The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 31: Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

Frank, J. D., & Frank, J. B. (1991). Persuasion and healing: A comparative study of psychotherapy (3rd ed.). Johns Hopkins University Press.

The goods of religion travel through a shared frame rather than through any particular doctrine. Frank and Frank argue that psychotherapy, religious and shamanic healing, and other sanctioned forms of help share one structure—a confiding relationship, a healing setting, an explanatory rationale, and a believed-in ritual—and that this common structure, not the specific theory, carries much of the effect. But no secular institution yet gathers all of these elements in one place.

Lim, C., & Putnam, R. D. (2010). Religion, social networks, and life satisfaction. American Sociological Review, 75(6), 914–933. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122410386686

Panel evidence that the well-being benefits of religion flow chiefly through congregational friendship and shared identity rather than through private belief; frequent attenders with no friends in the congregation were no better off. 

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

The “existential security” thesis: populations facing hardship tend to be more religious, while security and prosperity drive secularization. The most secular societies function at least as well as the most devout, while cautioning that the causal arrow may run from security to secularity rather than the reverse.

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 finding that the more secular prosperous democracies tend to show lower rates of societal dysfunction than the more religious ones. As the author's own subtitle concedes, it is “a first look”—ecological, correlational, and sharply criticised (notably by Rodney Stark) for the ecological fallacy and for selective measures—so it cannot establish causation. But it emphasizes the fact that there is no measurable “supernatural dividend” which appears where belief is most fervent.

Wampold, B. E., & Imel, Z. E. (2015). The great psychotherapy debate: The evidence for what makes psychotherapy work (2nd ed.). Routledge.

The major contemporary defence of the contextual (common-factors) model of psychotherapy: relationship and expectancy account for a substantial share of outcome relative to specific technique. It is the empirical backbone of the nonspecific-factors argument this book builds on, religion's benefits are real yet independent of doctrine. 

← Chapter 30 | Contents | References →

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

← Chapter 27 | Contents | Chapter 29 →

The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 27: Consciousness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

← Chapter 26 | Contents | Chapter 28 →

The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 26: religiosity & narcissism

The combination of religiosity and narcissism is common. Some forms of faith are bound up with humility and a genuine care for others. The darker pattern emerges when belief fuses with status-seeking and a sense of group superiority. Then people insinuate, or simply assert, that their beliefs, their culture, and their moral grounding are better than those of outsiders. Confidence gets mistaken for virtue, and the group may come to reward the very traits it ought to distrust.

We tend to picture the narcissist boasting of brains or power, but the psychologist Jochen Gebauer and his colleagues described a second variety, which they called communal narcissism. The cravings are the same. They are simply pursued through the moral and communal domain instead. Rather than "I am the most brilliant person," the thought is "I am the most caring, the most trustworthy." Religion, with its vocabulary of virtue, offers such a person an ideal stage.

Sanctimony is the close cousin of this: moral language used to signal superiority or to punish dissent. In its mildest form it is performative piety; in harsher forms it becomes a social weapon. The philosophers Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke gave the pattern a name, moral grandstanding, meaning public moral talk used to win admiration or status. The psychologist Joshua Grubbs and his colleagues later tested the idea across six studies, and found that the disposition is associated with narcissism and predicts conflict. It is the motive that makes something grandstanding, and the words themselves may be entirely admirable. The listener usually feels the difference. Ordinary people come away feeling belittled and morally diminished, because someone wished to stand above them. This research grew up largely around secular and political discourse—the call-out, the social-media pile-on—so none of this is the property of the religious.

A different but overlapping pattern is rigidity. Some people are uncomfortable with ambiguity, with exceptions, with shades of grey, or with the possibility that decent people might disagree in good faith. They are drawn to fixed rules and a kind of moral bookkeeping. The social psychologists Donna Webster and Arie Kruglanski called this disposition a high need for cognitive closure—a craving for firm answers and an aversion to the unsettled—and it travels closely with dogmatism and with the authoritarian temperament discussed in the chapter on religious abuse. In religious life it can harden into scrupulous rule-mindedness: a chronic compulsion to monitor, confess, correct, classify, and control. In its clinical extreme this is a recognized condition, religious scrupulosity, a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) in which the sufferer is tormented by fear of sin. A separate condition, obsessive-compulsive personality, is different from OCD: a lifelong style marked by perfectionism, rigidity, and preoccupation with rules and order. Christopher Miller and Dawson Hedges make a point that holds for this whole chapter: religiosity does not cause obsessive disorders. A person does not become obsessive because they are devout. But where the disposition already exists, religion can give it language and social reward, and supplies the content on which the anxious mind then fixes. Families and whole communities shaped by this mentality can end up living in a fearful state of feeling scrutinized and judged for every action, large or small.

