered "for others."

These stories share a hidden architecture: substitution. The ram caught in the thicket dies in Isaac's place; the Levitical scapegoat is loaded with the community's sins and driven into the wilderness to carry them away; and Christianity universalizes the logic completely, casting Jesus as the "Lamb of God" whose single sacrifice is meant to end the need for any further sacrifice at all. Much of the moral force of sacrifice lives here—in the idea that suffering can be transferred, that one life or one death can be made to stand in for another.

Across much of the ancient world, sacrificial traditions were common, and often brutal. Ancient Greek religion had animal sacrifice. Vedic religion in India revolved around yajña, the sacrificial fire ritual. Ancient China had elaborate sacrificial practices directed toward ancestors and higher powers, sometimes involving animals and—as the royal tombs at Anyang attest, on a large scale—human beings. The Aztecs are especially notorious for human sacrifice; the numbers reported by their Spanish conquerors were very likely inflated, but archaeology at the Templo Mayor has confirmed that the practice itself was real and substantial.

Why would an all-powerful deity, especially one associated with the highest moral standards, want a dead animal or a burnt work of art as a gift? One might think a god worth revering would count it a gift if you helped other people or cared for the natural world, rather than destroyed objects or killed living things. But sacrificial systems do not usually work that way.

This objection is not a modern or anti-religious invention; the traditions raised it against themselves long ago. The Hebrew prophets are scathing on exactly this point: "I desire mercy, not sacrifice," says Hosea; Micah asks whether the Lord wants "thousands of rams," or rather that one do justice and love mercy; Amos has God declare that he despises the festival offerings and demands instead that "justice roll down like waters." Socrates presses the same nerve in Plato's Euthyphro, mocking the notion of piety as a kind of commercial exchange with the gods—a trading relationship in which the right offering buys favour. The most humane corrections to religion have often come from inside it, and the critique of sacrifice is a striking early example.

Reciprocity, Magical Thinking, and Social Technology

Sacrifice is, in my view, an extension of ordinary human ideas about reciprocity and gratitude—infused with magical thinking. In a community we do favours, give gifts, and care for one another; these behaviours can be altruistic, but they are also held in place by norms of reciprocity. If one believes that a mystical power controls destiny, fertility, weather, health, wealth, or victory in war, it becomes psychologically "reasonable," within that worldview, to give that power a gift—and to hope for a return.

And once a person enters this mindset, the logic can become self-sealing. If you make a sacrifice and misfortune still comes, you can conclude the offering was not large enough, or not sincere enough, or not given with the right purity of heart—so next time you must give more. If something good happens afterward, it feels like proof that the sacrifice worked, and should be repeated. There is no result that can disconfirm the practice; every outcome feeds it. In this way sacrifice can escalate into something brutal and destructive—and the sacrificed animals, often the most vulnerable and least able to "consent" to the human story being told about them, get no say in the matter.

Another motivation for sacrifice likely came from the grim necessities of ancient life: hunting, or killing domestic animals for food. Most humans bond to animals easily, and it is troubling to watch an animal struggle and suffer. Ritual can function as a kind of moral anaesthetic—a way to consecrate violence, assuage guilt, and turn a hard necessity into a story of gratitude, order, and meaning.

Two scholars loom over any modern account of sacrifice, and it is worth setting these intuitions against theirs. Walter Burkert, in Homo Necans, argued that Greek sacrificial ritual grew out of the guilt and anxiety of the Palaeolithic hunt—that the solemn choreography around the killing is, at bottom, a way of managing the unease of taking life. That is close to the "moral anaesthetic" idea. René Girard, in Violence and the Sacred, proposed something darker: that sacrifice channels the contagious, escalating violence of a community onto a substitute victim—a scapegoat—whose death discharges the tension and restores peace, after which the victim is often made sacred. One need not accept either theory wholesale to notice that both converge with the argument here: sacrifice is a technology for metabolizing the violence and anxiety that group life generates.

Sacrifice can also be political performance. Public ritual consolidates hierarchy—especially priestly hierarchy—displays power, intensifies fear, and signals unity. It makes shared belief visible and costly. It puts loyalty on display: it shows who is serious, who is obedient, who can be trusted, and who has the authority to declare what counts as holy.

