Chapter 29: The Psychology of Cults

Few words in religion are as morally loaded as the word "cult."

By "cult," I do not mean merely a new, small, emotionally intense, or theologically unusual religion. A destructive cult is better understood as a high-control group in which a leader, ideology, or inner circle pressures members to subordinate conscience, evidence, relationships, money, sexuality, bodily autonomy, and ordinary freedom to the demands of the group. The key question is not whether the beliefs are odd. The key question is what happens when a member doubts, disobeys, asks questions, seeks outside help, or tries to leave.

Some groups have mild cult-like features: excessive admiration of a leader, hostility to critics, ritualized confession, pressure to donate, suspicion of outsiders. Other groups are more intense: members are isolated from family, discouraged from outside education, pressured into sexual access to leaders, or threatened with damnation or violence if they leave.

Almost every intense human group has some version of the ingredients. A fraternity, political movement, therapy community, or religious congregation may require sacrifice, discipline, shared language, and strong group identity. A demanding group can be healthy if participation is voluntary, criticism is allowed, members can leave freely, finances are transparent, and outsiders are not treated as enemies.

Examples of Cults

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. Waco is a more complicated example than Jonestown or Heaven's Gate, because the catastrophe involved both internal apocalyptic/high-control dynamics and disastrous confrontation with state authorities.

But most high-control groups do not end in mass death or 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.

Some mainstream groups used to be considered cults. 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 remain controversial, but many are now accepted as ordinary community groups.


How Common Are Cults?

The public tends to notice the rare examples of catastrophic endings, but cult-like behaviour exists in quieter forms all around us. There are small churches in which members are shunned for dissent. Some self-help groups pressure vulnerable people to pay for endless levels of training. Political movements in which the leader cannot be criticized, and facts are treated as enemy propaganda, can be cult-like. A family system can even become cult-like when one controlling parent defines reality for everyone else, punishes dissent and restricts contact with outsiders.

Historically, cult-like movements often flourish during periods of dislocation: war, migration, economic distress, family breakdown. People seek certainty when the world becomes confusing.

Specific prevalence is hard to pin down. The few relevant surveys are decades old and rely on self-report—problematic, since a current member is precisely the person least likely to call the group a cult. Such surveys have found that between one and three percent of people say they have belonged to a cultic group at some point, while as many as a fifth of adults report some brush with a new or para-religious movement, though the great majority of those involvements are fleeting. Those are lifetime figures; the number belonging at any single moment is much smaller— on the order of one in a few hundred. This is still a lot of people: in a typical large city we would be talking about thousands of members at any given time.


Why Do People Join Cults?

In an earlier chapter I attributed 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 due to simple situational factors. 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, 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, or heal from trauma 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, and social standing. 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 phenomenon all around us today is the media echo chamber. This is not a cult by itself, but it rehearses one piece of cultic machinery: the reduction of competing sources of reality. When people are exposed mainly to one interpretive system, and are taught that rival sources are corrupt, foolish, or evil, the group's worldview becomes harder to test.

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 signalling. 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. Various terms cults have used to describe outsiders include "suppressive," "unenlightened," "apostate," "impure," "worldly," "asleep," or "fallen nature." 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. Of course, this is not unique to cults. Every close community has private terminology that quietly shapes the thinking of its members: but cults intensify this process as an agent of strict control.

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-counselling 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 emphasises 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 too aggressively, 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.

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. https://doi.org/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.

 

Bird, F., & Reimer, B. (1982). Participation rates in new religious and para-religious movements. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 21(1), 1–14. (Available via JSTOR.)

This survey of adults in San Francisco and Montreal is one of the few attempts to gauge how widely people brush against new or para-religious movements. The authors found that roughly a fifth of adults reported some involvement, but that the great majority of those involvements were transient, with only a small fraction entering groups that would commonly be called cults. Its value here is as an empirical anchor for the otherwise slippery question of prevalence, and as a reminder that lifetime contact and durable membership are very different quantities.

 

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 operationalise psychological abuse in cultic or high-control groups. 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. https://doi.org/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.

 

Dawson, L. L. (1999). When prophecy fails and faith persists: A theoretical overview. Nova Religio, 3(1), 60–82. https://gwern.net/doc/sociology/1999-dawson.pdf

Dawson reviews the accumulated case evidence on groups whose predictions failed. Responses to failed prophecy are varied and contingent: some groups spiritualize the failure, some reset the date, some quietly dissolve, and heightened evangelism proves the exception rather than the rule. 

 

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. https://doi.org/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. https://doi.org/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. https://doi.org/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. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.614657

This article is not about cults narrowly, but it reviews why people enter and internalize commitment to violent groups. 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.

 

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. https://doi.org/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.