In my clinical experience the traits do not come in packages. Narcissism and obsessiveness are dimensions we all sit on, shifting over a lifetime. What has struck me most is how domain-specific they can be. I have known people who are sincere and generous in ordinary life, and who turn contemptuous—sometimes shockingly so—the moment the subject is religion, or the people outside it. One might expect the religious frame to draw out a person's best. Often I have seen the opposite: the best traits shine everywhere else, and the narcissistic or obsessive ones appear inside the sphere where they should be least at home.

I want to add a caution, because this chapter hands out clinical words and they are easily misused. Narcissistic personality disorder is a diagnosis, made by a clinician who has assessed a particular individual over time, and not a stronger grade of the trait. It is not a label to be applied from across a room, or from a pew, or to a person whose politics or piety one finds insufferable. The same goes for obsessive-compulsive disorder, which is a genuine illness and a source of real suffering, not a synonym for being rigid or fussy.

None of these traits, then, are religious traits. They are human traits, found throughout the ordinary population, and they surface wherever there is status to be won or certainty to be craved. Religion can bless them with sacred language. But it does not create them, and it is not the only institution that rewards them.

The religious traditions themselves saw the danger, and they condemned it from within. The Gospels reserve their harshest words for the conspicuously pious. The rabbis were no gentler with their own: the Talmud sorts the Pharisees into seven types, mocking the one who wears his good deeds for show and the one bent double in advertised humility, and then falling to argument over whether the one who serves out of love belongs on such a list at all. (The caricature of the Pharisees is, in fairness, unjust to what was a serious movement of piety and the root of rabbinic Judaism. The failing was never uniquely theirs.)

There is a New Testament parable about exactly this. Two men go up to the temple to pray. One is a Pharisee, who stands and thanks God that he is not like other men—not greedy, not dishonest, not like the tax collector over there—and lists his fasting and his tithing. The other is the tax collector, who will not so much as raise his eyes, and beats his breast, and says only: God, be merciful to me, a sinner. It is the second man, Jesus says, who goes home justified. The story has lasted two thousand years because it is uncomfortable, and it is uncomfortable because the Pharisee has done nothing wrong. Everything he says is true. He really does fast; he really does tithe; he really is more upright than the tax collector. His conduct is not the problem. The problem is the use he makes of it—the audience he is playing to, and the man he needs standing beneath him. That is the whole pattern, described before anyone thought to measure it.

References

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

Introduces the "agency–communion" model of narcissism, distinguishing the familiar agentic narcissist ("I am the most intelligent") from the communal narcissist, who pursues the same grandiosity, entitlement, and craving for esteem through the moral and communal domain ("I am the most helpful," "the most trustworthy"). Across several studies the authors show that communal narcissists rated themselves highly on warmth and morality while observers who knew them rated them lower.

 

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

A six-study empirical investigation of moral grandstanding, finding that the disposition to use moral talk for status is associated with narcissism and predicts heightened interpersonal and political conflict. The studies were conducted largely on secular political discourse, underscoring that the pattern is general rather than peculiarly religious. It supplies empirical support for a concept originally advanced on philosophical grounds.

 

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

A comprehensive review of scrupulosity—a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder marked by pathological guilt and obsessive doubt about sin, with compulsions of repetitive prayer, confession, and reassurance-seeking. The authors are clear that religiosity does not cause the disorder, though in a devout sufferer it supplies the content on which the obsessions fix. The distinction matters clinically, since treatment must address the illness without attacking the faith.

 

Tosi, J., & Warmke, B. (2016). Moral grandstanding. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 44(3), 197–217. https://doi.org/10.1111/papa.12075

The philosophical paper that introduced the term "moral grandstanding"—the use of public moral discourse for self-promotion. Its central claim is that grandstanding is defined by motive rather than content: the same righteous words may or may not be grandstanding, depending on whether they aim at moral truth or at the speaker's own status. The authors argue that the practice degrades public moral discourse even when the positions expressed are correct.