This is also where sacrifice connects to group psychology. The anthropologist Richard Sosis has argued that costly rituals—the things you would not do unless you were genuinely committed—work as hard-to-fake signals that strengthen trust and cooperation within a group, partly by screening out free riders. A community bound together by shared sacrifice can feel safer, warmer, and more morally serious to its members. But the same mechanism can harden boundaries and deepen suspicion of outsiders.

And costly sacrifice does not only send a signal to other people; it also works on the person making it. As we saw earlier with initiation, people are deeply reluctant to admit they have suffered for nothing. So the greater the sacrifice, the stronger the pressure to reinterpret the suffering as meaningful, noble, or necessary. That is what makes sacrificial systems self-protective: the cost itself becomes part of the "evidence" that the belief must matter.

Which raises a deeper question. Sacrifice is only the most vivid of a whole set of shared, costly markers—shared dress, shared food, shared song, shared taboo—and all of them seem to produce the same effect: they make strangers feel like family. But why should a shared ritual generate the feeling of kinship at all? To answer that, we have to look at something far older than any religion: the machinery by which living things came to favour their own kind in the first place.

Kin Altruism

Reciprocity has a deeper and older root than social custom. There is a strongly selected tendency to favour and help genetic relatives, sometimes even at real cost to oneself. The logic was formalized in 1964 by W. D. Hamilton: a gene that inclines an individual to help close relatives can spread down the generations, because those relatives are disproportionately likely to carry the very same gene. Hamilton's rule states the condition precisely—an allele prompting costly help toward kin can spread when the benefit to those relatives, weighted by the probability that they share the allele, outweighs the cost to the helper, even when that cost is steep.

But humans do not walk around calculating degrees of genetic relatedness. Instead we rely on crude, fast cues—ones that, over most of human history, were reasonably well correlated with kinship. People who live near one another, marry one another, and raise children together will, over generations, tend to share not only genes but language, accent, customs, dress, habits, and norms. On average, they will also tend to resemble one another physically more than they resemble people from a distant village or lineage. Conversely, people who look different, speak differently, or keep very different customs were, historically, more often from a different family network—and so, on average, somewhat less closely related.

Similarity of appearance, familiarity of accent, shared habits, shared rituals, shared dress, shared taboos—all of these can become proxies, very imperfect proxies, for "one of us." And religion supplies them in abundance: common dress, common restrictions, common foods, common sacrifices, common songs, common stories, common enemies. In effect, it manufactures the feeling of kinship among people who are not literally kin.

A caution is in order, because the step from "looks different" to "treated as an enemy" is looser than it first appears. In a well-known set of experiments, Robert Kurzban, John Tooby, and Leda Cosmides found that the mind does not seem to track race, or physical similarity, as a fundamental category at all; what it tracks is coalition—who is allied with whom. Subjects' tendency to sort others by race dropped sharply, within minutes, once they were given a more salient cue to who was on which team. If that is right, then physical appearance is encoded only insofar as it has historically predicted alliance, and it can be overwritten when a better predictor comes along. This does not weaken the argument so much as relocate it: religion's real power is that it floods the mind with vivid, durable coalition markers—shared dress, shared rites, shared sacrifice—and so recruits a coalitional psychology far older and deeper than any doctrine.

The mind appears to have evolved to be slightly more generous, trusting, and self-sacrificing toward those who are more likely to be "one of us," and correspondingly less generous, more wary, or more distant toward those who feel like "not us." These tendencies are not destiny, and they are not moral justification—but they do appear to be among the psychological and evolutionary foundations of prejudice. They are precisely the sort of inherited inclination we have to learn to recognize, question, and actively override.

Belonging and Group Boundaries

Religion can widen the circle of felt family. But it can also sharpen the line between those inside the group and those outside it. Once sacrifice, loyalty, and identity are fused, shared customs take on unusual emotional and moral weight, and group boundaries begin to feel enormously important. The stronger those boundaries, the easier it becomes to view outsiders with suspicion, distance, or moral distrust. This does not mean religion always produces hostility, or that it does so uniquely—these are broad features of human social psychology, and the willingness to sacrifice for one's own group has been linked, in some evolutionary models, to hostility toward rival groups, the two evolving together. But religion can give the whole pattern a sacred language, a ritual structure, and a heightened sense of seriousness. In that way, stronger religious boundaries can feed exclusion and, in some cases, open hostility between groups. Religion does not invent this psychology—but it can consecrate it.

