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 controlled many of the material conditions of scholarship: the copying of books, access to manuscripts, and much of the economic support that let a person read, write, and think rather than spend life in manual labour. In practice, 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 centre 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.

When people saw a brilliant, educated, generous person who was also a priest, minister, or theologian, the inference was almost irresistible: if someone this thoughtful believes it, 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.

I am reminded of the profession I trained in myself. Psychiatrists of previous generations were educated in an environment where psychoanalysis was king. If you wanted to be a psychiatrist, you had to learn psychoanalytic theory, and perhaps even undergo psychoanalysis yourself; if you did not, you risked being seen as an outsider and suffering a professional disadvantage. The pendulum has since swung the other way, and biological psychiatry is the new king. Express guarded opinions about psychopharmacology, or emphasize longer-term psychotherapy rather than medication management, and you may suffer a similar disadvantage today. The bias runs deeper still: many thoughtful people would not want to enter psychiatry in the first place if they understood the profession to be dominated by writing prescriptions rather than offering therapy. So the field quietly fills with applicants and new members who fit the current orthodoxy—and then that orthodoxy looks, from the outside, like the consensus of the best minds, when in fact it is partly the product of who was drawn in and who was filtered out.

That filter has run through all of intellectual history, and it bends the record itself. In earlier centuries, 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.

There is a famous illustration of the mistake this leads to. During the Second World War, the Allies studied the bombers that came back from raids, mapping the bullet holes to decide where to add armour. The holes clustered on the wings and tail, so that is where reinforcement seemed to belong. The mathematician Abraham Wald saw what everyone else had missed: they were only looking at the planes that returned. The holes showed where a bomber could be hit and still fly home. The places with no holes—the engines, the cockpit—were exactly where the missing planes had been struck, and those planes were not in the sample, because they were at the bottom of the sea. The armour belonged where the survivors showed no damage at all.

Intellectual history has the same problem, and it is the same filter that shaped my own profession, only vastly larger. We see the scholars who came back from the raid—who stayed inside the lines, kept their posts, and were remembered. We do not see the ones shot down: silenced, exiled, burned, or quietly never permitted to begin. When we notice how many learned people through history were religious, we are counting bullet holes on the planes that landed. The believers are the survivors. The doubters are the missing data.

Two famous cases show the boundary being enforced. Galileo 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 the details of the case, one lesson is clear: a scholar's standing and safety could depend on not going too far beyond approved belief.
Giordano Bruno, a Dominican friar and philosopher, shows a different version of the same pattern, though his case is 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.

This pressure was never limited to astronomy. Reformers, translators, and other dissidents were 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?

Nor was Europe unique. 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 depended on mastery of the Confucian classics and success in the imperial examination system. In India too, advanced learning grew around religious traditions, temple settings, monasteries, and learned priestly circles. The details differed from place to place, but the larger point holds: when one tradition controls the road to education and status, its ideas start to look far more intellectually established than they really are.

To be fair, religious institutions also preserved and passed on learning. They copied books, trained students, and kept scholarship alive through centuries when little else did; several of the world's great universities began in religious settings and still carry that identity. 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 be overrepresented inside that system, and their presence will look like an endorsement.

You can still see a milder version today. Many excellent colleges and universities are sponsored by religious organizations and maintain very high academic standards, sometimes while also requiring students to take courses in religion, attend chapel, or absorb a moral outlook shaped by a faith tradition. The academic strength is real; so is the packaging. Strong education and religious commitment arrive bound together, and the binding makes the religion look more intellectually confirmed than it is.

There is a second modern echo, and it is closer to home. In many religious schools, seminaries, tightly bound communities, and other closed systems—including, in their own secular way, some professions and institutions—career paths and social acceptance can still depend on affirming the right beliefs. The penalties are softer now: not execution, but loss of job, status, community, and belonging. The pattern is the same. A belief system becomes part of the ticket into a valued world, and once it does, it will again look as though the best minds endorse it—when in truth some of the critics have left, gone quiet, or been pushed out.

So when we survey the long history of learning and notice how much of it was religious, we should remember what we are looking at. It is a photograph of the planes that came back. The missing ones—the heretics who were burned, the doubters who stayed silent, the students who never enrolled, and, in my own profession, the healers who would have practiced differently had the gate been shaped otherwise—left no holes for us to count. The correlation between deep learning and religious belief is real. It is just not the evidence for religion it appears to be.

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 scholarly history of the medieval university, tracing how the institution that became the home of Western higher learning grew out of church and cathedral schools. It documents the Church's central role in the material conditions of scholarship—funding, libraries, licensing, and the right to teach. For centuries, the road to serious education ran through religious institutions.

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

A definitive study of the civil examination system that, from 1315 to 1905, controlled access to office and status in imperial China by testing mastery of the Confucian classics. Elman shows how a single canonical tradition became the gateway to advancement, shaping what educated people studied and believed. 

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

An argument that the religious and institutional conditions of the medieval West—above all the university, established around 1200—actively enabled rather than merely tolerated the later rise of science. Grant's account complicates any simple "conflict" story by showing the Church as a preserver and organizer of learning. The same institutions that set the limits of belief also kept scholarship alive.

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

A comparative history of the madrasa and the other institutions of medieval Islamic learning, centred on law and scripture, and their parallels with the later Western college. Makdisi traces how advanced learning in the Islamic world grew around religious foundations. 

Mangel, M., & Samaniego, F. J. (1984). Abraham Wald's work on aircraft survivability. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 79(386), 259–267. https://doi.org/10.1080/01621459.1984.10478038

The scholarly exposition that recovered Abraham Wald's wartime memoranda on estimating aircraft vulnerability from data on planes that returned. It explains his method for inferring where the missing, downed aircraft had most likely been hit—the reasoning now known as an early and classic treatment of survivorship bias. It is the source for this chapter's central analogy about counting only the survivors.

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 specialists dismantling widespread myths one by one—including the claims that Galileo was imprisoned and tortured, that Bruno was the first martyr for science, and that the medieval Church suppressed scientific inquiry. 

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

The standard modern biography of Giordano Bruno, establishing that his condemnation and execution in 1600 turned chiefly on theological heresy—his denial of the Trinity and of Christ's divinity, among other doctrines—rather than on his cosmology. 

Wald, A. (1943). A method of estimating plane vulnerability based on damage of survivors (CRC 432). Statistical Research Group, Columbia University; reprinted 1980, Center for Naval Analyses.

Wald's original wartime memoranda, developed at the Statistical Research Group at Columbia University, presenting a statistical method for estimating which parts of an aircraft were most vulnerable using data only from planes that survived their missions. 

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