 

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

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

 

A note on scriptural and rabbinic references, handled as primary sources rather than formal citations: the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector is Luke 18:9–14; the wider Gospel critique of performing piety "to be seen by others" runs through Matthew 6:1–6 and Matthew 23. The rabbinic satire of the seven types of Pharisee, and the dispute over whether the Pharisee "from love" and the Pharisee "from fear" belong on the list at all, is at Babylonian Talmud, Sotah 22b.

← Chapter 25  |  Contents  |  Chapter 27 →

The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 25: Speaking in Tongues

Some religions feature unusual behaviours that are accepted as manifestations of divinity. A clear example is glossolalia—"speaking in tongues." Every culture has rituals that gesture at divine intervention in some form, and there is nothing remarkable in that. What is more concerning is the readiness to treat this as a literal case of God "speaking through" a person, rather than as a human psychological and social phenomenon.

This is not a fringe practice. Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity, in which tongues is central or at least familiar, is among the largest and fastest-growing religious movements on earth—on the order of half a billion people, most of them in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Whatever one concludes about glossolalia, it is not an oddity at the margins.

So what do we actually know about it? It usually is not the dramatic thing some imagine—suddenly speaking a real foreign language one never learned. (That claim, properly called xenoglossy, is a different matter, and does not survive scrutiny.) What tongues-speakers produce is speech-like vocalizing: it has rhythm, emotion, and a kind of word-like flow, but it does not reliably carry stable meaning or grammar the way an ordinary language does. The foundational linguistic study, by William Samarin, concluded that it is a "meaningless but phonologically structured human utterance"—patterned sound. It draws heavily on the sounds and speech habits the speaker already has in their native tongue, favouring simple syllables and a narrow range of sounds. It feels like language without functioning as one. Nor is it a supernatural gift. Nicholas Spanos and his colleagues showed this experimentally: naive volunteers, given a little exposure and encouragement, could produce passable glossolalia on demand. Where it is expected, taught, and socially supported, it behaves like a learned skill.

Here is one point I want to make in my own professional voice, because a clinical description can so easily be mistaken for a diagnosis. Glossolalia is not a symptom of mental illness. As a psychiatrist I would not want anyone who practises it to close this chapter fearing otherwise. The research is consistent: its practitioners are psychologically unremarkable, and Samarin stressed that the behaviour is normal, not pathological. It is an ordinary human capacity, like singing or weeping.

From a psychological point of view, glossolalia is best understood as a learned vocal practice that can, under the right conditions, shade into an altered state of attention. Assemble the ingredients—music, group emotion, high expectation, authority cues, a shared vocabulary of the sacred—and a person can generate vocalizations that feel profoundly meaningful, and may experience the act as a surrender of control. The sense of surrender does have a measurable correlate: in a small neuroimaging study, Andrew Newberg and colleagues found that, compared with devotional singing, speaking in tongues was accompanied by decreased activity in the frontal lobes—the seat of deliberate, intentional control. Many practise it quietly, in private prayer, and describe it as calm or soothing rather than ecstatic. So the phenomenon is broader than revivalist spectacle. But spectacle is where its social force becomes most visible.

Some of the most widely circulated recordings of tongues online are public performances by televangelists, including figures who have held real political access. I will not pretend to be neutral about these. They are showmanship. The performer is on a stage, with lighting and a sound system and a camera, and the display is timed for effect. It is showmanship of a peculiar kind, because there is nothing in it that anyone can check. If a preacher says God told him something, one can at least ask what God said. Here there is nothing to ask about. The sounds carry no meaning, so no one can evaluate them—and the performer knows this perfectly well.
What the display accomplishes is to establish the performer as a channel: someone God speaks through. Once that is established, whatever comes next arrives with the same authority. The appeal for donations. The political endorsement. The pronouncement about what the nation must do. One cannot cross-examine the Holy Spirit. I think that in some cases this is entirely deliberate. A person who can produce these sounds on cue, in front of a camera, and who then asks the audience for money, is doing something other than praying in an unusual way.

The best objection to these performances comes from inside the tradition. It is Paul's. In his first letter to the Corinthians—the founding text for the practice, and the passage to which charismatic Christians themselves appeal—Paul spends a long chapter restraining public tongues-speaking. No more than two or three should speak, he says, each in turn, and only if someone is present to interpret. If there is no interpreter, the speaker "should keep quiet in the church." He ranks intelligible prophecy above tongues, because tongues without interpretation helps no one, and he says he would rather speak five words that others can understand than ten thousand in a tongue. And he warns that if outsiders walk in on a whole congregation speaking in tongues, they will conclude the assembly has lost its mind. Paul saw the spectacle coming almost two thousand years ago and told the church not to stage it. A stadium of people speaking at once, on camera, with no interpreter, is not a loose departure from those instructions. It is the specific thing he prohibited, item by item. By the standard of the very letter that authorizes the practice, the modern performances are out of order.

