Chapter 29: The Psychology of Cults

Few words in religion are as morally loaded as the word “cult.” This term usually refers to a strange, intense, controlling group with a charismatic leader and loyal followers who appear to have surrendered their independent judgment. But in scholarship, the word is more complicated. Sociologists of religion have often preferred terms such as “new religious movement,” partly because “cult” has become so pejorative that it can stop careful thinking before it begins.

Still, I do not think the word should be abandoned entirely. There really are destructive cults. There really are groups in which people are manipulated, isolated, humiliated, exploited, terrified, financially drained, sexually abused, or induced to surrender ordinary moral judgment to a leader or ideology. The term is useful if it points toward a pattern of coercive group control. It is much less useful if it simply means “a religion I dislike.”

A destructive cult is a group in which a leader, ideology, or inner circle becomes so authoritative that members are pressured to subordinate conscience, evidence, relationships, money, sexuality, bodily autonomy, and ordinary freedom to the group’s demands. The content may be religious, political, therapeutic, commercial, conspiratorial, or self-help oriented. The key issue is not whether the group believes in God, aliens, enlightenment, revolution, purity, healing, or business success. The key issue is whether the group uses those beliefs to control people.

Some groups have mild cult-like features: excessive admiration of a leader, hostility to critics, ritualized confession, pressure to donate, suspicion of outsiders. Others become severely cultic: members are isolated from family, discouraged from outside education, punished for doubt, pressured into sexual access to leaders, or threatened with damnation, exile, violence, or cosmic catastrophe if they leave.

Almost every intense human group has some version of the ingredients. A military unit, fraternity, elite sports team, political movement, therapy community, monastic order, or religious congregation may require sacrifice, discipline, shared language, and strong group identity. That alone does not make it a cult. A demanding group can be healthy if participation is voluntary, leaders are accountable, criticism is allowed, members can leave without catastrophic punishment, finances are transparent, and outsiders are not automatically treated as enemies. The danger begins when loyalty becomes more important than truth, obedience more important than conscience, and belonging more important than freedom.

Examples of Cults, and the Problem of the Label

The most infamous cult examples are now part of public memory. Jonestown, led by Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple, ended in 1978 with more than 900 deaths in Guyana, including many children. Heaven’s Gate ended in 1997 when 39 members died by suicide, linked to beliefs about a UFO associated with the Hale-Bopp comet. Aum Shinrikyo, a Japanese apocalyptic movement, carried out the 1995 Tokyo subway sarin attack, killing 13 people and injuring thousands. The Branch Davidians, an offshoot of the Davidian Seventh-Day Adventist tradition, became internationally known after the 1993 Waco siege, which ended with nearly 80 deaths.

These examples shape public imagination, but they can also mislead us. Most high-control groups do not end in mass death. Most do not become global news. Many simply create years of quiet suffering: estrangement from family, lost education, sexual shame, financial exploitation, fear of leaving, and a long aftermath of confusion.

There are also groups that were once called cults—or sects, heresies, fanatical movements, or dangerous outsiders—that later became accepted, or at least normalized. Early Christianity itself was viewed by many Roman observers as a strange and deviant sect. Protestants were once heretics to Catholics; Catholics were viewed with paranoia in many Protestant countries, and many Protestants to this day consider Catholicism to be a cult. Quakers, Methodists, Shakers, Mormons, Seventh-Day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Scientists, Pentecostals, and many others have at various times been treated as dangerous outsiders by dominant religious cultures. Some of these groups remain controversial; some retain high-control features; some have liberalized; some have become legally protected, socially familiar, and in many communities quite ordinary.

This raises an uncomfortable point: “cult” is partly a social status label. A new religion that is small, poor, foreign, sexually unusual, secretive, or socially embarrassing is much more likely to be called a cult than an older religion with cathedrals, lawyers, tax status, universities, famous donors, and tasteful music. If an elderly institution teaches supernatural claims, demands money, restricts behaviour, discourages apostasy, and venerates ancient leaders, we call it a religion. If a new group does similar things with less history and less social capital, we may call it a cult. Age does not make a belief true. Respectability does not make a social structure harmless.

But many religious groups are not cult-like: they are open, kind, pluralistic, self-critical, and psychologically healthy. Many people participate in religion without being controlled. The better point is that religion and cults share underlying mechanisms, and the difference is often one of degree, accountability, and freedom.

How Common Are Cults?

The prevalence of cults is hard to measure, because everything depends on definition. If by cult we mean a small new religious group, there are many. If we mean a destructive high-control group, there are fewer, but still more than most people realize. If we include nonreligious groups—political extremists, conspiratorial movements, therapy cults, human-potential movements, multilevel marketing groups with quasi-spiritual rhetoric, militant ideological communities, and online radicalization clusters—the number becomes much larger.

The public tends to notice catastrophic endings, but cult-like behaviour exists in quieter forms all around us. A small church in which members are shunned for dissent can be cult-like. A self-help group that pressures vulnerable people to pay for endless levels of training can be cult-like. A political movement in which the leader cannot be criticized, facts are treated as enemy propaganda, and members are rewarded for visible loyalty can be cult-like. A family system can even become cult-like when one controlling parent defines reality for everyone else, punishes dissent, recruits allies, and frames escape as betrayal.

Historically, cult-like movements often flourish during periods of dislocation: war, migration, economic distress, rapid modernization, humiliation, family breakdown, cultural change, or institutional collapse. People seek certainty when the world becomes confusing. They seek belonging when ordinary community has failed. They seek moral clarity when ambiguity becomes exhausting. This is not a sign that people are stupid. It is a sign that human beings are social creatures whose minds are built for attachment, identity, and meaning.

Why Do People Join Cults?

A common mistake is to imagine that people join cults because they are unintelligent, or gullible. That is comforting to believe, because it allows everyone else to say, “That could never happen to me.” But this is not what the evidence suggests. A review of cultic environments noted that people entering such groups do not necessarily show mental health problems, and that current members may appear well-adjusted in many respects.

The initial experience of joining a cult often feels good. It may feel wonderful. The person is lonely, grieving, uncertain, ashamed, bored, rejected, idealistic, or in a period of transition. Then a group appears offering warmth, certainty, purpose, moral seriousness, friendship, structure, and perhaps even practical support. This is almost exactly the same mechanism by which ordinary religion can function as refuge. In an earlier chapter I compared religious benefit to nonspecific therapeutic factors: the frame, the relationship, the structured attention, the ritual, the group support. Cults often begin by offering those same nonspecific factors in concentrated form. They do not usually begin with the most bizarre doctrine. They begin with love, interest, inclusion, and a sense that your life is finally becoming meaningful.

Many people join because they happen to meet the group at the wrong moment, or the right moment, depending on one’s point of view. A new friend invites them. A romantic partner is involved. A campus recruiter is kind. A meditation group seems peaceful. A Bible study group seems sincere. A charismatic teacher gives a talk after a period of depression or grief. The group may provide housing, food, music, emotional intensity, or a sense of being chosen. The person does not feel captured. They feel rescued.

Mental illness can sometimes be a vulnerability, but it is not the main explanation. Depression, trauma, substance use, psychosis, personality vulnerabilities, or severe anxiety may increase susceptibility in some cases, especially if the group offers certainty and containment. But many recruits are healthy, intelligent, educated, and morally serious. In fact, idealism can be a risk factor. People who want to change the world, purify themselves, help the poor, find truth, heal from trauma, or live a life of moral depth may be especially vulnerable to a group that claims to offer exactly that.

Poverty and lack of social support can also matter. If a group provides housing, food, friendship, or protection, it becomes much harder to evaluate it objectively. Leaving may mean not just changing beliefs but losing shelter, work, childcare, social standing, and one’s entire identity. A cult is most powerful when it becomes not only a belief system but a life-support system.

The Psychological Machinery of Cults

The machinery of cults is not mysterious. It is a set of ordinary human processes intensified and organized.

First, there is love-bombing or intense early inclusion. The new person is treated as special. They are welcomed, listened to, praised, and given a role. In ordinary life, many people feel unseen. A group that suddenly sees them can feel intoxicating.

Second, there is a charismatic leader or sacred authority. Sometimes this is a literal leader: a prophet, guru, pastor, therapist, revolutionary, coach, or founder. Sometimes the leader is dead but still controlling through texts, recordings, rules, or institutional descendants. Sometimes the authority is an ideology rather than a person. In all cases, the same psychological structure appears: ordinary doubts are subordinated to a higher truth.

Third, there is isolation from competing sources of reality. This may be physical isolation, as in a commune, compound, retreat centre, or remote residence. But isolation can also be informational and relational. Members are encouraged to distrust outsiders, avoid critical media, reduce contact with family, or reinterpret criticism as persecution. The group gradually becomes the main source of facts, values, relationships, and meaning. A modern cult-like phenomenon all around us today is the “media echo chamber” by which people are often exposed only to one news source, which espouses a particular political or cultural position.

