The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 20: Religious Abuse

Abuse is tragically common. It affects every kind of community and family. Over the years I have seen numerous cases in which religious texts, or elements of religious faith, were used as instruments to abuse innocent children. (To protect privacy, identifying details have been altered, and some of the following examples are composites.)

Among them is the worst case of emotional abuse I have encountered in my career.

A teenager—gentle, intelligent, altruistic, living in a wealthy household—was subjected to forced “family sessions” late at night. She would be made to sit for hours in her bedroom while various family members recited Bible passages in a harsh, accusatory tone, orchestrated by a brutal, controlling father. The purpose was not moral guidance; it was humiliation and intimidation.

The teenager was, in fact, actively engaged in altruistic leadership at a church. But the family accused her of hypocrisy and of being a “false disciple,” citing passages such as Matthew 7:21–23 and Matthew 23:13–20, telling her repeatedly that “God has abandoned you,” and threatening her with hell. The irony, of course, is that those very passages condemn hypocritical, performative, self-aggrandizing religiosity.

The family would then pivot to the Old Testament, including Deuteronomy 21:18–21, which prescribes that a “stubborn and rebellious son” be stoned to death by the community. (That the passage concerns a son seems not to have troubled them.) It is worth noting what the tradition itself did with this text: in the Talmud, the rabbis hedged the law of the rebellious son with so many conditions that they pronounced it had “never happened and never will happen,” preserved in scripture only so that one “may expound it and receive reward”—in other words, it was supposed to be a teaching exercise, never a licence to kill. But the family was indeed taking the “license to kill” attitude, brandishing a commandment their own tradition had disarmed two millennia earlier. Because the girl was devout herself, the experience was not merely frightening; it was torturous, and permanently traumatizing—especially in combination with the family’s other abuse and neglect.

These episodes were interspersed with the family’s evangelical outreach in the community, “to spread the word.” As is so often the case, the parents were regarded by many others as pious and respectable. Abusive behaviour has complex causes, and in the absence of religion these parents might well have found another vehicle for cruelty. But in this family the abuse intensified as religious involvement intensified. Congregants who knew what was happening were horrified—yet very few intervened beyond offering prayer.

In a second case, the children of a deeply religious mother endured profound daily neglect and emotional abuse for years. Once again, members of the religious community did little to change the situation other than pray. When one of these children later went to live with the other, non-religious parent, her quality of life improved dramatically. She grew into an intelligent, kind, and accomplished young woman—though she still carries post-traumatic symptoms from that earlier phase of life.

Clinicians have begun to give this kind of injury a name: what some now call religious trauma, or spiritual abuse. Neither term is yet a formal diagnosis; the underlying condition is generally understood as a variant of post-traumatic stress disorder.

In a third case, a family that had once been happy and well-integrated with its extended kin seemed to change in personality as it became absorbed in extreme fundamentalist religion. They grew dark, angry, and suspicious, and eventually estranged themselves from everyone else. Threatening posters appeared on their property bearing scriptural warnings about hell. Attempts to reach out with kindness were met with scolding condemnations about religious difference. A particular low point was an angry, rambling religious tirade delivered during the funeral of a family elder. These changes tracked precisely with the family’s deepening insularity and its growing commitment to extreme belief and practice. To this day I feel badly for the children who had to grow up in that home.

I have seen many estrangements: religious parents ostracizing, shaming, or shunning their children over differences of lifestyle or belief—sometimes with the encouragement and applause of the religious community. In other cases, religious adults shunned their own ageing parents, depriving them of access to grandchildren, always with some pious justification.

It would be a mistake, however, to read these cases as a verdict on religion in general. A clinician sees the casualties, not the far larger number of families for whom religious life is quiet, ordinary, and unremarkable, and who therefore never come to clinical attention. It is sometimes argued that religion is good for children, since some studies (such as Bartkowski et al.) report an association between parental religiousness and a range of desirable child outcomes. But such studies are correlational, confounded by nearly everything that inclines many people toward religion in the first place—conscientiousness, marital stability, social class. If religion sometimes has benefits, it is through nonspecific factors—community, routine, social support, a shared moral vocabulary—and not through the supernatural content of belief. The most secular societies on earth raise children at least as well as the most devout. 

This cuts both ways. If religious belief is not the cause in families that flourish, neither is it the root cause in the families that harm—an abuser deprived of scripture would likely have been abusive in some other way. But an authoritarian and fear-based religion can be a fearsome weapon in the hands of a tyrant: the authority of God behind the father’s will, the infinite stakes of hell behind every threat, scripture as a ready-made prosecutorial script, and a congregation to approve the verdict. The girl’s own devotion deepened the wound: a threat of damnation lands hardest on someone who believes in hell.