References

Aronson, E., & Mills, J. (1959). The effect of severity of initiation on liking for a group. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 59(2), 177–181. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0047195

The classic effort-justification experiment: people who underwent a more embarrassing initiation in order to join a group afterward rated the group more highly, not less. The result has been replicated many times and is counterintuitive—the steeper the price of entry, the greater the reported attachment.  The cost of a sacrifice tends to deepen commitment to the belief it serves rather than weaken it.

Burkert, W. (1983). Homo necans: The anthropology of ancient Greek sacrificial ritual and myth (P. Bing, Trans.). University of California Press. (Original work published 1972)

A foundational anthropological account tracing Greek sacrificial ritual to the guilt and anxiety of Palaeolithic hunting, and reading the solemn choreography of the kill as a way of managing the unease of taking life. Burkert treats sacrifice as something humans developed to live with violence rather than to celebrate it. 

Choi, J.-K., & Bowles, S. (2007). The coevolution of parochial altruism and war. Science, 318(5850), 636–640. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1144237

A formal evolutionary model showing how in-group self-sacrifice ("altruism") and hostility toward out-groups ("parochialism") can evolve together, each making the other adaptive: groups with altruistic warriors outcompete groups without them. The authors argue the two traits are not opposites but partners. The warmth of belonging and the suspicion of outsiders are two faces of a single mechanism.

Girard, R. (1977). Violence and the sacred (P. Gregory, Trans.). Johns Hopkins University Press. (Original work published 1972)

Advances the "scapegoat" theory of sacrifice: that a community discharges its own escalating, imitative violence onto a substitute victim, whose killing restores order and who is then made sacred. For Girard, the mechanism is largely hidden from the participants, which is part of how it works. 

Hamilton, W. D. (1964). The genetical evolution of social behaviour. I. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 7(1), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-5193(64)90038-4

The founding paper of kin-selection theory, introducing the rule now named for Hamilton: a gene for helping relatives can spread when the benefit to kin, discounted by the degree of relatedness, exceeds the cost to the helper. It gave a precise mathematical basis for the evolution of self-sacrificial behaviour toward family. 

Kurzban, R., Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (2001). Can race be erased? Coalitional computation and social categorization. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 98(26), 15387–15392. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.251541498

Experimental evidence that the mind encodes race not as a primitive category but as a cue to coalition or alliance, such that race-based sorting drops sharply once a competing cue to team membership is made salient. The finding suggests that what looks like an automatic focus on physical difference is really a search for who is allied with whom.  Appearance matters only as a proxy for "us versus them," and can be overwritten.

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 widely cited review of costly-signalling theories of religion, arguing that hard-to-fake ritual commitments stabilize cooperation by screening out free riders—those who would take the benefits of group membership without paying its costs. The more expensive the ritual, on this account, the more reliably it identifies the genuinely committed. 

The Binding of Isaac appears in Genesis 22:1–19; the parallel Qur'anic narrative is in Surah as-Saffat (37:99–113), where the son is not named. The prophetic critique of sacrifice is found at Hosea 6:6, Micah 6:6–8, Amos 5:21–24, 1 Samuel 15:22, Psalm 51:16–17, and Isaiah 1:11–17.

Socrates' treatment of piety as a form of exchange with the gods appears in Plato's Euthyphro*, especially at 14e–15a.*

← Chapter 15 | Contents | Chapter 17 →

The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 15: Spirituality & Superstition

Humans have cognitive tendencies that make superstitious beliefs easy to generate—and hard to extinguish. By "spirituality" here I do not mean awe, contemplation, or reverence in a broad sense; I mean the more specific belief that hidden forces—fate, synchronicity, spirits, or nonphysical "energy"—are actively guiding events. Beliefs in spirits, ghosts, magic, luck, or fate are widespread across cultures. The specifics vary wildly—local spirits, protective rituals, sacred objects, gnomes, invisible dangers—but the underlying psychology is similar.