Fourth, there is escalation of commitment. The person gives time, money, labour, secrets, sexual access, public testimony, or obedience. Each sacrifice makes departure more psychologically expensive. People do not like to admit they have suffered for nothing. So the more they give, the more they need the group to be worthy of the gift. This is one reason costly rituals and high-demand commitments can strengthen groups.

Fifth, there is public signaling. The member does not simply believe privately; the member is seen believing. They attend meetings, wear symbols, donate publicly, confess, sing, testify, recruit, or participate in rituals. This connects directly with the idea of common knowledge. Once everyone has seen you declare loyalty, your identity becomes socially fixed. Doubt is no longer a private intellectual event. It becomes a public betrayal.

Sixth, there is language control. Cults often develop a specialized vocabulary. Ordinary words are replaced by group terms or jargon. Critics are “suppressive,” “worldly,” “demonic,” “asleep,” “impure,” “unenlightened,” “bourgeois,” “apostate,” or “negative.” The words differ, but the function is similar: to make dissent feel morally contaminated before it is even heard. Language becomes a fence around thought.

Seventh, there is confession and surveillance. Members may be encouraged to reveal doubts, sins, sexual thoughts, family conflicts, fears, or traumas. In a healthy therapeutic context, disclosure can be healing. In a cultic context, disclosure becomes leverage. The group learns where the person is vulnerable. The person becomes more dependent on the group’s approval. Private life becomes group property.

Eighth, there is fear. The fear may be supernatural: hell, demons, curses, divine punishment, loss of salvation. It may be social: shunning, humiliation, loss of family, loss of marriage, loss of children, loss of reputation. It may be practical: poverty, deportation, loss of housing, loss of job. It may be apocalyptic: the world is ending and only the group will survive. Fear keeps people attached even after love has faded.

This combination produces what Janja Lalich has called “bounded choice”: the member may appear to be choosing freely, but the social and ideological world has been narrowed so dramatically that only one choice feels morally possible.

The Long-Term Outcomes of Cults

Cults do not all end the same way. Some collapse quickly when the leader is exposed, imprisoned, dies, loses charisma, or fails to deliver a prophecy. Some fragment into rival factions. Some remain small but stable for decades. Some become less extreme over time as children are born, finances become formalized, legal scrutiny increases, and the group learns to survive by appearing more normal. Some become mainstream religions or denominations. Some self-destruct catastrophically.

Catastrophic self-destruction becomes more likely when several conditions converge: apocalyptic belief, isolation, paranoia about outside persecution, leader instability, weapons or poison, sexual or financial scandal, legal pressure, and a doctrine that reframes death as victory. Jonestown and Heaven’s Gate are the public nightmares, but the psychological ingredients are not exotic. They are ordinary group processes pushed to a terrifying extreme.

Many groups do not implode. They simply become chronic containers of control. Children grow up inside them. Marriages are arranged or heavily influenced by them. Education is restricted. Doubters learn to remain silent. The group may never make the news, yet it quietly consumes the lives of its members.

Cults and Ordinary Religion: Difference in Kind, or Difference in Degree?

We often talk about cults as though they are qualitatively different from religion. That is understandable, because it protects ordinary believers from feeling accused. But psychologically, many of the same mechanisms are present across the spectrum. The difference is usually intensity, accountability, and freedom.

Ordinary religions often include sacred authority, ritual, public profession, moral language, behavioural restrictions, costly sacrifice, insider-outsider boundaries, suspicion of apostasy, and emotionally charged group experiences.

A church that teaches children they are loved, encourages charity, welcomes doubt, cooperates with science, protects dissenters, and allows people to leave peacefully is not a cult in any meaningful sense. A church that teaches children that outsiders are evil, threatens hell for unbelief, shuns dissenters, hides abuse, demands unquestioning obedience, and gives leaders unchecked power is moving along the cultic continuum, even if it has beautiful buildings, tax-exempt status, and a long history.

This is the uncomfortable thesis: cults are not alien intrusions into religious life. They are one possible intensification of religious life. They are what happens when normal human tendencies—belonging, reverence, loyalty, trust, moral aspiration, fear of death, love of authority, need for certainty—are captured by a closed system.

The same point applies outside religion. Political cults, therapy cults, business cults, and conspiracy movements show that the problem is not supernatural belief alone. The problem is totalizing allegiance. Any group can become cult-like when it treats loyalty as the highest virtue and dissent as contamination.

Helping Someone Who Is in a Cult

The old movie image of an “intervention” is dramatic: family members kidnap the person, lock them in a room, and bring in a deprogrammer to break the spell. This approach is ethically and legally fraught, and it can easily reproduce the coercion it claims to oppose. Historically, “deprogramming” declined partly because of legal risks, public criticism, and the rise of less coercive exit-counseling approaches.

The more humane approach is relational. Do not begin by humiliating the person. Do not mock the group’s beliefs. Do not treat the person as stupid. Do not force them to choose between the cult and the family in a single dramatic confrontation, because the cult has usually already prepared them to interpret criticism as persecution. If outsiders behave with contempt, the group’s warnings are confirmed.

The first task is to keep the relationship alive. Be kind, steady, patient, and curious. Ask questions rather than delivering lectures. The second task is to provide a non-cultic attachment. Many people stay because leaving would mean loneliness. If the outside world contains only critics, shame, and confusion, the cult remains emotionally safer. Outsiders need to become a credible alternative: not a debate team, but a humane place to land. Megan Phelps-Roper’s experience is a useful example. Her account emphasizes that compassionate relationships with outsiders, including people who disagreed with her profoundly but treated her with dignity, helped create the conditions for doubt.

The third task is safety. If there is imminent risk—suicidal intent, violence, child abuse, sexual exploitation, medical neglect, forced confinement, weapons, or credible threats—then ordinary clinical, legal, and protective steps are necessary. But even then, intervention should be careful. Heavy-handed state action can sometimes intensify the group’s persecution narrative and increase danger, especially if members believe the outside world is evil, corrupt, or violent.

How likely is it that someone will leave a cult? There is no single answer. Many people do leave high-demand groups, but the timing is unpredictable. Some leave after a leader’s hypocrisy becomes undeniable. Some leave after a failed prophecy. Some leave because they fall in love with someone outside the group. Some leave when they become parents and cannot bear to subject their children to the same control. Some leave after education, travel, illness, grief, burnout, or private moral disgust. Some do not leave for decades. Some never leave.

Leaving is not a single event. It is often a long psychological migration. A person may physically leave before mentally leaving. Or mentally leave years before saying so publicly. This is especially true when family remains inside. To leave a cult may mean losing one’s parents, siblings, spouse, children, friends, language, cosmology, moral identity, and sense of destiny all at once. Outsiders sometimes underestimate this. They say, “Why don’t you just leave?” But leaving can feel like stepping off the edge of the world. In many ways leaving a cult is analogous to a person leaving an abusive family.

After Leaving

Former members often need practical and psychological support. They may need housing, money, employment help, education, legal assistance, medical care, and protection from harassment. They may also need gentle, empathic therapy.

Research on former members describes an “in-between” period: loss of worldview, confusion, grief, identity disruption, and distress as the person tries to adapt to life outside the group. Leaving does not automatically produce joy. It may produce terror, emptiness, guilt, and longing. The cult may have been abusive, but it was also home.

Former members may need to relearn ordinary decision-making. What do I wear? What do I eat? Who am I allowed to date? What music do I like? What do I believe about death? How do I spend money? How do I disagree with someone without panic? How do I trust my own perception? These questions can be profound for someone whose preferences were controlled for years.

There is also moral injury. Former members may have recruited others, shunned family, repeated hateful doctrines, donated money, punished children, or participated in humiliating rituals. Some were victims and perpetrators at the same time. A good therapeutic approach has to make space for both accountability and compassion. Shame alone can drive people back into closed systems. But denial is not healing either.

A healthy exit requires new community. This is a recurring theme in the psychology of religion. A person rarely leaves a total social world merely because an argument is correct. They need somewhere else to belong. The secular world often fails here. It can be rational but socially thin. Cults and religions know how to gather people, sing together, eat together, help each other move apartments, visit the sick, celebrate births, mourn deaths, and give people roles. A purely intellectual critique of cults is not enough if we do not offer better human structures outside them.

Preventing Cults at a Community Level

At a community level, preventing cults requires more than warning people. It requires reducing the vulnerabilities that cults exploit: loneliness, poverty, untreated mental illness, poor education, family estrangement, lack of belonging, and lack of meaning.

People need to learn cognitive biases, social influence, probability, media literacy, financial literacy, and the warning signs of coercive control. They need to understand that intelligence does not immunize anyone against manipulation. In fact, intelligent people can become very skilled at defending a false belief if the belief protects identity and belonging.