 

Iannaccone, L. R. (1992). Sacrifice and stigma: Reducing free-riding in cults, communes, and other collectives. Journal of Political Economy, 100(2), 271–291. https://doi.org/10.1086/261818

His argument is that apparently pointless prohibitions and sacrifices are not irrational: by imposing costs, a group screens out the half-hearted and raises the commitment of those who remain, solving the free-rider problem that erodes weak collectives. Costly demands can strengthen high-control groups, without any appeal to pathology, deception, or brainwashing.

 

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 counselling 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.

 

Langone, M. D. (1986). Cultism and American culture. Cultic Studies Journal, 3(2). https://articles1.icsahome.com/articles/cultism-and-american-culture-langone-csj-3-2-1986

Langone gathers the scattered survey evidence on how many people have had cultic involvements and situates it within a broader cultural argument. It is cited here chiefly as an accessible synthesis of the prevalence figures—the one-to-three-percent self-report range among students and the higher, mostly transient participation among adults—with the frank caveat that these are dated, regional, self-report instruments rather than definitive measurements.

 

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. https://doi.org/10.2307/2090965

This classic article is one of the foundational sociological accounts of conversion to a deviant religious perspective. Lofland and Stark emphasised 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.

 

Phelps-Roper, M. (2019). Unfollow: A memoir of loving and leaving the Westboro Baptist Church. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Phelps-Roper's memoir of leaving the Westboro Baptist Church is cited here for its central practical insight: it was not a decisive argument but sustained, dignified contact with outsiders—people who disagreed with her profoundly yet treated her kindly—that opened the space in which doubt could grow. It illustrates the relational, rather than purely evidential, route out of a high-control group.

 

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. https://doi.org/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. https://doi.org/10.2307/3511972

Richardson shows how the term "cult" 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. https://doi.org/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 organisations. 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. https://doi.org/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. https://doi.org/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. https://doi.org/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, routinised 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.

 

Zablocki, B., & Robbins, T. (Eds.). (2001). Misunderstanding cults: Searching for objectivity in a controversial field. University of Toronto Press.

This edited volume is the most balanced single treatment of the "brainwashing" controversy precisely because it declines to resolve it, pairing scholars sympathetic to coercion models with sceptics who regard the concept as scientifically empty. It maps the terrain between the anti-cult movement's clinical claims and the sociology of religion's insistence on member agency. It is cited here as the reference demonstrating that the chapter's process-based, non-sensational account was reached with the opposing case fully in view.

 

Zimbardo, P. G., & Hartley, C. F. (1985). Cults go to high school: A theoretical and empirical analysis of the initial stage in the recruitment process. Cultic Studies Journal, 2(1), 91–147.

Zimbardo and Hartley surveyed a random sample of a thousand high-school students and found that three percent reported belonging to a cultic group, while more than half reported at least one contact with a recruiter. The study is dated, regionally narrow, and dependent on adolescents' willingness to label their own group a cult, but it remains one of the few pieces of primary survey evidence on prevalence and recruitment exposure. It anchors the estimate that current membership, though genuinely hard to measure, is far from negligible.

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, 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.

None of this is a new observation. More than half a century ago the sociologist Robert Bellah gave the pattern a name—civil religion—and catalogued its saints, its martyrs, its holy days, and its sacred symbols. But this civil religion comes with a cost.

Nationalism 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, neighbourhoods, 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.” Evolutionary theorists have a name for this pairing, too: parochial altruism. There is a real possibility that its two halves—generosity turned inward, wariness turned outward—evolved together, each making the other viable in a world of competing groups. If so, the kindness and the suspicion are not separate faculties we might hope to prise apart, but two sides of the same coin.

At its best, patriotism is gratitude and stewardship. It is care for one’s home, loyalty to neighbours, 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.

Orwell drew the line at exactly this point: patriotism, as he defined it, is “devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life” with no wish to force it on others—defensive by nature—while nationalism is “inseparable from the desire for power.” The distinction is worth keeping, because it lets us honour the first while staying wary of the second.

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 still live in sub-Saharan Africa. As we have discussed earlier, humans originating in Africa migrated across the world over tens of thousands of years. However you draw the boundaries, only a small fraction of families still live where their ancestors were the first human settlers. There is a particular irony in societies built almost entirely by waves of immigration, that later turn a cold face to newcomers.

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.

There is an uncomfortable implication here for the argument of this book. If the real goods of religion—belonging, ritual, meaning, the sense of being carried by something larger than oneself—flow through nonspecific channels rather than through any particular doctrine, then nationalism is simply another vessel carrying the same goods. That is partly why it moves people so deeply, and why it cannot be dissolved by argument alone, any more than faith could be. You cannot reason someone out of a need you have not offered to meet some other way.