At its root is pattern-seeking. The mind craves meaning, and when the world is uncertain or painful it will often manufacture meaning rather than tolerate ambiguity. This is not a sign of low intelligence; it is ordinary cognition under stress. And it does not stop at pattern. We also read agency into the world, and imagine hidden minds behind ambiguous events. The anthropologist Stewart Guthrie argued that this is the seed of religion itself: we are built to see faces in clouds and a watcher in the rustling grass. If you mistakenly assume that the shadow of a tree branch swaying in the wind is a tiger stalking you, you will still be alive in the morning. But if you mistakenly assume that an actual tiger is just a shadow in the wind, you and your family might not survive the night. A mind tuned that way will find agents everywhere, including where there are none.

That tuning is not learned at church, or from bedtime stories; it comes installed. In a famous 1944 experiment, Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel showed people a short animation of two triangles and a circle moving around a box, and almost nobody could describe it as geometry: viewers saw chasing, bullying, hiding, rescue—a drama, complete with villain. And the tendency is at work long before language arrives. In a celebrated series of experiments at Yale, infants of six and ten months watched a character with googly eyes struggle to climb a hill while a second character either helped it to the top or shoved it back down; offered the two afterward, the babies overwhelmingly reached for the helper. (Some of this research, deliberating babies included, can be watched in the Netflix documentary series Babies—filmed, as it happens, in a laboratory in Vancouver.) Whether that second step, infants taking sides, survives the current replication debate is an open question, as the notes describe. The first step, seeing agents and intentions in anything that moves on its own, is not in doubt. The watcher in the rustling grass does not have to be taught; he is on duty in the crib.

When people feel a loss of control, the appetite for pattern intensifies—and coincidence is more readily treated as signal. Superstition can be emotionally satisfying because it converts randomness into a story.

Once a few people begin to read events through a "hidden forces" framework, it spreads: it gives language to fear and hope, it confers a sense of specialness, and it offers the pleasure of explanatory closure. Coincidences become "signs." Ambiguous perceptions become "messages." A confusing life becomes a legible plot. A person has a strong feeling—dread, relief, attraction, foreboding—and the mind is tempted to treat that feeling as information about the outer world. A difficult decision feels as though it has been answered by "the universe." A run of bad luck starts to feel orchestrated. The step from "this feels meaningful" to "this is meaningful" is, for most of us, a short one.

And sometimes the belief helps, at least in the short term. A ritual, a talisman, or the conviction that one has "good energy" can reduce anxiety, steady the nerves, and make a person readier to act. In that sense superstition works a little like prayer, or placebo, or a pre-game routine: it changes the person's emotional state, and the changed state can genuinely improve performance or endurance. But—exactly as with the faith healing and the diets earlier in this book—that does not validate the explanation. It shows that belief can move mood, attention, and confidence. It does not show that a mystical force is operating in the background.

When Meaning Hardens into Causation

The trouble begins when a poetic interpretation hardens into a literal theory about reality. At that point there is no longer a harmless sense of wonder; there is a false model of causation. There is still no robust, independently replicated evidence that psychic forces, spirits, or nonphysical "energies" of this sort actually guide events—and there is no good reason to treat a strong feeling of destiny as evidence that destiny is real. Once such feelings are treated as evidence, judgment drifts away from probability, base rate, character, and consequence. A person stays in a bad relationship because it feels "meant to be." Someone avoids effective medical treatment because the illness is thought to be spiritual. Someone takes reckless risks because fate is presumed protective. Life planning gets worse when omens and vibes displace sober attention to what is actually happening.

There is a darker social risk as well. Once people begin to believe that invisible moral or spiritual contamination clings to persons, places, or groups, superstition becomes a license for prejudice. History offers grim examples of what happens when communities weaponize these causal illusions. The early modern European witch crazes, which claimed tens of thousands of lives, were driven in large part by the urge to assign occult causality to illness, infant mortality, crop failure, or misfortune. Medieval blood-libel accusations, and the pogroms—organized mob attacks on a minority—that swept Jewish communities during outbreaks of plague, drew on the same fantasy of hidden contamination: when the Black Death arrived with no visible cause, Jews were accused of poisoning the wells, and thousands were killed across Europe. In Strasbourg, on Valentine's Day 1349, much of the Jewish community was burned alive before the plague had even reached the town.

In parts of sub-Saharan Africa, people with albinism are still hunted, mutilated, and killed for body parts believed to hold ritual power. In modern, everyday life the same pathology is more banal but no less real: a neighbour is said to have "dark energy." A house is called cursed. A child is treated as spiritually tainted. A stranger is felt to be threatening in some occult way rather than simply unfamiliar. Once a group shares such assumptions openly, they stop being private quirks and coalesce into a moral atmosphere in which exclusion, suspicion, and even violence come to feel justified. This is how a private comfort slides into public harm.