Religious communities themselves can help prevent cultic drift by building safeguards: transparent finances, rotating leadership, independent abuse reporting, no secret doctrines for inner circles, no punishment for leaving, no shunning, no leader above criticism, no sexual access disguised as spiritual privilege, no pressure to cut off family, no discouragement of education, and no claim that doubt is evil.

When authorities do intervene, they should of course minimize aggression. Some cults depend on a persecution narrative. If the state behaves stupidly or brutally, the leader’s warnings are confirmed. This does not mean tolerating abuse. It means that intervention should be intelligent, patient where possible, legally precise, and informed by people who understand high-control groups.

Participating in Religion in a Less Cult-Like Way

The final question is not only how to identify cults, but how to participate in religion—or any intense community—in a less cult-like way.

A less cult-like religion allows members to leave without punishment. It allows doubt to be spoken aloud. It teaches children accurate science and history, not only sacred stories. It does not require hatred or fear of outsiders. It does not make sexuality the obsessive focus of moral worth. It does not protect leaders from consequences. It does not treat financial giving as proof of holiness. It does not confuse humility with obedience. It does not turn family love into a hostage situation.

A less cult-like religion treats doctrine as a framework for moral reflection, not as a weapon. It values truth enough to tolerate questions. It values love enough to refuse shunning. It values conscience enough to let people disagree. It values children enough not to terrify them with hell. It values community enough not to trap people inside it.

Of course, one could ask why supernatural belief is needed at all. If the best parts of religion are community, music, moral reflection, care for the vulnerable, gratitude, beauty, mourning, celebration, and humility, then perhaps those goods can be cultivated without insisting on literal fictions. But while religion persists, it is worth asking how it can become less coercive, less dogmatic, less tribal, and less cult-like.

A cult is not just a strange group somewhere else. It is a warning about human social nature.

Annotated Bibliography

Aronoff, J., Lynn, S. J., & Malinoski, P. (2000). Are cultic environments psychologically harmful? Clinical Psychology Review, 20(1), 91–111. doi:10.1016/S0272-7358(98)00093-2

This review is useful because it complicates the simplistic idea that people who join cults are obviously mentally ill or psychologically unwell. 

Barker, E. (1984). The making of a Moonie: Choice or brainwashing? Blackwell.

Barker’s study of the Unification Church remains one of the most important empirical works on conversion to a controversial new religious movement. Its central value is that it resists both extremes: the idea that converts are simply brainwashed robots, and the equally naive idea that conversion is always a free, rational, individual choice. Barker’s work is especially useful for describing how social context, personal searching, recruitment settings, and group experience interact over time.

Chambers, W. V., Langone, M. D., Dole, A. A., & Grice, J. W. (1994). The Group Psychological Abuse Scale: A measure of the varieties of cultic abuse. Cultic Studies Journal, 11(1), 88–112.

This article introduced the Group Psychological Abuse Scale, an attempt to operationalize psychological abuse in cultic or high-control groups. While the journal and field are more specialized than mainstream psychiatry or psychology, the article is important because it tries to move the discussion away from vague accusation and toward measurable dimensions: isolation, dependency, fear, manipulation, and exploitation.

Coates, D. D. (2010). Post-involvement difficulties experienced by former members of charismatic groups. Journal of Religion and Health, 49(3), 296–310. doi:10.1007/s10943-009-9251-0

Coates examines the difficulties former members can experience after leaving charismatic or high-demand groups. This is important because many outside observers assume that leaving is the end of the problem, when in reality it may be the beginning of a difficult identity transition. Former members may struggle with guilt, fear, loneliness, distrust, and loss of worldview.

Festinger, L., Riecken, H. W., & Schachter, S. (1956). When prophecy fails: A social and psychological study of a modern group that predicted the destruction of the world. University of Minnesota Press. doi:10.1037/10030-000

This classic study introduced one of the most memorable accounts of cognitive dissonance in a religious-apocalyptic setting. Festinger and colleagues studied a group whose prophecy failed, showing how disconfirmation can sometimes intensify rather than weaken belief, especially when members have already sacrificed publicly for the worldview. This remains highly relevant to cult psychology because failed predictions, scandals, and contradictions do not automatically dissolve closed groups. Sometimes they generate more fervent proselytizing and more elaborate rationalization. This is also a caution for some of the world’s cult-like political phenomena—even as more and more disasters occur as a result of poor leadership, the “base” following may become even more fervent or extreme.

Galanter, M., Rabkin, R., Rabkin, J. G., & Deutsch, A. (1979). The “Moonies”: A psychological study of conversion and membership in a contemporary religious sect. American Journal of Psychiatry, 136(2), 165–170. doi:10.1176/ajp.136.2.165

This psychiatric study of Unification Church members is important because it brought the topic of charismatic religious sects into mainstream psychiatric discussion. It explored conversion and membership without reducing the issue simply to psychosis or individual pathology.

Galanter, M. (1990). Cults and zealous self-help movements: A psychiatric perspective. American Journal of Psychiatry, 147(5), 543–551. doi:10.1176/ajp.147.5.543

Galanter’s article is valuable because it broadens the discussion beyond obviously religious cults to include zealous self-help movements. This is a crucial point: cultic dynamics are not limited to supernatural belief. They can appear in therapeutic, commercial, political, and “human potential” settings as well.

Gómez, Á., Martínez, M., Martel, F. A., López-Rodríguez, L., Vázquez, A., Chinchilla, J., Paredes, B., Hettiarachchi, M., Hamid, N., & Swann, W. B. (2021). Why people enter and embrace violent groups. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, Article 614657. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.614657

This article is not about cults narrowly, but it reviews why people enter and internalize commitment to violent groups. Concepts such as identity fusion, sacred values, social influence, and radicalization are directly applicable to cultic dynamics. The importance here is that it places destructive religious cults within a broader family of intense group allegiances, where belonging and identity can override ordinary self-interest and moral caution. This reference is already aligned with your existing reference base.

Hadding, C., Semb, O., Lehti, A., Fahlström, M., Sandlund, M., & DeMarinis, V. (2023). Being in-between; exploring former cult members’ experiences of an acculturation process using the cultural formulation interview (DSM-5). Frontiers in Psychiatry, 14, Article 1142189. doi:10.3389/fpsyt.2023.1142189

This recent qualitative study explores former cult members’ experiences after leaving, describing the “in-between” quality of post-cult adjustment. It is significant because it treats exit as an acculturation process: the person is not merely changing opinions, but moving from one cultural world to another.

Kent, S. A. (2002). Deprogramming, exit counseling, and the decline of deprogramming. Cultic Studies Review, 1(3).

Kent’s article is important for understanding the history of attempts to remove people from cults. Earlier “deprogramming” sometimes involved coercive tactics, including abduction or confinement, which raised serious ethical and legal concerns. The shift toward exit counseling reflects a more humane and defensible approach: rapport, information, family support, and voluntary engagement.

Lalich, J. (2004). Bounded choice: True believers and charismatic cults. University of California Press.

Lalich’s concept of “bounded choice” is one of the most useful ways to describe the subjective experience of cult members. From outside, members appear to be making irrational choices. From inside, the group has narrowed the moral and informational universe so dramatically that obedience feels like the only possible path. This concept is significant because it avoids crude “brainwashing” language while still taking coercive control seriously.

Lifton, R. J. (1961). Thought reform and the psychology of totalism: A study of “brainwashing” in China. W. W. Norton.

Lifton’s work is foundational for understanding totalistic environments: milieu control, confession, sacred science, loaded language, doctrine over person, and the demand for purity. Although the original context was political thought reform rather than religion, the framework has been influential in later discussions of cults and high-control groups. Its significance lies in describing how environments can reshape identity and reality-testing without requiring that every member be mentally ill or unintelligent.

Lofland, J., & Stark, R. (1965). Becoming a world-saver: A theory of conversion to a deviant perspective. American Sociological Review, 30(6), 862–875. doi:10.2307/2090965

This classic article is one of the foundational sociological accounts of conversion to a deviant religious perspective. Lofland and Stark emphasized strain, religious seeking, affective bonds, and intensive interaction with believers. The article is significant because it helps explain why conversion is rarely just an abstract intellectual shift. It is a social and emotional process.

Pretus, C., Hamid, N., Sheikh, H., Ginges, J., Tobeña, A., Davis, R., Vilarroya, O., & Atran, S. (2018). Neural and behavioral correlates of sacred values and vulnerability to violent extremism. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, Article 2462. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02462

Pretus and colleagues examine sacred values and vulnerability to violent extremism using behavioural and neural measures. This is important for cult psychology because sacred values are not experienced as ordinary preferences. Once a belief becomes sacred, compromise can feel like betrayal. The article helps explain why cult members may endure suffering, reject evidence, or even accept violence when the group’s core values have become fused with identity.