Yet, most religious parenting is ordinary or better; an authoritarian layer tilts toward physical discipline, often with negative effects; and a small, extreme group shades into genuine abuse. It remains hard to deny that dogmatic belief, fused with communal endorsement, can make these problems deeper and far harder to escape.

One phrase I have heard from abusive religious parents is “turn or burn.” I find it typical of a conviction that lurks in the background: if you don’t adopt my belief, you deserve to be tortured forever. Such a phrase can be offered as an invitation, but it functions as a threat. Surely, if a way of life is divinely inspired, it ought to be compelling because it is beautiful and ethically coherent—not because it terrifies people into compliance.

It can be helpful to listen to those who have escaped abusive religious communities. Megan Phelps-Roper was raised in an extreme religious sect, and was once among its most fervent young members. Her most useful insight is not a clever argument against dogma but a relational one: what changed her mind was sustained contact with outsiders who treated her with patience and respect—people willing to build a human connection before attempting to debate her beliefs. This is not merely an inspiring story; it is among the best-supported findings in the study of persuasion. The way to reach the faithful is not to defeat them in argument but to remain in relationship with them.

References

Altemeyer, B. (1996). The authoritarian specter. Harvard University Press.

—Altemeyer’s research on right-wing authoritarianism—the cluster of authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, and conventionalism. He reports that the trait correlates strongly with religious fundamentalism and predicts punitiveness, the policing of nonconformity, and hostility toward outsiders. (With Bruce Hunsberger, Altemeyer also studied why people enter and abandon fundamentalist faith.)

 

Bartkowski, J. P., Xu, X., & Levin, M. L. (2008). Religion and child development: Evidence from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study. Social Science Research, 37(1), 18–36. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2007.02.001

— A large national study reporting an association between greater parental religiousness and a range of desirable outcomes in young children, on both parental and teacher report. It is cited here as the strongest form of the “religion is good for children” claim—and as a caution against it: the association is correlational and heavily confounded (by conscientiousness, family structure, social class, and community), and so does not establish that religious belief itself does the causal work. Genuine benefit is due to nonspecific factors rather than doctrine.

 

Broockman, D. E., & Kalla, J. L. (2016). Durably reducing transphobia: A field experiment on door-to-door canvassing. Science, 352(6282), 220–224. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aad9713

— A landmark field experiment showing that a single brief, non-judgmental, perspective-taking conversation produced a measurable reduction in prejudice that persisted for months and withstood subsequent counterargument. Empirical support for Phelps-Roper’s relational insight, and evidence that respectful contact outperforms confrontation.

 

Phelps-Roper, M. (2019). Unfollow: A memoir of loving and leaving the Westboro Baptist Church. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

— A memoir of growing up inside, and eventually leaving, the Westboro Baptist Church. Phelps-Roper attributes her change of heart not to anti-religious argument but to the patient, respectful engagement of strangers—several of whom she first encountered while running the church’s Twitter account. (Her 2017 TED talk makes the same case in brief.)

 

Winell, M. (2011). Religious trauma syndrome [Three-part series]. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy Today (British Association for Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapies), 39(2–4).

— A clinical psychologist’s coinage of the term “Religious Trauma Syndrome” for the harm sustained by those leaving authoritarian, dogmatic religion. The label is not a formal DSM or ICD diagnosis—it is generally subsumed under post-traumatic stress—but it has clinical currency, and Winell is careful to confine it to authoritarian and fundamentalist forms of religion. Lisa Oakley’s work on “spiritual abuse” offers a complementary, empirically grounded framework.

 

A note on scriptural references: Matthew 7:21–23 and Matthew 23:13–20 record Jesus’s denunciations of hypocritical and self-aggrandizing piety; Deuteronomy 21:18–21 sets out the law of the “stubborn and rebellious son.” On the rabbinic neutralisation of the latter, see the Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 71a, which declares that the case “never happened and never will happen,” and was given only “that you may expound it and receive reward.”

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The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 19: Object Relations

Humans have a far more richly developed capacity for imagination than other animals, and one of its quieter uses is that we can hold inside the mind an internalized representation of the people who matter to us. This is a bit like having an “imaginary friend,” but the point is not childish fantasy; it is a normal and indispensable developmental achievement—the capacity to keep another person in mind when they are not physically present. This is one of the foundations of object relations theory, the branch of psychoanalysis—running from Fairbairn and Klein to Winnicott—that takes the inner world to be populated not by drives alone but by internalized images of others.

