The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 4: The Main Thesis

With these acknowledgments in mind, I still have to come around to my main thesis here: that all religions are based on beliefs that are not literally true, with some of the stories having an idealized, embellished, or exaggerated relationship to actual historical figures or events, and with many narratives shaped by—sometimes directly adapted from—the surrounding mythologies of their time. We see recurring motifs across cultures: flood myths (for example, the Mesopotamian flood traditions in the Atrahasis material and the Epic of Gilgamesh, which closely resemble later biblical flood storytelling), miraculous or “virginal” conception stories in which a revered figure is portrayed as born under exceptional divine circumstances (for example, the Roman tradition that Romulus and Remus were conceived when Mars impregnated the Vestal Virgin Rhea Silvia), and death-and-restoration / descent-and-return narratives that can function as “proto‑resurrection” themes (for example, Osiris in Egyptian religion, or Inanna’s descent and restoration in Sumerian literature). Even the moral ideas most frequently marketed as uniquely Christian have deep pedigrees outside Christian theology. The command to “love your neighbour” predates Christianity in the Hebrew Bible; versions of the Golden Rule appear in Confucius and in ancient Indian sources; and the psychological logic of non‑retaliation—refusing to keep hatred alive by feeding it—shows up in pre‑Christian moral traditions. Christianity did not invent the moral grammar from nothing; it inherited, recombined, amplified, and ritualized themes that human cultures have been discovering for a very long time.


All religions contain stories that can have moral lessons and often reflect the history of cultural groups striving to improve justice, security, morality, happiness, and harmony in their civilizations, while reflecting on human foibles. Modern religions are not very much different from other historical mythologies, such as Greek, Roman, or Egyptian mythology: they have profoundly shaped culture, and they continue to give us interesting, thoughtful stories, but they are not generally treated as literal truths.The fact that religious narratives can be psychologically helpful, ethically suggestive, or aesthetically beautiful does not make their supernatural claims true; it makes them powerful cultural creations, which is a different category.

It is also worth noticing that while religion is ancient, many features of large-scale organized religion—public priesthoods, written canons, institutional authority, standardized doctrine, and state alignment—intensified alongside agriculture, cities, and larger political structures. In such settings, religion can function as social “glue”: a way to unify large groups, encode shared identity, and establish norms for how people should behave together in communities far larger than anything most hunter-gatherer minds evolved to manage. Not surprisingly, many sacred texts contain themes of intergroup conflict, invasion, conquest, boundary maintenance, and rules for cooperation—stories shaped by the political pressures, environmental constraints, and moral agendas of their times, repeatedly revised and reinterpreted, and naturally inclined to aggrandize the moral standing of the home tribe. In that way, religions can function like other art forms—literature, theatre, poetry, film—sometimes illuminating human experience, sometimes acting as tools of persuasion, and sometimes sliding into outright propaganda.

People become deeply attached to religious beliefs through powerful psychological forces. Most of all, there is longstanding commitment—often beginning in childhood—bolstered by parents, friends, admired community figures, and the sheer comfort of familiarity. It is as though roots form around a belief system, growing deeper over time, intertwined with identity, memory, and the need for coherence. Weakening those roots can feel like a threat to one’s sense of self, one’s social safety, and one’s personal integrity. For many, it would also be embarrassing—or even humiliating—to admit that something they have honored for decades might be false or misguided; so the mind protects itself by doubling down on prior commitments.

We see versions of this phenomenon far beyond religion, including in medicine and science, where people like to imagine that evidence automatically wins. Even among highly educated experts, new frameworks are often resisted when they threaten status, identity, professional sunk costs, or a lifetime of being “the one who knows.” History is full of examples: the Copernican move toward a Sun-centred system; the germ theory of infectious disease; the slow acceptance of plate tectonics; the bacterial role of Helicobacter pylori in peptic ulcer disease; Boltzmann’s atomic theory and statistical mechanics; Cecilia Payne’s early demonstration that stars are composed primarily of hydrogen (and helium); and the recognition of prion diseases as a genuinely new kind of infectious process.
In each case, the evidence did not simply land on neutral minds; it collided with human psychology—pride, fear, loyalty, identity, and the discomfort of having to revise one’s story about reality.

At times, the advent or widespread adoption of a new religion has been followed by improvements in a society’s stability. But the reasons for this, as I will argue, often have less to do with the truth of any particular doctrine, or the real existence of any divinity with imagined powers, and more to do with what I would call “nonspecific factors”: the social technology of shared rituals, shared identity, shared moral language, mutual aid, and coordinated behavior—effects that can be psychologically and culturally potent even when the beliefs are false.

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