Even so, the topic calls for sensitivity, and this is where I want to be careful. For the person immersed in these beliefs, the experience is not frivolous. It feels visceral, self-evident, woven into memory from early life, and reinforced for years by trusted friends, family, charismatic figures, chosen anecdotes, online communities, and a steady diet of "paranormal" documentaries that showcase the apparent hits and quietly discard the misses. When a belief has been stabilized by familiarity, repetition, and community, challenging it feels less like an intellectual correction than like an attack on lived experience. The humane response is not to mock the feeling. The feeling is real. What deserves challenge is the conclusion drawn from it.

As a psychiatrist, I often feel stuck in a state where the only possible response to stories of this type has to be gentle, non-judgmental curiosity. I say "stuck" because I have to withhold a powerful urge within myself to reach for some evidence-based argument that would move the person away from such beliefs. In a sense this entire book is like that, on a larger scale. But I know the argument would not help, so I bite my tongue—and perhaps write a blog article afterward rather than start a clinical debate. Empathy and trust are the more powerful forces, and any real possibility of an evidence-based conversation about these topics takes far more time, empathy, and trust than most of us realize.

A Psychiatric View

From a clinical standpoint, people genuinely differ in their proneness to unusual, mystical, or numinous experience—and this variation is not itself pathology. Some people reliably feel awe, presence, synchronicity, and "spiritual certainty"; others rarely do. The psychologists Auke Tellegen and Gilbert Atkinson gave this trait a name—absorption, the disposition to become deeply immersed in imaginative and perceptual experience—and it is linked to hypnotic susceptibility, vivid felt significance, and openness to anomalous experience.

A useful, imperfect metaphor is that some minds run with higher gain. Turn up the gain on a receiver and faint signals become audible—but so does the static, and past a certain point the receiver begins to pull voices out of pure noise. An absorptive, high-gain mind receives the world vividly and meaningfully, which is a gift; it also runs a greater risk of hearing signal in what is only noise. The brain's salience machinery is part of this story, though it is not reducible to dopamine alone. And this is where the ordinary shades, by degrees, into the clinical. Shitij Kapur's influential account of psychosis describes it as a state of aberrant salience: a dysregulated system stamps neutral events—a passing car, a stranger's glance—with a feeling of intense personal meaning, and the mind, doing what minds do, builds an explanation to fit. The delusion is not a failure of reasoning so much as reasoning applied, faithfully, to a feeling of significance that should never have been there.

Frank psychotic delusions are, in a strange way, often easier to help than large-scale systems of false belief. There is usually a more immediate biological cause, and a few weeks or months of medication will often make the delusions recede—sometimes vanishing entirely, without a trace. But beliefs that have grown over a lifetime, braced by community, probably never vanish, even if they can lose some of their grip when the conditions are right.

There is one more thread worth pulling, because it bears on how we treat people who hold these beliefs. Gordon Pennycook and his colleagues have shown that a more analytic cognitive style—the habit of stopping to check an intuition against probability—predicts weaker paranormal and religious belief, and, crucially, it does so even after controlling for raw intelligence, education, age, sex, and politics. It is not that believers are less able. It is that the disposition to question a compelling feeling varies from person to person—and, unlike intelligence, that disposition can be taught. The problem is not a deficient mind; it is an intuition left unchecked, and checking is a skill.

Spirituality and Religion

Many members of organized religions look down on "superstition" and free-floating "spirituality." Yet in psychological terms—at the level of cognitive ingredients—the difference is often one of degree rather than kind. Organized religion formalizes these same human tendencies: it standardizes the stories, professionalizes the interpreters, and binds belief to group identity and obligation. "Spirituality" tends to keep the intuitions while loosening the institutional grip. But both draw on the same human appetite for meaning, comfort, narrative, and relief from uncertainty. The gain is turned up in both sanctuaries; one has simply built more architecture around it.