Once the nation is felt to be sacred, military power begins to acquire a special moral glow. Global military spending now runs to roughly $2.7 trillion a year, and it is still rising. Broader estimates of the economic impact of violence run to something closer to $20 trillion annually. Even allowing for debate about definitions and methodology, the scale is staggering. By way of contrast, the world spends on peacekeeping and peacebuilding well under one per cent of what it spends on its armies. The military figure is also vastly greater than most published estimates of what would be required each year to eliminate all of the world’s 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 organised defence 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. In an open letter to the United Nations in 1947 he argued that the scale of modern destructive power had made absolute national sovereignty 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, neighbourhoods, architecture, and cultural beauty. At worst, they give us fear, exclusion, and repeated conflict.

References

Anderson, B. (2006). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (Rev. ed.). Verso. (Original work published 1983)

— Anderson’s influential thesis is that a nation is an “imagined community”: its members will never meet most of their compatriots, yet each carries an image of their communion. The account is largely cultural and historical rather than psychological, locating the rise of nationalism in print capitalism and the vernacular press. It is cited here for the point that we are able to feel kinship—and grief—for millions of strangers we will never see.

Bellah, R. N. (1967). Civil religion in America. Daedalus, 96(1), 1–21. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20027022

— The founding statement of the idea that a modern nation possesses, alongside its churches, an “elaborate and well-institutionalised” civil religion, complete with its own saints (Washington), martyrs (Lincoln), sacred texts, holy days, and symbols. Bellah drew on Rousseau, who coined the phrase religion civile, and on Durkheim. The essay is the direct conceptual parent of this chapter, and the reason the pattern it describes deserves to be named rather than merely noticed.

Choi, J.-K., & Bowles, S. (2007). The coevolution of parochial altruism and war. Science, 318(5850), 636–640. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1144237

— Using game theory and agent-based simulation, the authors show that altruism toward one’s own group and hostility toward outsiders—“parochial altruism”—could have evolved together under conditions plausible for late-Pleistocene humans, each trait making the other viable in intergroup conflict; neither, they argue, would likely have evolved alone. The result is a formal model, not a proven history, and it remains debated. Warmth binding an ingroup is the same force that hardens its borders.

Durkheim, É. (1995). The elementary forms of religious life (K. E. Fields, Trans.). Free Press. (Original work published 1912)

— The seminal argument that religion is fundamentally social: through collective ritual a group generates “collective effervescence,” experiences its own unity as something sacred. 

Einstein, A. (1947, October). Open letter to the General Assembly of the United Nations.

— Written in frustration at the deadlock over international control of atomic energy, Einstein argued that “security is indivisible” and that lasting peace required “a modification of the traditional concept of national sovereignty”—a supranational authority with real legislative and executive power. He returned to the theme repeatedly until his death. The letter is reprinted in O. Nathan and H. Norden’s Einstein on Peace (1960) and is widely available online; the U.S. National Archives holds related correspondence (Identifier 7873451). It is the source for the chapter’s account of his turn toward world government.

Institute for Economics and Peace. (2025). Global Peace Index 2025: Measuring peace in a complex world. https://www.economicsandpeace.org

— The source of the chapter’s figure for the global economic impact of violence: US$19.97 trillion in 2024 and an estimated US$21.8 trillion in 2025, expressed in purchasing-power-parity terms. The estimate is a broad model that folds in the cost of homicide, incarceration, private security, and lost productivity as well as war, and it has been criticised for not measuring direct human injury; it should be read as an order-of-magnitude indicator, not a precise ledger. The same reports supply the striking contrast that global spending on peacebuilding and peacekeeping is well under one per cent of military spending.

Orwell, G. (1945). Notes on nationalism. Polemic, 1.

— Orwell separates patriotism—“devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life,” defensive and content to leave others alone—from nationalism, which he takes to be “inseparable from the desire for power” and marked by obsession, self-deception, and indifference to atrocity when committed by one’s own side. The essay is freely available via the Orwell Foundation (orwellfoundation.com).

Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. (2025). Trends in world military expenditure, 2024 (SIPRI Fact Sheet). https://www.sipri.org

— The authoritative annual measure of military spending. World military expenditure reached US$2.718 trillion in 2024—a tenth consecutive annual rise and the steepest since the end of the Cold War—of which the United States accounted for roughly a third. On present commitments SIPRI and the United Nations project the figure could climb toward US$4–6 trillion by 2035. These are the numbers behind the chapter’s point about the moral glow that attaches to armed force.

United Nations. (1948). Universal Declaration of Human Rights. https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights

— Article 1 reads, “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” The universalist phrasing was hard-won: Hansa Mehta of India is credited with changing an earlier draft’s “All men” to “All human beings.” The Declaration elaborates the United Nations Charter’s pledge (Articles 1 and 55) to promote “human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction.” 

United Nations. (2025). The Sustainable Development Goals report 2025. United Nations.