Developmentally, we are at first comforted by a literal parent. Over time we also come to carry in memory an internalized representation of that parent—an inner sense of their presence, their values, their voice—which can console us even when we are alone. Psychoanalysts call the mature form of this achievement object constancy—the gradual consolidation of a stable inner image of the caregiver, one that survives the caregiver’s absence. It is what allows a child to tolerate separation without panic, and it is the same inner resource we draw on much later to endure loss and, eventually, grief when someone we love dies. The person is gone; the internal representation remains.

For many people, religious life includes this type of internalized relationship, with an idealized figure they call God. Ana-María Rizzuto, in her study The Birth of the Living God, showed that each believer fashions a personal “God representation” out of the same materials as the rest of the inner world—parental images, early longings, the imprint of how love and authority were first encountered. In much Western Christian imagery, and in many people’s mental pictures, this figure is imagined in human form: often a bearded white man, despite the Middle Eastern setting of the biblical “Holy Land” and the obvious diversity of human appearance. Some people experience this inner figure as gentle, fatherly, wise, consistent, almost coach-like or therapist-like; others internalize a God who feels stern and frightening, poised to punish. These images tend to track what a person first learned to associate with safety, love, and authority in their own family and community.

Just like relationships with living people, individuals can become fiercely loyal to these internal figures—sometimes to extremes, including a willingness to suffer or die in service of what they experience as sacred. And because the relationship is felt as profoundly real, it is no surprise that believers often respond with anger or grief when someone calls it “imaginary,” a mere construct rather than an external reality.

There is a dark side to this. Many traditions personify not only the good but also the bad—a concept of ultimate evil, cast in devil-like terms. This is an example of what psychoanalyst Melanie Klein called splitting: the mind’s tendency, under strain, to divide experience into an all-good idealized figure and an all-bad evil one. The loving God and the malevolent Devil are a textbook split pair, with every scrap of goodness gathered onto the one and every scrap of badness projected onto the other.

Psychologically, a personified evil makes moral struggle vivid and coherent: it recasts temptation, cruelty, or one’s own worst conduct as a battle against an outside adversary rather than having to deal with one’s own capacity for harm. In a tight-knit community this can even ease reintegration. If a wrong can be blamed on the Devil rather than the wrongdoer’s character—particularly once a ritual of repentance, prayer, or “deliverance” has been performed—the community may find forgiveness easier.

But to locate evil outside oneself is to blunt accountability; and once evil has a face, it is too easily seen in people we simply don’t like—in outsiders, dissenters, scapegoats. The historian Elaine Pagels followed this in early Christianity: the figure of Satan, she argued, became the name for the human “other,” the device by which a community demonized its rivals. The result, down the centuries, was fear, prejudice, and recurrent moral panic—the same dynamic I described earlier in connection with the witch hunts, in which a community’s anxieties were given a satanic shape and then hunted down among its own neighbours.

References

Kirkpatrick, L. A. (2005). Attachment, evolution, and the psychology of religion. Guilford Press.

— Extends Bowlby’s attachment theory to religion, treating a believer’s felt relationship with God as an attachment bond.

 

Mahler, M. S., Pine, F., & Bergman, A. (1975). The psychological birth of the human infant: Symbiosis and individuation. Basic Books.

— The classic statement of the separation–individuation process in early childhood. Its culminating phase, the consolidation of emotional “object constancy,” a stable inner representation of the caregiver that endures through absence and underwrites the later capacity to tolerate separation and loss.

 

Pagels, E. (1995). The origin of Satan. Random House.

— Traces how the figure of Satan, in early Judaism and Christianity, became a means of demonizing one’s opponents—rival Jews, then pagans, then heretics—transforming human conflict into cosmic warfare.

 

Rizzuto, A.-M. (1979). The birth of the living God: A psychoanalytic study. University of Chicago Press.

— The foundational object-relations study of the personal “God representation.” Drawing on Freud, Erikson, Fairbairn, and Winnicott, Rizzuto shows that each individual constructs a private image of God from parental figures and early experience, one that functions as a living element of the inner world; the work effectively launched the empirical study of God-images.

 

Winnicott, D. W. (1953). Transitional objects and transitional phenomena: A study of the first not-me possession. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 34, 89–97.

— Introduces the “transitional object”—the child’s blanket or toy—and the “intermediate area” of experience, neither wholly inner nor wholly outer, of which Winnicott insisted one must never ask whether it was created or found. Revised as the opening chapter of Playing and Reality (1971), where the idea is extended to art, culture, and religion. 

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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.