Richardson, J. T. (1993). Definitions of cult: From sociological-technical to popular-negative. Review of Religious Research, 34(4), 348–356. doi:10.2307/3511972

Richardson’s article is essential for any chapter that uses the word “cult.” It shows how the term has changed over time and how its popular use has become strongly negative. The significance is that it forces conceptual discipline: we should not call a group a cult merely because it is new, strange, small, foreign, or theologically unappealing. The better question is whether the group uses coercive, exploitative, or abusive control.

Saldaña, O., Rodríguez-Carballeira, Á., Almendros, C., & Escartín, J. (2017). Development and validation of the Psychological Abuse Experienced in Groups Scale. The European Journal of Psychology Applied to Legal Context, 9(2), 57–64. doi:10.1016/j.ejpal.2017.01.002

This article is significant because it attempts to measure psychological abuse in group settings empirically. The authors developed and validated a scale focused on abuse experienced in groups, including former members of manipulative or coercive organizations. This helps support the chapter’s process-based definition of cults: the concern is not theological oddness but patterns of control, manipulation, dependency, isolation, and harm.

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. doi:10.1177/1069397103037002003

Sosis and Bressler’s study is important because it links costly ritual and group survival. Their analysis of communes supports the idea that demanding rituals and sacrifices can strengthen cooperation by signalling commitment and filtering out free riders. This is directly relevant to cults because high-control groups often require costly behaviours—donations, dress codes, confession, celibacy, public testimony, isolation—not only for theological reasons but because cost itself creates loyalty and makes commitment visible.

Stark, R., & Bainbridge, W. S. (1980). Networks of faith: Interpersonal bonds and recruitment to cults and sects. American Journal of Sociology, 85(6), 1376–1395. doi:10.1086/227169

This article is central to understanding recruitment. Stark and Bainbridge argue that interpersonal bonds play a major role in conversion to cults and sects. This is crucial because it challenges the image of recruitment as simply ideological persuasion. People are often drawn in through friends, partners, mentors, and emotionally meaningful relationships.

Ungerleider, J. T., & Wellisch, D. K. (1979). Coercive persuasion (brainwashing), religious cults, and deprogramming. American Journal of Psychiatry, 136(3), 279–282. doi:10.1176/ajp.136.3.279

This psychiatric article is historically important because it reflects the late-1970s clinical concern about brainwashing, cults, and deprogramming. Its significance today is partly historical: it shows how psychiatry was grappling with cultic influence during a period of intense public concern. It also helps frame why later writers became more careful about the language of “brainwashing,” preferring more nuanced models of social influence, coercive persuasion, bounded choice, and high-control environments.

Whitehouse, H. (2004). Modes of religiosity: A cognitive theory of religious transmission. AltaMira Press.

Whitehouse’s work is highly relevant because it explains how different ritual styles transmit religious commitment. His distinction between rare, intense, emotionally memorable rituals and frequent, repetitive, routinized practices is useful for understanding how groups create cohesion. Cults often combine both: dramatic initiations, confessions, retreats, or ecstatic experiences, alongside repetitive meetings, slogans, and behavioural rules.

Next Chapter

Chapter 30 - Religion & Nationalism

Nationalism—loyalty and commitment to serve one’s country—is, in many ways, a secular cousin of religion. Patriotism—the warmer, more emotionally charged attachment to one’s nation—is a secular cousin of religious piety. Nations, like religions, have founding stories, revered leaders, martyrs, songs, holy days, symbols, and texts. A flag can function almost like a religious icon. The national anthem is a bit like a hymn. A constitution is not literally a scripture, of course, but psychologically it can occupy a similar place: quoted selectively, interpreted by specialists, and treated with special reverence in times of crisis. In many countries, national symbols are everywhere—flags outside homes, in schools, at sports events, on the lapel of a suit, and so routinely in the background of films and television shows that people hardly notice them. These are not just decorations; they are signals of belonging.

Just like religion, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Humans need belonging. National identity can give people meaning, gratitude, pride, and a feeling of rootedness. Patriotism can bring people together to cooperate, to build a good society, or to face difficult problems. This is true not only of nations, but of smaller units too: provinces, states, cities, schools, neighborhoods, families. People can love a landscape, a language, a history, or the memory of ancestors who endured hardship and built something.

But the same psychological mechanism that creates warmth and cooperation also creates outsiders. Fellow citizens of our nation, just like fellow members of a religion, become members of an ingroup, and therefore receive preferential regard, support, and trust compared to outgroup members—"foreigners."

At its best, patriotism is gratitude and stewardship. It is care for one’s home, loyalty to neighbors, respect for institutions that protect people decently, and a wish to pass something worthwhile on to the next generation. At its worst, patriotism becomes collective vanity. The nation stops being a practical civic arrangement and starts to feel almost sacred—above criticism, above humility, perhaps even above ordinary morality. The home group is imagined to be uniquely virtuous, uniquely wronged, or uniquely deserving. Critics become suspect. Outsiders become threatening. At that point harshness can begin to feel justified.  

Often patriotic citizens forget that their own families were once immigrants.  If you go far enough back, almost all humans are descended from "immigrants," except perhaps some who live in sub-Saharan Africa.  As we have discussed earlier, humans originating in central Africa have migrated across the world over tens of thousands of years.  Depending on how you define the geographic limits, a very limited proportion of families still live in the homeland where their ancestors were the first human settlers. Ironically this proportion is particularly low in North America, which is the place where nowadays we see particular hostility to immigrants.  

One of the great ironies of civilization is that many countries have beautiful constitutions and noble founding ideals while behaving badly toward outsiders. At their best, constitutions speak of liberty, justice, equality, dignity, due process, fairness, and restraint of power. But the emotional force of these values often applies only to insiders. A country may insist that its own citizens deserve humane treatment and equal standing before the law, while showing indifference or contempt toward people outside the border. The moral imagination stops at the passport.

This is one place where constitutions and scriptures are interesting to compare. At their best, both reach toward universality. At their worst, both become tribal property. People sometimes quote them not to enlarge compassion, but to justify selective loyalty. There is something strange about passionately affirming equality while only feeling it fully for one’s own side. If fairness, justice, and dignity are real values, they should not evaporate when a person happens to be born on the wrong side of a line on a map.

Religion and nationalism can also become strongly fused. In some places this fusion is formal and built directly into law and state power: religious leaders may hold autocratic authority, or the state may define itself in theological terms. In other places the fusion is softer but still very real: politicians wrap themselves in sacred language, imply that the “real” members of the nation follow the dominant religion, and use religious identity as a marker of patriotism. Religion then lends nationalism sacred prestige, while nationalism lends religion the machinery of the state. In many parts of the world, it feels as though these tendencies are intensifying again. The old tribal reflexes are not difficult to awaken.

This is also the point where nationalism begins to resemble religion most vividly: sacrifice becomes noble. The soldier lost in battle becomes a secular martyr. Military cemeteries become sacred ground. National memorial days, uniforms, solemn parades, salutes, flyovers, and moments of silence are not trivial theatre; they are rituals. Some of these rituals can be dignified, moving, and morally serious. But psychologically they are doing something very similar to religious ceremony: they sanctify loyalty, make sacrifice visible, and bind the group together around a shared story of suffering and duty.

Once the nation is felt to be sacred, military power begins to acquire a special moral glow. Global military spending is now close to $3 trillion per year. And broader estimates of the economic impact of violence run to roughly $20 trillion annually. Even allowing for debate about definitions and methodology, the scale is staggering. It is also vastly greater than many published estimates of what would be required each year to eliminate extreme poverty. Beyond the numbers, there is the cost in human talent: engineers, chemists, manufacturers, and researchers working on military technology could instead use their abilities to give the world better housing, cleaner energy, safer roads, prosthetics, better medications, water systems, or even simply better playgrounds for children, instead of better ways to maim or kill them.

Human societies will always require policing, disaster response, protection against violent actors, and organized defense of civilians. But it is worth imagining a more mature global arrangement: less dependence on giant national war machines, and more emphasis on internationally accountable peacekeeping, policing, engineering, disaster response, and protection of human rights. It is worth imagining a system in which soldiers or security personnel would train with colleagues from other nations, in different parts of the world, learn other languages, work alongside people from other cultures, and spend more of their careers helping with floods, fires, epidemics, rebuilding, mediating regional conflicts, and civilian protection. The point would not be to erase local loyalties, but to weaken the automatic “us and them” mentality.

What can be done about this problem? This is one place where the best of religion and the best of civic life actually converge. The best religious values call for compassion, humility, fairness, hospitality, and recognition of the dignity of other persons—not just of one’s own tribe. Likewise, the best constitutional ideals call for equal protection, restraint of power, due process, and humane treatment. The United Nations, however imperfectly, points in this direction. The UN Charter speaks of promoting human rights and fundamental freedoms for all, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights begins with one of the most beautiful sentences in political history: all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.