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

A leader skilled in spectacle and emotional orchestration can turn all of this to darker ends—manufacturing awe, certainty, and the sense that "we are witnessing the sacred." The danger was never the oddness of the behaviour. It is how easily the resulting conviction can be redirected into worldly power under the banner of a divine mandate.

I want to end somewhere other than the danger, though, because glossolalia is also the clearest illustration in this book of what I have been arguing all along. Every chapter so far has made some version of the claim that religion's benefits flow from the frame around a doctrine rather than from the doctrine itself—the relationship, the ritual, the community, the expectancy. Tongues is that argument in its purest form. Here there is no doctrine to be true or false. There is no proposition at all: no claim to assess, no theology to examine, not one word that means anything. And it still works. It still consoles, still bonds, still moves people to tears and to loyalty. Here is a room full of people deeply moved by a language nobody understands, including the person speaking it. If the content were what mattered, this could not happen.

References

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

An anthropological and cross-cultural study arguing that glossolalia is a learned, ritually shaped vocal behaviour, usually accompanied by an altered or trance-like state, and occurring across many cultural and religious settings. Goodman documented the practice in Mexico, Yucatán, and the United States, finding similarities of rhythm and intonation across languages. Her emphasis on trance runs directly against Samarin's linguistic account, and the disagreement between them has never been settled.

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

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

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

The foundational linguistic analysis of glossolalia, concluding that it is phonologically structured but semantically empty—patterned sound that resembles language without being one—and that it draws on the speaker's native phonology. Samarin stressed that the behaviour is learned, normal rather than pathological, and not reducible to a trance state. His insistence on the second point remains the standard corrective to popular assumptions about the mental health of practitioners.

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

An experimental and psychometric study testing—and largely rejecting—the claims that glossolalia requires a trance state or signals psychopathology. Practitioners scored within normal ranges on standard measures, and there was no evidence that the behaviour depended on altered consciousness. It remains the strongest empirical case that glossolalia is a normal practice performed by ordinary people.

Spanos, N. P., Cross, W. P., Lepage, M., & Coristine, M. (1986). Glossolalia as learned behavior: An experimental demonstration. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 95(1), 21–23. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-843X.95.1.21

A direct experimental test of whether glossolalia must be a spontaneous gift. Naive volunteers with no prior exposure were given brief training, including audio samples, and a substantial proportion produced fluent glossolalia on the first attempt. The result establishes that the behaviour can be learned on demand, without religious conviction, altered consciousness, or divine involvement.

A note on scriptural sources, handled as primary references rather than formal citations: the New Testament contains two distinct phenomena often conflated under "tongues"—the Pentecost narrative of Acts 2:1–13, in which the apostles are understood by speakers of many foreign languages (closer to xenoglossy), and Paul's discussion in 1 Corinthians 12–14, in which the utterance is ecstatic and requires interpretation. It is the latter strand that corresponds to modern glossolalia. Paul's restrictions on public tongues-speaking are at 1 Corinthians 14:5, 14:18–19, 14:23, and 14:27–28.

← Chapter 24 | Contents | Chapter 26 →

The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 24: Behavioural Restrictions

In discussing sacrifice I described how costly, hard-to-fake commitments bind a group together—the anthropologist Richard Sosis's account of why demanding rituals stabilize cooperation. That logic does not stop at the altar. It extends into what people may eat, how they must dress, how they wear their hair, when they may work, and what they may do with their bodies: not the dramatic offering, but the daily one.

There is an enormous variety of rules among different groups. Jews keep kosher and Muslims halal, each with an elaborate system of permitted and forbidden food. Observant Muslim women cover their hair; observant Jewish men cover their heads; Sikh men keep uncut hair beneath a turban, one of five articles of faith worn on the body. Latter-day Saints wear temple garments beneath ordinary clothes. Amish and Old Order Mennonite communities keep to plain dress—no jewellery, no ornament, prescribed cuts and colours—and among conservative Anabaptists the head covering remains a visible marker of a woman's standing in the community. Ramadan requires a month of daylight fasting; Lent, historically, forty days of abstention; Orthodox Judaism forbids a long list of activities from Friday sunset to Saturday nightfall. 

