The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 13: to be a scholar, you had to study theology

For long stretches of European history, many able people who wanted to study the biggest questions ended up studying religion. That was not always because religion had the best answers. Often it was because religious institutions controlled much of the schooling, the books, and the road to public influence. If you wanted literacy, training, status, or a respected voice in your community, religion was often the main gate you had to pass through.

Before the printing press, and before secular universities became common, the Church often controlled many of the material conditions of scholarship as well: the copying of books, access to manuscripts, and much of the economic support that allowed a person to read, write, and think rather than spend life in manual labor. In practice, that often meant that to be a scholar was to be funded, housed, trained, or at least tolerated by a religious institution. That inevitably shaped what could be said, what could be explored, and how far a person could go.

This created a built-in bias. It was not just that highly capable people happened to like theology. It was that theology sat near the center of educated life. If you wanted mentors, libraries, credentials, or a place to teach and write, you often had to work inside a religious setting, or at least learn to speak its language. In that kind of system, religion could borrow prestige from the educated people who passed through it.

That distinction mattered. When people saw a brilliant, educated, generous person who was also a priest, minister, or theologian, they could easily draw the wrong lesson: if someone this thoughtful believes it, maybe the religion itself must be true. But that does not follow. A person can be wise, morally serious, and deeply useful to society while still believing things that are false. Learning and talent do not make a doctrine true.

There was another pressure as well. In many periods, if you were a serious thinker and openly challenged the religious system, you were not just risking an argument. You could lose your position, your audience, your safety, or even your life. So the historical record is not a fair contest in which every idea had the same chance to survive. People who stayed within accepted limits were more likely to keep teaching, keep publishing, and keep being remembered.

Galileo is a clear example. He used a telescope to study the sky and argued publicly that Earth moved around the sun. Today that sounds ordinary. In his time it crossed powerful religious limits. He was put on trial in 1633 and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. Whatever one thinks about all the details of the case, one lesson is plain: a scholar’s standing and safety could depend on not going too far beyond approved belief.

Giordano Bruno shows a somewhat different version of the same pattern, and it is worth getting the details right, because his case is so often misremembered. Bruno did hold radical cosmological views—an infinite universe, countless inhabited worlds—but he was burned in Rome in 1600 chiefly for theological heresy: he had denied the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, and other core doctrines. The popular image of Bruno as the first martyr for science is therefore misleading; his astronomy was a secondary matter beside his religious unorthodoxy. But that correction, far from weakening the point, sharpens it. What killed Bruno was not a scientific theory but the crossing of religious boundaries—and it is precisely the power to set and enforce those boundaries, on pain of death, that shaped which ideas could be voiced and which thinkers survived to be remembered.

And this pressure was not limited to astronomy. Reformers, translators, and other dissidents were also punished severely in different times and places. Even when the issue was not a new scientific discovery, the deeper conflict was often the same: who gets to define truth, and what happens to you if you say otherwise in public?

Europe was not unique in this broad pattern. In the Middle East and the wider Islamic world, serious learning often grew around mosques, religious schools, and scholars of law and scripture. In China, higher learning and public advancement often depended on mastery of the Confucian classics and success in the imperial examination system. In India too, advanced learning often grew around religious traditions, temple settings, monasteries, and learned priestly circles. The details differed from place to place, but the larger point remains: when one tradition controls the road to education and status, its ideas can start to look far more intellectually established than they really are.

To be fair, religious institutions also preserved and passed on learning in many eras. They copied books, trained students, and helped keep scholarship alive. Several well-known universities began in religious settings or still carry that identity. So the story is not simple. But that is exactly why the bias is easy to miss. When the same institution both protects learning and sets the limits of belief, educated people will naturally be overrepresented inside that system.

You can still see a milder version of this today. Many excellent private schools, colleges, and universities are sponsored by religious organizations and maintain very high academic standards. Some of them also require students to take courses in religion, attend chapel, or absorb a broader moral and intellectual outlook shaped by a faith tradition. That does not mean these schools are weak academically; some are excellent. But it does mean that strong education and religious commitment can be packaged together in a way that makes the religion seem more intellectually confirmed than it really is.

There is a second modern echo too. In some religious schools, seminaries, tightly bound communities, and other closed systems, career paths and social acceptance can still depend on affirming the right beliefs. The penalties are usually softer now—not execution, but loss of job, loss of status, loss of community, loss of belonging. The basic pattern is similar: a belief system becomes part of the ticket into a valued world. And once again, this can make it look as though the best minds support the belief, when some critics have left, have been forced to stay quiet, or have been pushed out.

So the old link between theology and scholarship was often not straightforward proof that theology was true. Much of it grew out of history, institutional control, and control over the means of education. For long stretches of time, if you wanted a serious education, you often had to study religion; and if you wanted to keep your place in public intellectual life, you often had to stay inside religion’s limits. That alone can make religion look intellectually stronger than the evidence for its literal claims really is.

References

de Ridder-Symoens, H. (Ed.). (1992). A history of the university in Europe: Vol. 1. Universities in the Middle Ages. Cambridge University Press.

— The authoritative history of the medieval university, documenting its church-based origins and the Church’s role in the institution that became the home of higher learning.

 

Elman, B. A. (2000). A cultural history of civil examinations in late imperial China. University of California Press.

— A definitive study of the Confucian-classics civil examination system (1315–1905) that controlled access to office and status in late imperial China.

 

Grant, E. (1996). The foundations of modern science in the Middle Ages: Their religious, institutional, and intellectual contexts. Cambridge University Press.

— Argues that the religious and institutional conditions of the medieval West—above all the university, founded around 1200—actively enabled the rise of science.

 

Makdisi, G. (1981). The rise of colleges: Institutions of learning in Islam and the West. Edinburgh University Press.

— Traces the madrasa and the institutions of Islamic learning (law and scripture) in the medieval Islamic world, and their parallels with the later Western college.

 

Numbers, R. L. (Ed.). (2009). Galileo goes to jail and other myths about science and religion. Harvard University Press.

— The standard scholarly correction to the “conflict thesis,” with chapters specifically debunking the myths that Galileo was imprisoned and tortured (Finocchiaro), that Bruno was the first martyr of science (Shackelford), and that the medieval Church suppressed science (Shank)—essential for handling this chapter’s two examples rigorously.

 

Rowland, I. D. (2008). Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/heretic. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

— The standard modern biography of Bruno; establishes that his condemnation turned chiefly on theological heresy—notably his denial of the Trinity and of Christ’s divinity—rather than on his cosmology.

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