Einstein, especially after the arrival of nuclear weapons, moved toward this kind of thinking as well. He argued that the scale of modern destructive power had made old-style nationalism dangerously obsolete, and he supported some form of supranational democratic authority—what he often called world government—as a way of preventing catastrophe. 

Of course, there are dangers in any larger political arrangement. A world government, if badly designed, could become bureaucratic, overreaching, or tyrannical. There would have to be strong safeguards: systematic democracy, term limits, limited executive power, fair elections with protections against propaganda, and protections against wealthy candidates or partisan blocs using economic power to sway the electorate unfairly. 

A more modest movement in this direction would simply be to greatly strengthen international law and increase the authority, accountability, funding, and capacity of institutions such as the United Nations, rather than pretending that national sovereignty must remain absolute forever.

The task is not to abolish tribal feeling altogether, but to civilize it—to channel it toward celebration, artistry, local pride, friendly competition, and cooperative belonging rather than toward prejudice, ostracism, and war. At best, tribalism, nationalism, and religion give us festivals, songs, neighborhoods, architecture, and cultural beauty. At worst, they give us fear, exclusion, and repeated conflict.

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The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 31: Conclusion

In conclusion, religious beliefs—and organized group religion in particular—have been part of human civilization for thousands of years. Culturally, religion can bring real benefits: it helps communities gather to celebrate and to grieve, to contemplate morality, to show gratitude, and to meditate. Religious faith is consolidated by human tendencies to be loyal—to family, to ingroups, to longstanding beliefs learned and practiced since childhood, and to idealized figures—with God for many believers functioning as an inner representation of perfect goodness, power, or protection. Religions are further consolidated by many of the most enjoyable and meaningful human activities: a great deal of the world’s art, music, literature, and architecture is rooted in religion. Religions also help many people cope with the deepest, most painful, and most frightening experiences of life, such as facing the deaths of our loved ones, or facing our own mortality.  Some of the greatest human leaders, standing for peace, justice, and a better society, have been religious leaders. And religious services can be a medium through which people meet friends or potential partners, sometimes with a better-than-average chance of meeting someone with whom they might share values, also with that person in some sense vetted by the church community. The congregation itself can even act as a kind of village matchmaker.

For all of these reasons, I do not think society presently has good secular alternatives to religion taken as a whole. We have secular versions of pieces of it—music, psychotherapy, volunteer organizations, civic ceremonies, lectures, support groups, sports clubs, humanitarian projects—but not many institutions that gather together, in one place and over generations, family history, ancestry, ritual, moral reflection, structured weekly services, practical community support, beautiful buildings, shared songs, and common knowledge. Religion has had thousands of years to root itself in calendars, holidays, funerals, weddings, neighbourhoods, and family memory. Because of that, I do not think it is practical—or usually wise—to speak as though religion could simply be replaced, or as though it should be discouraged wholesale.

But none of this changes my main thesis. Religions and other spiritual or mystical systems still hold beliefs that are not literally true. This is where the problem lies: not that people gather, sing, grieve, serve, reflect, and care for one another, but that these healthy and meaningful practices are so often fastened to false claims about reality. These beliefs are often taken literally, and dogmatic adherence to them—public profession of them, loyalty to them—is frequently required as a sign of belonging. Some of these fictions may be inconsequential much of the time; many people can live decent lives without a precise understanding of biology, astronomy, geology, genetics, or ancient history. But the darker side has to do with the extremity of group loyalty: ingroups and outgroups form, religion becomes an emblem of identity, and mistrust, exclusion, and maltreatment of outsiders can follow. Dogmatic pronouncements can also become oppressive to the group’s own members, particularly when people are pressured into literalistic interpretations of sacred texts, or when “faith” becomes a moral duty rather than an honest way of grappling with uncertainty. Furthermore, spiritual or mystical beliefs about causality can lead to dangerously poor judgment about important life decisions, yet the spiritually guided person can feel supremely confident while making these decisions.

The lack of accurate education about the way the world works is finally detrimental to any individual, group, or nation. It is like a pilot of an airplane who does not understand how the engines work, and assumes that planes fly due to magic. Most of the time this may not seem to make much difference to the safety and navigation of the plane—until the weather changes, until something unexpected happens, until you need a sober understanding of what is real in order to respond well. A culture can coast for a long time on comforting stories. It is when conditions become difficult that false models show their true cost.

So I think it is valuable that we live lives in which we strive toward understanding deep truths—about ourselves and about the world—and that we do not settle too easily for fictional belief simply because it is comforting. I would distinguish very clearly between respecting religion as culture, and giving institutional privilege to dogma. It is particularly troubling to me for children to be indoctrinated with rigid beliefs, especially if they are not also exposed to accurate information about the world in terms of science, history, and culture. And it remains troubling to me that there should be public financial support for religious groups, in the form of tax breaks and other privileges, unless these are clearly restricted to the charitable components of religious outreach rather than the promotion of dogma or political influence.

We certainly know that holding religious belief is not necessary to be a moral, kind, loving, gentle, humble person. In fact, in some cases religious beliefs can obstruct these positive qualities and add to the world’s problems. And it is possible to face the most difficult aspects of human life—grief, loss, pain, and death—while behaving honourably, peacefully, and nobly, without requiring belief in some eternal reward. In fact, moral behaviour done for its intrinsic good, rather than being motivated by fear of punishment or hunger for reward, seems to me a deeper ethical foundation. Such a stance does not require religion, but it does require effort: working on living well, striving to become a better person, and trying to be a stabilizing and humane influence on others.

In discussing religion, it is important to empathize with people who hold religious or spiritual beliefs. Respectful understanding of how and why people believe as they do matters—especially if the goal is genuine dialogue rather than tribal combat. This matters all the more if one hopes that religious culture itself can move in a healthier direction. It is also valuable to search for common ground, particularly with regard to values. Most religious people value integrity, loyalty, altruism, compassion, truthfulness, lawful behaviour, fairness, family, care of children, hard work, and the willingness to stand up for what is right even at risk to oneself. In a discussion about religious belief, it can help to emphasize these shared values, because it appeals to unity rather than escalating the feeling that one is an outgroup member disrespecting a sacred tradition.

And that brings me back to the question that started many of these reflections: how to face transience without leaning on supernatural reassurance. I sometimes think of simple things: a firework, a meal, a fire, a cup of hot tea. These things are transient; they disappear. Yet their constituents are still present—they have merely dissolved and dispersed into the surrounding space in a different form. The structure ends; the ingredients remain, rearranged, carried away by a current of increasing entropy. We can’t expect the cup of tea to survive unchanged forever, and we can’t expect the firework to glitter permanently. In fact, it is normal—and even required for its enjoyment—that it be transient. A lot of religion tries to deny this, or to soften it with a story about eternity. I think there is another path: to accept that things end, to grieve honestly when they end, and still to love them fiercely while they are here.

At the same time, we should not belittle myth, ritual, reverence, or the imaginative life. We would not discourage people from reading novels or watching films. In fact, part of what makes such art powerful is our willingness to enter into it with imagination—with a kind of suspension of disbelief—so that it can enlarge our emotional and moral life. The fact that a story is fictional does not make it worthless; often fiction contains deep truths about human nature, morality, grief, courage, and love. But we do not take a novel as a literal account of astronomy, geology, or medicine. We do not treat a play as an infallible instruction manual for public morality. And we would not normally build rigid tribes around a work of fiction, declaring outsiders corrupt, impure, or damned because they cherish a different story. I think religion is healthiest when its myths are approached in something like this spirit: as powerful cultural stories, moral frameworks, poetic language, and shared rituals—not as literal science, not as a basis for hostility to outsiders, and not as a justification for suspending critical thought.

There are examples of keeping the healthiest aspects of religion—the focus on values, morality, kindness, altruism, charity, humility, meditative self-care, self-improvement and sincere amends-making, caring for and accepting care from community members, enjoying beautiful music, art, and architecture, and cultivating gratitude and reverence—while not becoming captive to narrow dogma, false beliefs about science, or denigration of outsiders. Some interfaith movements aim to cultivate peace and mutual respect across traditions. Some branches of modern religion are simply less dogmatic and more open to science and cultural pluralism. I think that is the direction to hope for. The task, in my opinion, is not to uproot religion, but to help move it away from dogma, away from tribalism, and toward universalism and humanitarianism. If religion is going to continue to shape family life, art, ritual, and common knowledge—and I think it will—then let it do so in a way that is humble before science, honest about uncertainty, and generous toward all human beings, not just the home tribe.

References

The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 28: Religion and Common Knowledge

Imagine a crowded church service at the moment the congregation rises. Each person hears the same words, sees the same gestures, and sees everyone else hearing and making the same display. This is more than shared belief. It is public belief. More precisely, it is common knowledge.

One of the most useful ways to understand religion is to treat it as a way humans achieve social coordination. Steven Pinker’s recent work on common knowledge offers a sharp insight about this. Common knowledge is not merely that many people know something; it is the further fact that everyone knows that everyone knows it, and everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone knows it—in principle without end. This sounds like a philosopher’s game, but human beings handle it with surprising ease in daily life.