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: complications struck 59% of those who were certain they were being prayed for, 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. The striking thing is that no such supernatural dividend appears. 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. The comparisons are correlational and run at the level of whole nations, so they cannot, by themselves, establish that secularism produces the good outcomes; the causal arrow may well run the other way, with the security and prosperity that reduce human suffering also eroding the felt need for religion. What the data do undercut is the stronger, supernatural claim. If devout populations enjoyed real divine protection, the secular societies should be visibly worse off—and they are not. 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. Prayer made no difference to complication-free recovery from bypass surgery; the only statistically reliable effect was that patients certain they were being prayed for had slightly more complications (59% versus 52%). The study was funded by the John Templeton Foundation.

 

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. The broad thesis is deliberately provocative and much debated, but the specific point borrowed here—that empathy is skewed toward the salient—is well supported.

 

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, spatial metaphors. Their “orientational metaphors”—GOOD IS UP, MORE IS UP, and their downward opposites—underlie the chapter’s point that “God above” reflects the architecture of the human imagination rather than the location of a deity.

 

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

— Develops the influential “existential security” thesis: populations facing insecurity and hardship tend to be more religious, while security and prosperity drive secularization.

 

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 selective measures, so it cannot by itself establish causation.

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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 cousins, in a sense—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, attacking what he called “herd morality”—a value system he attributed above all to Christianity, which (in his reading) rebrands meekness, obedience, and self-suppression as virtues 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.

The phrase “sheep gone astray” appears repeatedly in scripture, usually as a metaphor for human misbehaviour. But actual sheep that never “go astray” do not graduate into freedom; they remain in the flock under management. As a child I never thought of this.

Now I think the metaphor is more revealing than its gentle surface suggests. Taken to its literal conclusion, it 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. 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 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 “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).

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The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 16: Sacrifice

Most religions have some form of sacrifice alluded to in 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 similar: something costly is offered up, with the hope of securing meaning, favour, purity, forgiveness, protection, or communal belonging.

There are also sacrificial motifs that move disturbingly close to human sacrifice. In the Abrahamic traditions, for example, the willingness of Abraham/Ibrahim to sacrifice his son, is presented as a peak test of obedience. In Islam it is commemorated annually in Eid al-Adha, the “Festival of Sacrifice,” in which animal sacrifice functions as a memorial of that story. And in Christianity, the theme of sacrifice is carried into the central story of Jesus: a dramatic moral and symbolic 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 lies 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 they were often brutal. Ancient Greek religion had animal sacrifice. Vedic religion in India revolved around yajña, sacrificial ritual. Ancient China too had elaborate sacrificial practices directed toward ancestors and higher powers, sometimes involving animals and—as the royal tombs at Anyang attest—at times human beings. The Aztecs are especially notorious for human sacrifice, though the true scale is debated and was very likely inflated by their Spanish conquerors.

Why would an all-powerful deity, especially one associated with the highest standards of morality, want a dead animal or a burnt work of art as a gift? One might think that a god worth revering would consider it a gift if you were to help other people or care for the natural world, rather than destroy objects or kill living things. But sacrificial systems do not usually work that way.

It is worth noting that 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, demanding instead that “justice roll down like waters.” The same suspicion runs through Greek philosophy from the Euthyphro onward. 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 supported by norms of reciprocity. If one believes that a mystical power controls destiny, fertility, weather, health, wealth, or military success, it becomes psychologically “reasonable,” within that worldview, to give that power a gift—hoping for a return.

And once a person enters this mindset, the logic can become self-sealing. If you make sacrifices and misfortune still comes, you can conclude the offering wasn’t sufficient, wasn’t sincere enough, or wasn’t given with the right purity of heart—so you must increase it next time. If something good happens afterward, it feels like proof that the sacrifice worked, and should be repeated. In this way, practising sacrifice can become an escalating, brutal, and destructive behaviour. The sacrificed animals—often the most vulnerable and least able to “consent” to the human story being told about them—do not get much say in the matter.

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

Two scholars loom over any modern account of sacrifice, and it is worth situating 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 of the animal is, at bottom, a way of managing the unease of taking life, which is close to the “moral anaesthetic” idea above. 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 sacralized. 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 can consolidate hierarchy, especially priestly hierarchy, display power, intensify fear, and signal unity. Sacrifice 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. Some scholars have argued that costly rituals—things you would not do unless you were committed—operate as signals that strengthen trust and cooperation within a group, partly by filtering out free riders. A community bound together by shared sacrifice can feel safer, warmer, and more morally serious to its members. But that same mechanism can harden boundaries and intensify suspicion of outsiders.