I think I have a "high gain" mind—not in the way a gifted poet or artist does (I wish I had that kind of talent), but in a way I enjoy. I am easily moved to awe and wonder. In an emotional moment I cry easily. I feel things strongly, and I love unconventional thoughts, which tend to flow freely. But I also seem to have another part of myself that keeps a hand on the amplifier—perhaps I inherited the two from each of my parents, in a way that balances out. And I think balance is the point, for all of us. We cannot, and should not, try to eradicate parts of ourselves; the task is to learn to hold them in some kind of equilibrium.

References

Babies. (2020). [Documentary series]. Netflix.

The twelve-part series follows fifteen families around the world through the first year of life, alongside the scientists studying each capacity as it arrives. The helper-and-hinderer experiments appear in the episode "Relationships" (Part 2, Episode 4), filmed at the Centre for Infant Cognition at the University of British Columbia, where the lead researcher also discusses the multi-laboratory replication project then underway. The puppet shows, and the babies deciding, can be watched in full.

 

Calin-Jageman, R. J., & Caldwell, T. L. (2014). Replication of the superstition and performance study by Damisch, Stoberock, and Mussweiler (2010). Social Psychology, 45(3), 239–245. https://doi.org/10.1027/1864-9335/a000190

Two high-powered, preregistered attempts to replicate the well-known "lucky ball" golf experiment, in which activating a superstition supposedly improved performance. Neither found any benefit, and a small meta-analysis of the best-designed studies found no effect. Even the appealing claim that superstition helps performance does not survive rigorous testing.

 

Guthrie, S. E. (1993). Faces in the clouds: A new theory of religion. Oxford University Press.

Argues that religion is rooted in a pervasive human tendency to anthropomorphize—to read human-like agency into wind, shadow, and chance. Guthrie treats this not as a defect but as a sensible perceptual strategy: in an uncertain world, over-detecting agents is safer than missing a real one. His account is the intellectual forerunner of the agency-detection theories of religion later formalized by Justin Barrett and others.

 

Hamlin, J. K., Wynn, K., & Bloom, P. (2007). Social evaluation by preverbal infants. Nature, 450(7169), 557–559. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature06288

The original hill studies. Infants of six and ten months watched a climber struggle uphill while a second character either helped it to the top or shoved it back down; at both ages the babies selectively reached for the helper, and the authors proposed that evaluating others by their conduct toward third parties may be a foundation of later moral thought. The finding launched a large literature, and its afterlife is instructive: single-laboratory replications were mixed, and the large coordinated replication cited below did not find the preference. Whether the effect is fragile, or the standardized method removed something essential—live puppets among it—is now the live question.

 

Heider, F., & Simmel, M. (1944). An experimental study of apparent behavior. The American Journal of Psychology, 57(2), 243–259. https://doi.org/10.2307/1416950

The original demonstration that agency attribution is nearly irresistible. Shown a simple animation of two triangles and a circle moving around a box, almost all viewers described the scene in terms of intentions, personalities, and social drama—chasing, fighting, protecting—rather than motion and geometry. The film runs barely a minute, is easy to find online, and has lost none of its force.

 

Kapur, S. (2003). Psychosis as a state of aberrant salience: A framework linking biology, phenomenology, and pharmacology in schizophrenia. American Journal of Psychiatry, 160(1), 13–23. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.160.1.13

The landmark aberrant-salience account of psychosis. Kapur proposes that dysregulated dopamine signalling assigns exaggerated significance to neutral events, so that ordinary coincidences come to feel intensely and personally meaningful; delusions are the mind's attempt to explain that misplaced significance.

 

Krummenacher, P., Mohr, C., Haker, H., & Brugger, P. (2010). Dopamine, paranormal belief, and the detection of meaningful stimuli. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 22(8), 1670–1681. https://doi.org/10.1162/jocn.2009.21313

A double-blind study using levodopa to probe how dopamine, paranormal belief, and the detection of meaning interact. The results were nuanced and in places counter-intuitive, and the authors are careful not to claim a simple causal chain. There is no simple "dopamine causes belief" story.

 

Levack, B. P. (2016). The witch-hunt in early modern Europe(4th ed.). Routledge.

The standard scholarly synthesis of the European witch trials of roughly 1450 to 1750. Careful regional accounting yields a consensus estimate near 45,000 executions out of perhaps 100,000 trials—genuinely "tens of thousands," but far below the wildly inflated figures of popular legend.