And it is not just an abstract curiosity. It is one of the practical tools that makes civilization possible. A simple way to grasp this is to compare private knowledge with common knowledge. Suppose I text you to meet me at a certain cafe at noon, but I am not sure whether you saw the message. My private intention does not coordinate anything unless I know that you know it too. Or take money: a paper bill has value only because I believe you will accept it, you believe I will accept it, and both of us assume countless other people will do the same. Without that shared expectation, it is only paper. Or think of driving through an intersection: I stop at a red light because I trust that other drivers know the same rule, and that they know I know it too. Without that layer of mutual expectation, there would need to be a police officer at every intersection and a supervisor at every transaction.

In Pinker’s framing, common knowledge generates coordination. It lets people converge on shared conventions—driving on the right, accepting paper currency, agreeing on a meeting place and time—without needing a central enforcer to micromanage every choice.

Once one starts seeing this, ordinary public events look different. A wedding is not only a private promise between two lovers; it is a public event in which everyone witnesses everyone else recognizing the couple’s new status. A graduation ceremony is not required to make learning real, but it does make achievement visible and socially undeniable. A courtroom oath, a citizenship ceremony, even the singing of a national anthem, all have a similar structure: they are not merely expressions of a belief or promise, but public demonstrations that everyone present has seen the same commitment made.

But the same logic also helps explain the shadow side of social life. People often avoid saying obvious things out loud because speaking them changes the situation. A whole family may privately know that a father is drinking too much, or that a marriage is failing, yet nobody mentions it at Thanksgiving dinner, because once it is said, everyone is forced to respond. Hypocrisy can sometimes be stabilizing in exactly this awkward sense: a church may publicly praise a strict moral rule while quietly knowing that many members do not live up to it, and the polite silence around the mismatch is part of what keeps the community from splitting apart. Shaming mobs ignite because once condemnation becomes visible—especially on social media—each person sees everyone else condemning too, and joining in suddenly feels safer and more rewarding. Revolutions can seem to erupt out of nowhere for a similar reason: thousands may privately resent a regime for years, but only when protest becomes public does each person realize that others were ready all along. And public rituals—religious, political, civic—have force because they do not merely express belief. They make belief mutually visible.

Religion is, among other things, a machine for manufacturing common knowledge. Private belief is psychologically real, but socially weak. It does not coordinate strangers. A society cannot run on invisible beliefs that no one can observe. What rituals do—prayer spoken aloud, communal singing, congregational responses, public confessions, initiation rites, sacred calendars, distinctive clothing, a crucifix necklace, shared dietary rules—is turn inner states into public signals. They convert “I believe” into “we can all see that we believe,” and then into “we all know that we can all see it.”

This matters because people are extremely sensitive to the social risk of being the odd one out. If belonging is the reward and ostracism the punishment, the most dangerous condition is uncertainty: Do they believe this? Do they know I believe it? Do they know I’m wavering? Rituals collapse that uncertainty. They make allegiance visible. They create an emotionally saturated version of a contract—less like signing a document, more like standing under a spotlight and letting the group watch you sign with your whole body.

This is why religions place such emphasis on public acts. Private prayer is meaningful to many, but communal prayer is socially decisive. Singing alone is esthetic; singing together is social glue. An individual moral intuition is fragile; a moral intuition recited in unison becomes harder to question, because questioning it is no longer just a solitary cognitive act—it becomes a social offense. And once a belief is entangled with common knowledge, its truthfulness often becomes secondary to its coordination-value. The belief may be fictional, but it is socially efficient.

This logic also helps explain why cost matters so much. A cheap signal is easy to fake. A costly signal is harder to fake, which is why social groups are so attracted to cost. High-demand religions—those that require many hours of weekly participation, tithing, conspicuous behavioural restrictions, sexual policing, or public displays of devotion—often look irrational or excessive from the outside. But through this lens, some of that irrationality is exactly the point. If a group can get you to do something inconvenient, stigmatizing, or effortful, it has a way to distinguish true loyalists from casual tourists. The sacrifice itself becomes evidence. The burden is part of the proof.

This is also why initiation rituals recur across wildly different human groups, religious and otherwise. The ordeal is a signalling device: I paid a price to be here; therefore I must value being here; therefore I am one of you. The group sees the price, and the price creates common knowledge of commitment.

Pinker makes an additional point that is deeply relevant to religious life: people do not always want knowledge to become common knowledge. They often go to great lengths to ensure that even if everyone privately knows something, no one is forced to acknowledge it publicly. Many communities function because people tacitly collude in not pressing certain questions to the point of explicitness.

Examples of this are everywhere. A family may quietly know that one relative has a severe drinking problem, yet conversation glides politely around it for years. A workplace may quietly know that a promotion was unfair, but no one wants to be the person who says so in the meeting. A teenager in a devout household may stop believing a doctrine years before saying it aloud, because the moment the words are spoken, the issue changes from an inner uncertainty into a relational crisis. Even in a congregation, several people may have serious private doubts about a sermon, a miracle claim, or a moral teaching, yet each person may assume that everyone else is more convinced than they are, and so the silence preserves the appearance of unanimity.

The moment a doubt is spoken plainly, it stops being a private flicker and becomes a social event. It demands response. It forces alignment. It threatens the shared story.

I can’t help thinking about the present political world. Within large partisan groups in parts of the world today, I suspect there are many private doubts about very alarming world events, and about the conduct of one very prominent leader who seems to dominate the news, yet too few people inside those groups are willing to speak their doubts aloud, because doing so would risk the loss of community. It reminds me of the old fairy tale The Emperor’s New Clothes. The force of that story is not that the child discovers some hidden fact. The child simply says aloud what everyone can already see. He turns private knowledge into common knowledge. Some of the truths of the current world situation, and of the behavioural problems of major leaders, are so obvious that a very young child could understand them clearly. Perhaps the innocence and humility of a child’s voice is exactly what is needed to pierce a collective performance of denial. One definition of heroism, in my opinion, is the willingness to speak one’s private knowledge of the truth to a group that may at least initially reject you for it.

In practice, a religious community often survives not by answering every question, but by managing which questions are acceptable to ask out loud.

Religious spectacles—miracles, exorcisms, dramatic conversions, speaking in tongues, revival meetings—are not just theological events. They are high-powered signalling events. They take a private feeling—“I felt something”—and turn it into a public fact: “We all saw her fall, shake, cry, speak strangely, rise transformed.” The group witnesses a performance that is emotionally contagious, and the witnessing itself becomes part of the evidence.

The crucial move is not merely that an unusual event occurs, but that everyone sees everyone else seeing it. This is how common knowledge is made at high speed: a shared spectacle that forces a shared interpretation, or at least a shared posture. If you stand in the room and do not respond, you are not merely unconvinced—you are socially deviant. The power of the event is partly the power of mutual surveillance.

This is also why sceptical outsiders often have a dual reaction to certain public charismatic performances: amusement at the apparent absurdity, mixed with unease at the very real influence such spectacles can have when they become fused to political power. The performance may look ridiculous, but its social function is very serious: it converts theatrical intensity into tribal certainty.

A frequent defence of religion is that it provides moral structure. That claim is not wholly wrong—at least at the level of group coordination. A community that repeats moral language weekly, that teaches children shared scripts for gratitude, restraint, charity, and self-scrutiny, will often produce decently socialized people. The group is continuously manufacturing common knowledge about what counts as admirable, shameful, or forbidden.

But this cuts both ways. It can coordinate kindness; it can also coordinate cruelty. When a group makes contempt for outsiders common knowledge—through sermons, jokes, or political messaging—the moral atmosphere shifts. People become emboldened. What was privately felt becomes publicly permitted. The difference between a prejudice that quietly lingers in someone’s mind and a prejudice that is openly shared is enormous: the second is actionable. It becomes policy. It becomes bullying. It becomes violence with a clean conscience.

One part of what we are seeing today in the rise of bullying and prejudice is this same effect: various groups are coordinating a social norm in which prejudicial thinking is shared openly within the community, until the prejudice itself becomes an emblem of partisan belonging.

The frightening historical efficiency of religious persecution is, in part, a story about common knowledge: it is easier to harm others when the justification has been made publicly shared, ritually repeated, and socially rewarded.

This dynamic is not only created in sanctuaries; it also spreads through networks. Here the work of Nicholas Christakis is a useful complement. His research suggests that behaviours can cascade through social networks—spreading from person to person to person, sometimes out to several degrees of separation. Human behaviour is not merely individual choice; it is often contagious.