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

The Mennonite faith of my childhood did not really require very much in terms of behavioural restrictions, except for one fairly trivial vestige: "dancing" was not allowed. I'm not even sure where this restriction about dancing came from. Perhaps it was associated, in prior generations, with some kind of immodesty or sexual impropriety. But as a result, this fun, wholesome, healthy art form and social skill was unavailable in our household. To this day I have a poor sense of rhythm and movement—and a shyness about it as well—and I often wished that dancing could have been part of my childhood.

These rules make loyalty visible. As William Irons argued in the foundational statement of the idea, a commitment that is expensive and hard to fake is, for that very reason, believable. Recognizable styles of appearance and behaviour mark membership: they make it easier to find fellow members, easier to distinguish outsiders, and easier to notice who might be wavering. Such rules do not merely symbolize belonging; they make unbelonging conspicuous and costly. A person who quietly stops keeping kosher may go unnoticed for a while. A woman who stops wearing the covering is visible from across the room.

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

Richard Sosis and Eric Bressler examined eighty-three nineteenth-century American communes and found that the religious ones far outlasted the secular ones—and that among the religious communes, the number of costly requirements a group imposed predicted how long it survived. The most revealing part of the finding is what did not happen: among the secular communes, costly requirements predicted nothing at all. Demanding sacrifices of a secular utopian community did not make it last longer. The difference, Sosis suggests, is that a religious justification cannot be argued with in the way a secular one can. A member who wonders why the rules must be so hard can be answered, in a secular commune, only by reasons—and reasons invite counter-reasons. In a religious commune the answer is that God requires it, and there the conversation stops. Unfalsifiability, which is an intellectual weakness, turns out in a religious community to be a considerable practical strength.

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

But if the "ring," so to speak, becomes massive and cumbersome—if it begins to hinder ordinary life—then what once felt meaningful can become a burden. There is a name for this logic in biology. The evolutionary theorist Amotz Zahavi proposed the "handicap principle," using the peacock's tail as his model: a display is a believable signal of quality precisely because it is costly, since only a genuinely fit peacock can afford to drag such a thing through the world. The principle is contested among biologists, though the human evidence is more direct. A costly observance is a believable signal of devotion precisely because it carries a real practical price. The burden is part of the proof.

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

These burdens also tend not to fall evenly. In many settings, women, girls, adolescents, and sexual minorities are scrutinized far more intensely than adult men; their bodies and behaviour become the stage on which the community performs its idea of moral seriousness. It is worth noticing how asymmetrical the enforcement usually is: a rule requiring modest dress falls on a fifteen-year-old girl in a way it does not fall on the middle-aged men who interpret it. At that point the rule is no longer merely symbolic. It has become a way of distributing power—and, as I noted in discussing the abuse of children, the heaviest enforcement tends to fall on those with the least power to resist it.

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

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

References

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

The foundational statement of the idea that costly, hard-to-fake religious observances function as reliable signals of an individual's commitment to a group, easing the problem of trust among people who must cooperate. Irons argues that the very features of religion that look irrational from outside—expensive rituals, arbitrary restrictions, time-consuming obligations—are what make membership credible from inside. It is the theoretical seed from which the costly-signalling account of religion grew.

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

A review of the evolutionary "costly signalling" theory of religion, arguing that demanding rituals, taboos, and sacrifices function as hard-to-fake signals of commitment to a group and its moral code. Because such displays are difficult to counterfeit, they promote trust and cooperation among believers while screening out free riders. The review also surveys the ethnographic and experimental evidence bearing on the theory.

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

An empirical test using historical data on eighty-three nineteenth-century American communes. Religious communes proved far more likely to survive than secular ones, and the number of costly requirements a religious commune imposed predicted its longevity. Crucially, no such association appeared among the secular communes—a result the authors attribute to the capacity of religious justification to place demands beyond the reach of ordinary argument.

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

The original statement of the "handicap principle": costly, fitness-reducing displays such as the peacock's tail are reliable signals precisely because only high-quality individuals can afford them. The biological version remains contested among signalling theorists—Richard Prum's aesthetic account of mate choice is a sustained argument against it—but the underlying logic, that cost guarantees honesty, is the framework on which the costly-signalling account of religion is built.

