The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 24: Behavioural Restrictions

In some cases, religious groups prescribe particular foods, styles of dress, grooming habits, and behavioural expectations that are only loosely related to the ordinary moral concerns most people would recognize—kindness, honesty, fairness, nonviolence—if they are related at all. Sometimes these 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.

One major function of these rules, in practice, is their signalling value: they make loyalty visible. Demanding, hard-to-fake practices show commitment to a group and its code. 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 more conspicuous and more costly.

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.

These rules are the price of admission to a genuinely valuable community. In a study of eighty-three nineteenth-century American communes, the religious ones far outlasted the secular ones, and among the religious communes the number of costly requirements a group imposed predicted how long it survived. The burden, in other words, is not incidental. Burdensome rules improve group survival.

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 discussed in an earlier chapter, where an imagined divine observer became a permanent inner companion: this is an external discipline 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. It comes to resemble the peacock’s tail, which the evolutionary theorist Amotz Zahavi made the model for his “handicap principle”: 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. By the same logic, 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. 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 was most inclined to despise: 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. The theoretical seed of the costly-signalling account of religion.

 

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.

 

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—an association absent among the secular communes.

 

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 debated among signalling theorists, but it supplies the underlying logic—cost guarantees honesty—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.

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