 

Lucca, K., Yuen, F., & the ManyBabies4 Consortium. (2025). Infants' social evaluation of helpers and hinderers: A large-scale, multi-lab, coordinated replication study. Developmental Science, 28(1), e13581. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13581

A preregistered replication of the 2007 hill studies across thirty-seven laboratories on five continents, testing over a thousand infants with standardized video stimuli designed to remove a perceptual confound in the original. The primary analysis did not find a reliable preference for helpers. The original authors are participants in the effort, and the interpretation—fragile effect, or method too far from the original live puppet shows—is being worked out in the open, which is how science is supposed to behave.

 

Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. (2021). Independent Expert on the enjoyment of human rights by persons with albinism. United Nations. https://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures/ie-albinism

The UN mandate documenting the abduction, mutilation, and killing of people with albinism for body parts used in witchcraft-related ritual—more than six hundred reported attacks across some two dozen sub-Saharan African countries over a decade. The mandate and the accompanying Human Rights Council resolution frame these as ongoing, witchcraft-driven human-rights violations.

 

Pennycook, G., Cheyne, J. A., Seli, P., Koehler, D. J., & Fugelsang, J. A. (2012). Analytic cognitive style predicts religious and paranormal belief. Cognition, 123(3), 335–346. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2012.03.003

Across two studies, a more analytic cognitive style predicted weaker religious and paranormal belief even after controlling for cognitive ability, education, sex, age, and political orientation. Belief tracks thinking style—the disposition to check an intuition—more than raw intelligence, and for the hopeful corollary that such a disposition can be cultivated.

 

Tellegen, A., & Atkinson, G. (1974). Openness to absorbing and self-altering experiences ("absorption"), a trait related to hypnotic susceptibility. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 83(3), 268–277. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0036681

The paper that introduced "absorption," the stable disposition to become deeply immersed in imaginative and perceptual experience. The trait is repeatedly linked to hypnotic susceptibility, vivid felt significance, and proneness to anomalous experience.

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The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 14: Religion as a Business

We usually say that a church can operate "like a business." But the arrow points the other way. Religion solved the hardest problem in commerce—how to make people loyal, for life, often without paying them—thousands of years before there were corporations, and business has been trying to reverse-engineer it ever since. Companies speak of brand "evangelists," of "converts" and "the faithful"; they build "communities," stage "rituals," and dream of the customer who never checks a competitor. That is religion's vocabulary, borrowed by people who wish they could do what religion does and mostly cannot. So the interesting comparison is not that religion resembles a business. It is that religion is the master technology of human commitment, and business is the imitation.

Marketing has quietly learned from faith. There is branding: symbols worn on clothing, around the neck, stuck onto bumpers. There is loyalty to the brand and suspicion of rival brands. There is outreach and proselytization. And beneath it, an organized financial structure with work to be done and an aim of retaining members, expanding the fold, eliciting contributions of money and labour, and keeping morale high. Any marketing department would recognize the org chart. Few could reproduce the devotion.

Consider what business would most like to copy and can't: the initiation. In tribal, high-commitment groups—fraternities are the benign example, gangs the dark one—entry is often made deliberately costly. In a classic 1959 experiment, Elliot Aronson and Judson Mills found that people who endured a more embarrassing initiation to join a group afterward rated it more highly, not less. The mind justifies what it paid to enter; this is effort justification, and Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance explains why. Religions have always known it in practice. Prospective members are vetted, sit through instruction, and then make solemn, public commitments in a ritual—a wedding to the community. No loyalty program can manufacture that.

Sometimes the model is not mass-market but luxury. Rather than broad proselytization, the "product" is restricted, and only a select few gain entry. In some traditions you must attain advanced standing—often over years—before you may enter the most sacred buildings or take part in the deepest rituals; sometimes only men may occupy certain roles or spaces. The obstacle is the point. It heightens the allure and selects for people willing to give more time, money, and devotion. If everyone had a Rolex or a Gucci bag it would stop being special; exclusivity is much of what makes a thing feel high-end—and much of what makes an inner circle feel sacred.

Then there is the masterstroke, the one no corporation has ever managed to pull off cleanly: the elevation of belief itself—faith—into a virtue. Belief without evidence is not merely tolerated but praised. Imagine what a company would give for that. Customers would form loyalty to the brand without ever looking too closely at the reviews; doubt could be reframed as weakness, betrayal, or impurity; and the most credulous buyers would be the most honoured, their standing rising in proportion to how little they questioned. Businesses attempt versions of this and mostly fail, because a dissatisfied customer can always leave and a competitor is one click away. Religion made not-looking a sacrament.