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

← Chapter 23 | Contents | Chapter 25 →

The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 23: Eschatology

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

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

Another form is more hopeful: a reforming attitude that reads history as something to be improved, even perfected, in preparation for what is to come. This has fuelled movements of real moral energy—the abolitionists and social reformers of the nineteenth century, the Social Gospel, the liberation theologies, the cadences of the American civil-rights movement with its confidence that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice. Some of the most admirable moral campaigns of the modern era drew their stamina from precisely this expectation. A person convinced that history is going somewhere may work harder to help it arrive.

And there is a third possibility. The historian Norman Cohn, surveying the millenarian movements of medieval and early modern Europe, found something closer to the opposite of resignation: expectation of an imminent end more often produced upheaval—prophetic insurgencies, the seizure of cities, the settling of scores against those cast as agents of the enemy. Apocalyptic conviction did not put people to sleep; it put them in the streets.

So eschatology is not one thing, and it does not always make people passive. Rather, it destabilizes. It can send people out into the world or withdraw them from it, and which way it breaks seems to depend largely on whether believers understand themselves as hastening the end or merely as surviving it. What the two have in common is that both loosen the ordinary hold of the future on present conduct. My concern in what follows is with the quieter of the two, because in our own moment it is the one doing the most damage.

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

Yet the same Pew report also found that 80% of religiously affiliated Americans agreed that God gave humans a duty to protect and care for the Earth, and that roughly seven in ten Americans overall said the Earth is sacred—a view most common among mainline Protestants and Catholics, but shared by a majority even of atheists. The strictly premillennial position—that the world will deteriorate until Jesus returns—is held by a modest minority. So religious belief does not make people indifferent to the planet; the effect is narrower than that, confined largely to a small minority holding one particular doctrine.

Apocalyptic predictions have a record of repeated failure. Specific, confident predictions of the end have been made for two thousand years. William Miller's followers awaited Christ's return in October 1844; the non-event became known as the Great Disappointment, and the movement did not dissolve but recalculated, concluding that the predicted event had occurred in heaven rather than on earth. Harold Camping named May 21, 2011, and when nothing happened, revised to October. The pattern was studied directly by Leon Festinger and his colleagues, who infiltrated a small group awaiting rescue by flying saucer from a flood prophesied for December 1954. When the flood did not come, the members did not abandon the belief; they proselytized more energetically than before. Disconfirmation, it turns out, does not reliably weaken a sacred conviction—it is far more likely to be absorbed, reinterpreted, and used as fuel. This is the same self-sealing logic I described in connection with other unfounded beliefs, operating at the scale of history.

At its rare and lurid extreme, apocalyptic conviction can turn lethal. Heaven's Gate, a fringe new religious movement that fused Christianity with UFO mythology, ended in the mass suicide of 39 of its members near San Diego in March 1997, timed to the passage of the Hale-Bopp comet, which they took for the sign of a spacecraft come to carry them to the "Next Level." Such episodes are rare, and it would be unfair to let a doomsday cult stand in for the millions of ordinary believers who hold some version of end-times expectation and lead quiet, decent, engaged lives. But it belongs to the same family as the medieval upheavals Cohn described—the active pole of a volatile belief, where the end is not merely awaited but met halfway.

The graver harm, though, is the quiet one: letting the world itself deteriorate—a destabilizing climate, a fraying environment—and handing the damage to the generations that follow. It is like leaving your campsite fouled and your fire smouldering on the reasoning that the whole forest will soon burn down anyway—forgetting that the blaze may never come, and that the next people to pitch their tents are left to live in the mess you made.

Even if the world were ending, there would be something profoundly dishonourable in greeting it with passive resignation—or worse, with a quiet flicker of comfort—rather than with help. My own field has a discipline founded on precisely the opposite premise. Palliative care begins where cure ends: when the outcome is certain and the end is close, the work does not stop, it changes. Comfort, presence, the relief of pain, the dignity of the person in the bed—these matter more as the end approaches, not less. No one in that field has ever argued that a dying patient is not worth the trouble. If that is the right posture toward a life that is certainly ending, it is hard to see why it would be the wrong posture toward the world, even if we were in our last days.

