During my childhood, I was drawn to many attractive features of religious life: the warmth of a "church family," an altruistic focus on service, and striving towards ideals—love, justice, forgiveness—personified in a gentle, loving deity. Choral music and camp songs, and the ready-made social world of youth groups, offered instant belonging to anyone willing to speak the language of faith.
And religion is not the only home for such longings: for many whose faith lies outside the realm of organized religion, magical or mystical beliefs—fate, spirits, psychic phenomena—can create a feeling of specialness and awe. They suggest that hidden powers might guide destiny through an often confusing and unjust world.
In this essay, I aim to balance deep respect for the ways faith offers community, moral reflection, and "nonspecific" therapeutic factors—ritual, belonging, empathic attention—alongside a critique of dogma. Immense harms follow when sacred narratives are treated as facts or as rigid moral law. I have no wish to mock the faithful—many of whom I love. I want to think these matters through honestly, with the same compassion I would hope to receive in return.
Religious belief thrives on the same psychological mechanisms that render us vulnerable to misinformation or propaganda: above all, the primal pull of group allegiance. Our beliefs grow roots that interweave with our social identities. The belief system becomes a costly emblem of tribal loyalty, pushing us to selectively seek confirmatory evidence and to discount or avoid evidence to the contrary. This loyalty offers many benefits—friendship, structure, material support, and safety—but at the price of intellectual narrowness. This process is not uniquely religious; it is an ordinary human tendency that religion can intensify and sanctify.
In fundamentalist communities everywhere, the same structures that create warmth and solidarity can harden into exclusion. In North America especially, these communities have also come to align tightly with a single political identity. These groups are often condescending or suspicious towards outsiders, and selectively resistant to scientific consensus. They may buffer loneliness for insiders while amplifying prejudice. The conviction that one's group possesses divinely mandated truth creates pressure to treat other traditions as inferior—a recipe for arrogance that weakens the opportunity to learn with humility from other cultures.
Drawing on evolutionary biology, neuroscience, history, and my clinical experience as a psychiatrist, I explore why people so readily defend spiritual beliefs and how they can both heal and wound. Understanding the natural world—from evolution to astrophysics to the brain—does not have to leave us nihilistic; in fact, I feel that an appreciation of science deepens our humanity. We can preserve the best ethical and communal aspects of religion without accepting its fictions as literal truth.
Faith is deeply shaped by identity, and this process develops over a lifetime; accepting evidence that challenges this identity can feel like betraying one's community. So it can be tempting to stick to the status quo within one's faith system. However, a process of questioning dogma can lead to a better life for both individuals and for groups. Ironically, some of the greatest wisdom in sacred texts invites us to humbly reflect upon our blind spots, and to transform ourselves for the greater good.
In that spirit, this book is an invitation—to believers, doubters, and everyone in between—to do that reflecting together: to value truth over comfort, and to discover how much of what we cherish survives, and perhaps even deepens, under honest scrutiny.
References
Allport, G. W., & Ross, J. M. (1967). Personal religious orientation and prejudice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 5(4), 432–443.
The classic study introducing the distinction between intrinsic religiosity (faith held as an end in itself) and extrinsic religiosity (faith used as a means to belonging, comfort, or status). Extrinsically religious churchgoers showed more racial prejudice than intrinsically religious ones. The paper remains foundational for understanding how the same religious institutions can house both tolerance and bigotry.
Hall, D. L., Matz, D. C., & Wood, W. (2010). Why don't we practice what we preach? A meta-analytic review of religious racism. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 14(1), 126–139. https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868309352179
A meta-analysis of American studies conducted since the Civil Rights Act, examining the relationship between religiosity and racial prejudice. Strong religious in-group identity was associated with derogation of racial out-groups, and religious racism was tied to underlying values of social conformity and respect for tradition. By contrast, religiosity motivated by humanitarian values was associated with racial tolerance. The findings suggest that in-group, conformity-based varieties of religious involvement—rather than faith as such—drive the association with prejudice.
Kunda, Z. (1990). The case for motivated reasoning. Psychological Bulletin, 108(3), 480–498.
The foundational review of motivated reasoning: people tend to arrive at the conclusions they want to reach, constrained mainly by their ability to construct seemingly reasonable justifications for them. This mechanism helps explain how belief systems of all kinds—religious, political, or otherwise—are maintained in the face of contrary evidence.
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
Using panel data, this study found that religious people report higher life satisfaction primarily because they attend services and build friendships within their congregations; the benefit of congregational friendship depended on the presence of a strong religious identity. Private or subjective aspects of religiosity, such as belief itself, showed little independent effect once attendance and congregational friendship were taken into account. Notably, frequent attenders with no friends in their congregation reported lower life satisfaction than others. The well-being benefits of religion appear to flow mainly through community and belonging rather than through doctrine.
Nickerson, R. S. (1998). Confirmation bias: A ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises. Review of General Psychology, 2(2), 175–220.
An encyclopedic review of confirmation bias—the tendency to seek, interpret, and remember information in ways that support pre-existing beliefs—documented across science, medicine, law, and everyday judgment. The review establishes confirmation bias as a human universal rather than a flaw of any particular group or worldview.
Norenzayan, A. (2013). Big Gods: How religion transformed cooperation and conflict. Princeton University Press.
A book-length argument that belief in "Big Gods"—moralizing, omniscient, punitive deities—helped human societies scale cooperation beyond small face-to-face groups, by making people feel watched and accountable even among strangers. One of the strongest scholarly cases that religion played a constructive role in building large, complex societies.
Sosis, R., & Alcorta, C. (2003). Signaling, solidarity, and the sacred: The evolution of religious behavior. Evolutionary Anthropology, 12(6), 264–274. https://doi.org/10.1002/evan.10120
A review of the evolutionary "costly signaling" theory of religion: demanding rituals, taboos, and sacrifices function as hard-to-fake signals of commitment and loyalty to a group and its moral code. Because costly displays are difficult to counterfeit, they promote trust and cooperation among believers—helping to explain why religions so often require sacrifice from their members, and why those requirements strengthen rather than weaken group bonds.
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 of costly signaling theory using historical data on eighty-three nineteenth-century American communes. Communes that imposed costlier requirements on their members survived longer, and costliness interacted with religiosity in promoting cooperation. Sacrifice appears to be functional: it binds groups together and improves their durability.
Van Bavel, J. J., & Pereira, A. (2018). The partisan brain: An identity-based model of political belief. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 22(3), 213–224. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2018.01.004
A review proposing an identity-based model of belief, showing how identification with a group can bias information processing—altering reasoning, memory, implicit evaluation, and even perception—such that people may place group loyalty above accuracy, and even above truth. Although focused on political partisanship, the model describes general mechanisms of identity-protective cognition that apply equally well to religious belief.
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