I have watched a version of this from inside my own profession. At a former workplace, a great deal of effort went into "branding" for mental health, involving a great deal of money; later came the fancy new buildings and offices. But the heart of the work does not require branding, or grand architecture, or a marketing staff, or layers of corporate management. None of it was what a frightened person in a small room actually needs, which is simply to be listened to, and to be able to come back.

The same misplacement of substance appears in religion on a far grander scale, and the numbers can be staggering. Across history and around the world, religious institutions have amassed extraordinary wealth—in land, buildings, art, and investments—on a scale hard to square with the ordinary believer's image of humble stewardship. The Roman Catholic Church holds a patrimony of cathedrals, real estate, and priceless art accumulated over nearly two millennia; the Church of England is among the largest landowners in Britain; and a good many megachurches and television ministries have made their founders very rich. Precise figures are often impossible to obtain, because most religious bodies are under no obligation to disclose them—which is part of the point. The clearest documented case is recent, and it became clear only because the law forced it into the open: in 2023 the Securities and Exchange Commission penalized the investment arm of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Ensign Peak Advisors, for using shell companies to obscure an equity portfolio that public filings put at roughly thirty-two to thirty-eight billion dollars; a whistleblower had earlier estimated the fund at close to a hundred billion. It stands as an illustration rather than an outlier—the one instance where the curtain happened to be pulled back. And much of this wealth, across traditions, operates with significant tax advantage. In the United States, churches are automatically tax-exempt and, uniquely among nonprofits, need not file the public disclosures other charities must. In Canada, registered charities, many of them religious, pay no income tax while registered.

The sharpest warnings about all of this come from inside religion itself. The most famous is the line attributed to Jesus, and preserved in all three Synoptic Gospels: "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." It is worth sitting with the irony. The institution that built the near-hundred-billion-dollar fund venerates a founder who owned nothing, praised the poor, and told the rich they would struggle to enter heaven at all. That gap—between the carpenter of the Gospels and the portfolio in the filings—is not an argument against faith. It is a warning from inside the tradition, aimed by its own founder at exactly what was later built in his name. The camel and the needle were meant for precisely this.

References

Aronson, E., & Mills, J. (1959). The effect of severity of initiation on liking for a group. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 59(2), 177–181. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0047195

The classic effort-justification experiment: young women who underwent a more embarrassing initiation in order to join a discussion group afterward rated the group more favourably than those admitted easily. The result is counterintuitive—the higher the price of entry, the greater the reported liking—and it has been replicated many times since. 

Canada Revenue Agency. (n.d.). Charities and giving. Government of Canada. https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/charities-giving.html

The federal agency's guidance on the tax treatment of registered charities, a category that includes a large share of Canadian religious organizations. Registered charities pay no income tax while registered and may issue tax-receipted donations, though they must file an annual T3010 information return. 

Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford University Press.

The founding statement of cognitive dissonance theory: the mind experiences discomfort when its beliefs and actions conflict, and works to reduce that discomfort, often by adjusting the belief. Applied to group membership, it is the mechanism beneath effort justification—having sacrificed to join, a person values the group more highly to make the sacrifice feel worthwhile. 

Internal Revenue Service. (n.d.). Tax guide for churches and religious organizations (Publication 1828). U.S. Department of the Treasury. https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p1828.pdf

The federal tax guide for religious organizations in the United States. It explains that churches are automatically recognized as tax-exempt under §501(c)(3) without having to apply, and that they are uniquely exempt, among nonprofits, from filing the annual Form 990 that would otherwise make their finances public. 

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. (2023, February 21). SEC charges the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its investment management company for disclosure failures and misstated filings (Press Release No. 2023-35). https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2023-35

The regulatory action behind this chapter's documented example of religious wealth. The SEC found that Ensign Peak Advisors, the investment arm of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, had used shell companies to obscure an equity portfolio reported in public filings at roughly thirty-two to thirty-eight billion dollars; a 2019 whistleblower complaint and subsequent reporting placed the total fund near a hundred billion. 

The saying "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God" appears in all three Synoptic Gospels: Matthew 19:24, Mark 10:25, and Luke 18:25.

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