Religion has always understood this intuitively. Congregations are network structures: friendship graphs with rituals attached. Conversion is rarely solitary; it is more often a relational event. People move toward belief because a trusted person pulls them toward a group in which belief is already visible and shared. Doubt spreads similarly: not primarily through reading an argument, but through watching someone you respect begin to question the sacred story. The moment that questioning becomes visible, it becomes socially thinkable. It becomes sayable. It becomes a potential cascade.

This is one reason religious authorities, across centuries, have been so preoccupied with public dissent. Private doubt is manageable; public doubt threatens contagion.

The “New Atheist” era often tried to treat religion as though it were primarily a set of factual claims—claims that could be refuted, one by one, by geology, evolutionary biology, textual criticism, or cosmology. Those refutations matter. But they often fail to persuade for the same reason a spreadsheet rarely defeats a love affair: the object is not merely an idea; it is a social world.

If religion is partly a technology for manufacturing common knowledge—about belonging, virtue, status, and identity—then a purely evidential critique will bounce off the surface for many people. The deeper structure is social. To leave a religion is not only to change one’s beliefs; it is to risk becoming unintelligible to one’s own tribe. In the harshest cases, it is to risk exile. The mind treats that as a danger.

This also helps explain why political leaders so often perform religiosity even when their lives show little evidence of it. Performance creates common knowledge. A staged photo with a sacred symbol is not primarily addressed to God; it is addressed to the crowd. It signals, “I am one of us,” and it invites the crowd to become complicit in acting as though that were obviously true. Once that performance becomes socially established, dissenters inside the coalition pay a price for pointing out the obvious.

Therefore, the secular task is not only to critique supernatural claims. It is also to build non-supernatural forms of common knowledge that can do some of the same social work. Something like this is already happening in the modern world. People gather around causes, institutions, professions, civic rituals, scientific identities, mutual aid networks, even exercise cultures. These can be silly or beautiful, freeing or authoritarian. The point is not that secular life lacks ritual. It is that secular rituals are often fragmented, unstable, less grounded in family history and ethnic continuity, and less explicitly oriented toward moral formation. Secular life is not short of art or beauty. What it often lacks is a comparably thick set of shared rituals that bind esthetics, morality, ancestry, and public belonging all at once.

Religion persists not only because people are credulous or fearful, but because religion solves hard social problems. Pinker’s concept of common knowledge helps explain how it solves them—sometimes in ways that elevate human life, sometimes in ways that deform it. And once one sees religion as a social technology of visibility—of signals, rituals, and shared scripts—one can critique it more honestly: not as a childish mistake, but as an ingenious human invention that exacts a price.

The deeper question is whether we can build a life, and a society, in which the best human goods that religion has traditionally coordinated—community, moral aspiration, awe, mutual care—can become common knowledge without requiring that we pretend, together, that comforting fictions are facts.

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The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 27: Consciousness

There are many unanswered questions about how the universe works. Part of the wonder of science is appreciating that for every advance in understanding, there are always new horizons of the unknown to explore further.

I find that one existential frontier in understanding has to do with consciousness. Regardless of the various physical explanations about why we have conscious, subjective experience (of memory, drives, sensations, emotions, etc.) it remains truly miraculous that this occurs. It is true that consciousness exists on a continuum; it has definitely been sculpted by evolutionary forces, and is subject to a lot of variation, with diminished or gradually altered consciousness caused by sleep, fatigue, anesthesia, substances, neurological disease, etc. It is interesting to consider whether consciousness could be a property of nature itself, as opposed to a property only of a neurological system such as the brain. Some great scientists such as Roger Penrose have theorized about the mechanisms of consciousness; while I think such theorizing is interesting and worth following, I'm not sure that the result would impact my opinion of this matter too much. Even if there was a precise physical explanation, it does not lessen the miraculousness of it.

I find consciousness even more miraculous than "free will" since even if the universe was entirely deterministic or superdeterministic, there would still be human consciousness, which is something which deserves a feeling of wonder and awe. Some people would say that the phenomenon of consciousness is a manifestation of the divine -- and I guess I'd have to be ok with that, perhaps even as a foundational definition of the word "divine."

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The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 26: religiosity & narcissism

The combination of religion with narcissistic style is not hard to find, but the issue is more specific than religiosity alone. Some forms of faith are associated with humility, service, and genuine care for others. The darker pattern emerges when belief fuses with status-seeking, certainty, and group superiority. Then people insinuate—or directly assert—that their beliefs, culture, and moral footing are simply better than those of outsiders. Confidence is mistaken for virtue; self-importance masquerades as conviction; and the group may reward precisely the traits it should distrust.

Sanctimony is a related phenomenon: moral language used not primarily to understand right and wrong, but to signal superiority, enforce conformity, or punish dissent. In its mildest form it is performative piety. In harsher forms it becomes a social weapon. Psychologists now sometimes describe a similar pattern as moral grandstanding: using public moral speech partly as a way of gaining admiration, status, or dominance. The content may sound righteous, but the motive can be vanity. Ordinary people end up feeling belittled, corrected, and morally diminished, less because a truth has been clarified than because someone wants to stand above them.

A different but overlapping pattern is rigidity. Some people are deeply uncomfortable with ambiguity, exceptions, shades of gray, or the possibility that decent people may disagree in good faith. They are drawn toward fixed rules, sharp boundaries, and moral bookkeeping. In religious life this can take the form of scrupulous rule-mindedness: a chronic need to monitor, confess, correct, classify, and control. Religion does not simply create these tendencies, but it can give them language, structure, and social reward. Families and communities shaped by this mentality can become tense, cautious, and punitive—more concerned with avoiding wrongness than with cultivating goodness.

To be clear, these are not “religious” traits. They are human traits. But religion can bless them with sacred language, allowing vanity to pass as conviction and control to pass as virtue. At its best, religion tries to humble the ego and enlarge compassion. At its worst, it gives the ego a halo, and makes severity look holy.

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The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 25: Speaking in Tongues

Some religions feature unusual behaviours that are accepted as manifestations of divinity. One example is glossolalia (“speaking in tongues”). Every cultural group has rituals that symbolize transcendence or divine intervention somehow, but it is concerning in modern times that people would treat this as a literal case of God “speaking through” someone, rather than as a human psychological and social phenomenon.

So what do we actually know about glossolalia? It usually isn’t the dramatic idea some imagine—suddenly speaking a real foreign language you never learned. Instead, it’s speech-like vocalizing: it has rhythm, emotion, and a kind of “word-like” flow, but it doesn’t reliably carry stable meaning or grammar the way a normal language does. When linguists study recordings, they tend to find that it draws heavily on the sounds and speech habits the person already has in their ordinary language—almost like a voice improvisation that feels like language, without functioning as one in the usual sense. When glossolalia happens in a context where it is expected, taught, and socially supported, it looks like a learned trance or skill—comparable to hypnosis, flow, or dissociation.

One can find examples online—there are widely circulated clips of a high-profile “faith leader,” close to a major political figure, performing “tongues” in public. I think a lot of people seeing this for the first time have a mixed reaction: perhaps, with a nervous smile, followed by some discomfort, and then a sharper concern once it lands that the performer has a large following of fervent supporters, and has mainstream political influence. It is deeply ironic that a communicative tool which does not carry any semantic meaning can be so persuasive to otherwise logical observers.

From a psychiatric point of view, glossolalia can be understood as a particular kind of altered attention state that can be learned, practiced, and performed. Put someone into the right mix of conditions—music, group emotion, high expectation, authority cues, shared language about the sacred—and a person can produce vocalizations that feel deeply meaningful. The speaker may experience it as surrendering control; the group experiences it as proof that something “beyond” is present.  Others practice it quietly, in private prayer, and describe it as calm or soothing. So the phenomenon is broader than revivalist spectacle, even if spectacle is where its social force becomes most obvious.

This is where the social function matters most. Like “miracles,” and like behavioural restrictions that visibly mark membership, glossolalia can work as a signal: it makes the group feel special, chosen, and close to the divine in a way outsiders “don’t get.” That feeling is intensely bonding. It strengthens loyalty, rewards conformity, and makes doubt feel not merely intellectual but socially dangerous—almost like betrayal. The experience itself becomes the evidence, and the shared intensity becomes the glue.  

Of course, the same machinery can be used for darker purposes. A leader who is skilled at spectacle and emotional orchestration can use these displays as tools of persuasion: not by offering reasons, but by creating awe, certainty, and a sense of “we are witnessing the sacred.” The danger is not the oddness of the behaviour; it’s the way the resulting belief and allegiance can be redirected into real-world authority—sometimes including political authority, or as a tool to obtain financial donations—under a banner of divine mandate.

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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 in the wider pluralistic society.

One major function of these rules, in practice, is their signaling value. They make loyalty visible. They remind others—and, through repetition, remind oneself—of group affiliation and allegiance. When there are recognizable styles of appearance and behaviour that clearly mark membership, it becomes easier to find fellow members, easier to distinguish outsiders, and easier to notice who may be wavering. These rules do not merely symbolize belonging; they make unbelonging more conspicuous and more costly.