And costly sacrifice does not merely send a signal to other people; it also works on the person making the sacrifice. As we saw in the earlier discussion of initiation, people are generally reluctant to admit that they have suffered for nothing. So the greater the sacrifice, the stronger the pressure to reinterpret the suffering as meaningful, noble, or necessary. That helps make sacrificial systems self-protective and self-reinforcing. The cost itself becomes part of the “evidence” that the belief must matter.

Kin Altruism

Reciprocity has a deeper and older root than social custom. It is a strongly selected trait to favour and help genetic relatives, sometimes even in self-sacrificial ways. If a person carries a trait that inclines them to help close relatives, that trait will tend to persist down the family line, because close relatives are disproportionately likely to carry the very same gene that produced the tendency. This is the core logic of kin selection: an allele that prompts costly help toward relatives can spread when the reproductive benefit to those relatives, weighted by the probability that they share the allele, outweighs the cost to the individual—even when that cost is steep.

But humans do not walk around calculating degrees of genetic relatedness. Instead, we rely on crude, fast estimates—cues that, over most of human history, were often correlated with kinship and shared ancestry. People who live near each other, marry each other, and raise children together will, over generations, tend to share not only genes but also language, accent, customs, dress, habits, and social norms. They may also tend, on average, to resemble one another physically more than they resemble people from a distant village, tribe, or lineage. Conversely, people who look different, speak differently, or practise very different customs are often from a different village, tribe, or family network—and therefore are, on average, somewhat less likely to be as closely related as the people who share one’s immediate cultural and familial world.

Similarity of appearance, familiarity of accent, shared habits, shared rituals, shared dress, and shared taboos can all become proxies—very imperfect proxies—for “one of us.” Religion gives people common dress, common restrictions, common foods, common sacrifices, common songs, common stories, and common enemies. In other words, it manufactures the feeling of kinship, even among people who are not literally kin.

A caution is in order here, because the inference from “looks different” to “treated as an enemy” is looser than it first appears. A well-known body of experimental work suggests that the mind does not actually track race, or physical similarity, as a fundamental category at all; what it tracks is coalition—who is allied with whom. In these studies, subjects’ tendency to sort others by race could be sharply reduced within minutes simply by giving them a different, 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 is supplied. 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 thereby recruits a coalitional psychology that is 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 suspicious, or more emotionally distant toward those who feel like “not us.” These tendencies are not destiny, and they are not moral justification—but they appear to be among the psychological and evolutionary foundations of prejudice. They are precisely the sorts of inherited inclinations we must learn to recognize, challenge, and actively override.
Belonging and Group Boundaries

Religion can sometimes widen the circle of felt family. But it can also strengthen the distinction between those inside the group and those outside it. Once sacrifice, loyalty, and group identity are fused together, shared customs can take on unusual emotional and moral weight, and group boundaries can begin to feel especially important. The stronger those boundaries become, the easier it is for outsiders to be viewed with suspicion, distance, or moral distrust. This does not mean religion always produces hostility, or that it does so uniquely; these are broader 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 developing together. But religion can give them a sacred language, a ritual structure, and a greater sense of seriousness. In that way, stronger religious boundaries can contribute to increased exclusion and, in some cases, increased hostility between groups. Religion does not invent this psychology, but it can reinforce 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: participants who endured a harsher initiation came to like the group more. It grounds the point that the cost of a sacrifice tends to deepen, rather than weaken, commitment to the belief it serves.

 

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 account tracing Greek sacrifice to the guilt and anxiety of Palaeolithic hunting, and reading ritual as a way of managing the unease of killing. It is the principal scholarly source behind this chapter’s “moral anaesthetic” idea.

 

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 model showing how in-group self-sacrifice (“altruism”) and hostility toward out-groups (“parochialism”) can evolve together, each making the other adaptive. It supports the chapter’s claim that the warmth of belonging and the suspicion of outsiders are two faces of one mechanism.

 

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

— Advances the “scapegoat” theory: that communities discharge their own escalating, mimetic violence onto a substitute victim, whose killing restores order and who is then sacralized. It is the second major theoretical lens against which this chapter’s argument is positioned.

 

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 relatedness, exceeds the cost to the helper. It is the precise basis for the chapter’s account of self-sacrificial kin altruism.

 

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 when a competing coalition cue is made salient. It is the key reference for the chapter’s caution that 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-signaling theories of religion, arguing that hard-to-fake ritual commitments stabilize cooperation by screening out free riders. It underpins the chapter’s treatment of sacrifice as a costly, trust-building social signal.

 

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.

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