The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 1: Introduction

Religion has been woven through my life from the beginning—Mennonite ancestors, a gentle church-going childhood, and a religious high school. Yet as I learned more about science, nature, and humanity, I moved away from the religious ideas I internalized in childhood. While spiritual traditions can be psychologically rich and culturally beautiful, their literal supernatural claims are not true. And despite their capacity for building community and moral leadership, religions have also caused profound harm to both individuals and society. The chapters that follow move from my personal history to the psychology of belief, a review of what science teaches us about natural history, then to the social harms of dogma, and finally to a reflection on how to preserve the positive aspects of religion.

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.

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.

Religious belief thrives on the same psychological mechanisms that render us vulnerable to misinformation or propaganda: 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; is is an ordinary human tendency that religion can intensify and sanctify.

In some fundamentalist communities, the same structures that create warmth and solidarity often calcify into exclusion. These groups are often condescending or suspicious towards outsiders, selectively resistant to scientific consensus, and tend to align tightly with political identity. 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 injure. Understanding the natural world—from evolution to astrophysics to the brain—does not have to leave us nihilistic, in fact I feel that 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.

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