Of course, many members experience such rules sincerely as discipline, modesty, reverence, or protection from vanity. That is often true. But these meanings do not cancel the social function. In fact, moralizing the rule is part of what gives it strength. Once a custom is linked to purity, holiness, or obedience, noncompliance ceases to look like preference and begins to look like sin.

Over time, people can become deeply attached to these behavioural symbols. They can evoke powerful feelings associated with the religion, and can function almost like wearing a ring with special significance 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, until conscience itself begins to speak in the voice of the group.

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 starts to resemble the peacock’s tail: a costly display that signals loyalty precisely because it has a real practical price. The burden is part of the proof.

We see similar dynamics in many parts 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 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.

A related dark side of religious dogma is condemnation or discrimination against people whose lifestyles are not endorsed by the group. Often, at root, this is not uniquely religious at all. It is one ordinary human tendency—present in many non-religious settings as well—to exclude or denigrate people who are different, even when they are not harming anyone. Religion did not invent this tendency, but it can sanctify it, organize it, and give it an air of cosmic authority.

Yet there are also humane strands within religious traditions that push in the opposite direction. Alongside all the purity language and social policing, there are scriptural moments emphasizing humility, mercy, and love toward precisely those people whom the surrounding culture was most inclined to vilify. That tension is revealing. At its best, religion asks people to transcend tribalism. At its worst, it turns tribal markers into sacred obligations.

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The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 23: Eschatology

Many religions have teachings about the “last things”—what happens after death, and, in some traditions, how history itself will end. This broader subject is called eschatology. What concerns me most here is one especially vivid form of it: apocalyptic belief, the idea that history is moving toward a dramatic divine climax. In some communities there is an almost excited anticipation of the world’s ending, paired with the idea of a glorious ascent of the worthy up to heaven. Of course, those with this view usually assume they will be among the worthy.

In turn, some people cultivate a kind of passive resignation about trying to improve the world’s problems: they say these are the “end times,” so why bother. And to some degree this kind of thinking can shape how people relate to society and politics—sometimes pulling them away from the work of changing the world. A 2022 Pew survey found that 39% of U.S. adults said humanity is “living in the end times.” The same research found a modest but real relationship between end-times belief and lower concern about climate change: those who believed humanity was living in the end times were less likely than others to say climate change is an extremely or very serious problem (51% versus 62%), and among those who held the more catastrophic view that the world would deteriorate before Jesus returned, the figure fell to 40%.

I realize, of course, that eschatology does not always produce passivity; in some forms it can motivate people toward reform or activism. But when apocalyptic belief becomes an excuse for disengagement—or an indulgence in catastrophe—it becomes a bleak and cynical example of what happens when dogma is taken literally. At its darkest, it can spill into extreme behavior, as in Heaven’s Gate, a fringe apocalyptic new religious movement whose 39 members died in a mass suicide in California in March 1997. Even if the world were ending, it seems profoundly dishonourable to adopt passive resignation—or even a quiet feeling of comfort—about helpful action. It would be like watching a burning building with no attempt to help the people trapped inside, while taking solace in the thought that heaven is getting closer.

I think most of us would agree that the most noble and beautiful actions humans are capable of are helpful and altruistic: working to improve a situation even when it is bleak or seemingly hopeless. A truly noble person would not be motivated by thoughts of a glorious heavenly reward upon death; they would be motivated to do good because of the intrinsic goodness of the action itself.

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The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 22: Heaven and Hell

Many religions have concepts of Heaven and Hell: Heaven an eternal state of perfect happiness, and Hell an eternal state of punishment. Religious doctrines often advise that people live appropriately during their lifetime on earth, and after they die they will be judged and sent to one place or the other. In some doctrines, the criteria are not even that you live a good life (for example, to be kind, to not hurt others, to contribute to society, to make the world a better place, etc.) but rather whether you profess belief in a very particular way. Thus, one could be the kindest, most helpful person in human history, but still go to hell if the appropriate beliefs are not endorsed. Or one could commit the worst atrocities in history, and just be an all‑round hurtful person, yet go to heaven afterwards if the appropriate beliefs are endorsed.

This concept functions as a powerful engine of group affiliation using a combination of threat and reward. It is like a company offering permanent safety and support if you sign a lifetime membership, agree to promote the brand, and guarantee not to deal with competing companies. But the same company would also threaten to ruin you permanently if you broke the deal. There would be frightening rules in the contract, such that the act of challenging company policy would be branded with words like “heresy” or “apostasy,” discouraging anyone from questioning the status quo.

Such a system is in contradiction to the spirit of fairness, grace, and justice—the striving toward mature morality—present in religious doctrines at their best. An infinite punishment for a finite set of crimes does not make sense. And the idea of punishing someone not for a crime, but for having an idea, belief, or thought that does not conform to a prescribed norm, is contrary to most people’s concept of a healthy society, and contrary to the “bill of rights” ideals that many of us—religious or not—value highly.

Pascal's Wager

A classic argument used to prop up religious belief is Pascal’s Wager. The reasoning goes something like this: if you believe, and the religion is true, you gain Heaven and avoid Hell; if you do not believe, and the religion is true, you face infinite punishment; if the religion is false, there is little or no cost either way. Therefore belief is said to be the safest bet.

But this reasoning is invalid. First of all, one could apply the same logic to any number of mutually incompatible religions, each with its own reward-and-punishment scheme. Which one, exactly, are you supposed to choose? Many religions explicitly require that you renounce the others. One could just as easily invent a magical rabbit in orbit around the moon who grants eternal reward, or literal Santa Claus delivering salvation at Christmas, or Bertrand Russell’s celestial teapot drifting between Earth and Mars. The wager does not tell you which claim to believe. It merely exploits fear.

Second, it is a very poor moral foundation. It reduces belief to a selfish reward-or-punishment calculation: believe so that you can profit, or believe so that you can avoid pain. But this kind of motive is at odds with the lofty ethical language religions themselves like to use. If a deity valued sincerity, honesty, courage, and intellectual integrity, then strategic belief adopted out of self-interest would look shallow, selfish, and hypocritical.

Third, the claim that there is “no downside” to belief is obviously false. Much of the rest of this book is about that downside: the psychological distortions, tribal loyalties, guilt, fear, dogmatism, social coercion, and political consequences that can follow from false sacred beliefs. Belief is not cost-free. It can shape an entire life, a family, a culture, and a society.

So Pascal’s Wager is not a deep argument. It is a fear-based sales pitch dressed up as prudence.

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In the world, on average, roughly two people die every second—about 7,200 deaths per hour, and on the order of five million per month. Only a fraction of these people follow any one particular religious belief system. Therefore, if one holds a strict doctrine of Hell tied to a strict interpretation of “correct belief,” it would follow that thousands of people every hour—including many who lived gentle, kind, generous lives—would be banished into eternal punitive suffering because they did not endorse the right beliefs. Conversely, many who behaved cruelly all their lives could receive an infinite reward if they endorsed the correct beliefs at the last moment. Imagine an all-powerful divine creator, pushing about one person every second--many of them kindly elders who simply didn't happen to endorse the appropriate beliefs--into a flaming inferno.

If one truly believes this is the fate of countless people, one would be forced into a grim psychological choice: either adopt indifference to unimaginable suffering, adopt a horrific view of how reality works, or devote one’s life to converting as many people as possible so as to save them from hell. It would not make sense to devote one’s life to rescuing people on a smaller scale (being a firefighter, a physician, a therapist, a humanitarian worker), since this would distract from the colossal task of saving people from an infinitely worse fate than any earthly accident, illness, or war could impose. Proselytizing would seem to be the only fully rational altruistic activity. And if you wanted to “save the most people efficiently,” you would focus your efforts on those with shorter life expectancy, since their impending eternal suffering would arrive sooner. If one’s own friend or child strayed from the perceived correct religious involvement, it would be understandable—within this belief system—to view this as the most horrifying contingency imaginable, infinitely more devastating than losing them to illness, assault, or accident, because the imagined suffering would be permanent.

This is one reason the Heaven-and-Hell framework is so morally destabilizing. It incentivizes fear, coercion, and tribal control, while undermining the best ethical themes that religions also sometimes teach: compassion, humility, grace, and love.

There is a sentiment, often attributed to Mother Teresa (probably not her exact words) that I find ethically beautiful: if Hell truly existed, the only morally coherent response would be to abandon Heaven to comfort those suffering in the abyss. To enjoy eternal bliss while remaining fully aware that others are enduring eternal conscious torment requires a catastrophic suspension of empathy. The impulse to forsake one's own salvation to sit with the damned represents a true transcendence of character. It highlights a profound theological irony: the highest conceivable expression of morality—unconditional, self-sacrificial compassion—demands a fundamental rejection of the traditional boundaries of divine justice. We should all strive toward such transcendence of character, prioritizing radical empathy.

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