And here I return to a thread from the previous chapter. A truly admirable person does not do good in order to get into heaven; they do good because it is the right thing to do—for the intrinsic worth of the act and the welfare of others, not for the prize one might earn after death. That was Rabia's insight, set against the whole economy of reward and punishment, and it applies with equal force to the end of a single life and to the imagined end of the world. To labour for a world one will not live to see, or that one believes will not last, is not futility. It may be the purest form the moral impulse can take.

References

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

A multivariate analysis finding that Americans who hold Christian end-times beliefs are less supportive of governmental action on climate change, even after controlling for party, ideology, and other factors. The authors attribute the effect to a shortened "shadow of the future"—a reluctance to bear present costs for benefits one does not expect to see realized. The effect is modest but survives statistical controls that eliminate many similar associations.

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

The classic history of medieval and early modern apocalyptic movements, from the flagellants to the Anabaptist seizure of Münster. Cohn shows that the expectation of an imminent end has more often produced revolutionary upheaval and violence than passive withdrawal, frequently directed against groups cast as agents of the enemy. It remains the strongest evidence that eschatological fervour is volatile rather than reliably quietist.

Festinger, L., Riecken, H. W., & Schachter, S. (1956). When prophecy fails: A social and psychological study of a modern group that predicted the destruction of the world. University of Minnesota Press.

The classic field study of a small apocalyptic group whose prophesied flood and flying-saucer rescue failed to arrive. Rather than abandoning the belief, committed members increased their proselytizing—the observation that gave rise to the theory of cognitive dissonance. It documents the central paradox of failed prophecy: disconfirmation, for the deeply committed, often strengthens conviction rather than dissolving it.

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

The source of the survey figures cited here, based on 10,156 U.S. adults surveyed in April 2022. It reports that 39% believe humanity is living in the end times and that this belief is associated with modestly lower concern about climate change, while also finding that 80% of religiously affiliated Americans endorse a God-given duty to protect the Earth and that about seven in ten Americans consider the Earth sacred. The report is careful to note that the climate association is heavily entangled with political partisanship.

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

The standard scholarly account of the Heaven's Gate movement, its synthesis of Christian millenarianism and ufology, and the 1997 mass suicide of its 39 members. Zeller situates the group within the wider landscape of American new religious movements rather than treating it as a mere aberration. His account is notable for taking the members' theology seriously as theology rather than reducing it to pathology.

.← Chapter 22 | Contents | Chapter 24 →

The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 22: Heaven and Hell

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

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

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

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

Pascal's Wager

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

If one genuinely believes this to be the fate of countless people, one is forced into a grim choice among three options: cultivate indifference to unimaginable suffering, accept a monstrous picture of how reality is run, or devote one's life entirely to converting as many people as possible before they die. Follow the last of these honestly and it leads somewhere terrible. It would make little sense to spend a life rescuing people on the merely earthly scale—as a firefighter, a physician, a therapist, a humanitarian—since any such work would be trivial beside the infinite catastrophe of eternal damnation. Proselytizing would be the only fully rational form of altruism; and if the aim were to save the most souls before death overtakes them, the coldly logical target would be the people with the least time left—the dying, the very ill, the old. The doctrine, taken with full seriousness, would make something predatory look like the highest form of love. I find that conclusion appalling, and I think most people would—which is rather the point. Almost no one, including the devout, actually lives this way. Held with full conviction, the belief would license a fanaticism that the overwhelming majority of believers visibly refuse to practise, which suggests that, at some level, very few truly hold it. Ask a believing parent whether they would rather their child die tonight in a state of grace or live a long, happy, decent life having drifted from the faith, and watch how few can give the answer the doctrine demands.

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

James's qualified defence of the right to believe, which nonetheless skewers the wager: a faith adopted by mechanical calculation, he writes, would lack the inner soul of faith's reality, and a deity might well take particular pleasure in cutting off believers of that pattern from their reward. The essay is also the origin of the useful notion of a "genuine option"—a choice that is live, forced, and momentous.

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

The leading philosophical treatment of the moral difficulties raised by the doctrine of hell, including the proportionality problem—how a finite life could merit infinite punishment—and the strategies theologians use to escape it. It surveys both the retributive and the free-will defences and finds them wanting.

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

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

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

The posthumous fragments containing the wager, in a single celebrated section, together with Pascal's own reply to the objection that belief cannot be willed: act as if you believed—take holy water, hear Masses—until habit produces faith. The reply is widely regarded as conceding the very weakness it was meant to repair.

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

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

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

 

← Chapter 21 | Contents | Chapter 23 →