— Cited for the comparison between military spending and the cost of ending poverty. Estimates vary by an order of magnitude with the target chosen: closing the extreme-poverty gap at the US$2.15-a-day line has been costed at tens to a few hundred billion dollars a year (for example, by UNU-WIDER and by researchers at Berkeley’s Center for Effective Global Action), while guaranteeing full social-protection floors is put by this report at roughly US$1.4 trillion a year. Every one of these figures is smaller than a single year of world military spending, which is the only point the chapter needs.

Next Chapter

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

Picture a crowded church at the moment the congregation rises to its feet. Each person hears the same words and sees the same gestures. Each person sees everyone else hearing them too. This is more than shared belief. It is belief made public, or what game theorists call common knowledge: not merely that everyone knows something, but that everyone knows that everyone knows it, and so on without end. A five-dollar bill has value only because I expect you to value it, you expect me to value it, and each of us assumes that strangers will value it as well; without that shared expectation it is just a piece of coloured paper. This is largely what ceremonies are for. A public rite works not only by sending a message from the altar to each person, but by letting each person see that everyone else received it at the same moment.

Religion is among the most powerful engines of common knowledge. A private belief is real but socially weak, because no one can see it; what ritual does, through spoken prayer, shared song, and the visible badges of membership, is turn “I believe” into “we can all see that we believe.” This matters because we are sensitive to being the odd one out, and the worst position of all is uncertainty—not knowing whether others believe, or whether others have noticed our own hesitation. Ritual removes the doubt. It is like signing a contract under a spotlight, with the whole room watching. And, as I argued earlier, the more costly and awkward the display, the harder it is to fake.

But the same logic explains the silences of social life as much as its ceremonies, because people do not always want a thing made common knowledge. A family may know perfectly well that one of its members is drinking himself to ruin, yet the talk glides around it for years, because once the words are said the knowledge becomes a fact everyone must act on. A congregation may be quietly full of doubt about a doctrine while each member, assuming the others are more convinced, says nothing—and the silence keeps up an appearance of unanimity that no one actually feels. A community often survives not by answering every question, but by managing which questions may be asked out loud.

The moment a doubt is spoken plainly, it stops being a private flicker and becomes a public event that demands a response. This is the whole force of The Emperor’s New Clothes: the child discovers nothing; he simply says aloud what everyone can already see, and so turns private knowledge into the far more dangerous public kind. This fairy tale reminds me of present-day partisan movements, in which many people surely harbour private misgivings about their own side’s conduct or its leaders, yet will not say so, because to speak would be to risk exile from the only community they have. But all partisan movements value heroism—for me, one essential component of heroism is the willingness to speak your private knowledge of the truth to a group that might, at least at first, reject you for it.

These effects travel along the lines of our friendships. Nicholas Christakis has shown that behaviour and mood spread through social networks—friend to friend to friend, out to about three degrees of separation—so that we are shaped by people we will never meet. A church congregation, seen this way, is a web of friendships with rituals attached. Few people are reasoned into faith; far more often a trusted friend draws them toward a group where belief is already on display. Doubt moves the same way in reverse—not usually through an argument, but through watching someone you respect begin to question the story. This is why religious authorities have always feared open dissent far more than private unbelief: the private doubter is containable, the visible one is contagious.

It is also why the “New Atheist” writers, such as Richard Dawkins, who treated religion as a set of false claims to be knocked down one by one, so often failed to move people: the thing they were attacking was not just an idea but a social world. To leave a faith is not merely to change your mind about the age of the earth; it is to risk becoming a stranger to your own people, and in the harshest communities to be cast out. The mind treats that as a real danger. It is also why some politicians perform piety their private lives do not support: the photograph with the holy book is aimed not at God but at the crowd. Common knowledge can make kindness visible, and it can do the same for contempt—a shared scorn for outsiders is far more dangerous than a private grudge, because cruelty comes easiest when made public, repeated together, and rewarded.

The secular approach to challenging religion cannot only be to refute supernatural claims. It is also to build other, non-religious ways of making our shared virtues visible to one another. Religion carries a rich fabric of shared ritual, one that can hold beauty, morality, memory, and belonging together at once. This is where secular life falls short.

References

Christakis, N. A., & Fowler, J. H. (2009). Connected: The surprising power of our social networks and how they shape our lives. Little, Brown.

— A synthesis of the authors’ research on social contagion, proposing the “three degrees of influence” rule: that behaviours, moods, and states—obesity, smoking, happiness, cooperation—spread through networks of friends to roughly three degrees of separation. How far this reflects genuine transmission rather than the clustering of similar people is still debated, but the broad claim that conduct is socially contagious is well supported.

 

Chwe, M. S.-Y. (2001). Rational ritual: Culture, coordination, and common knowledge. Princeton University Press.

— The foundational application of the game-theoretic idea of common knowledge to ceremony and ritual. Chwe argues that public rites—coronations, holidays, communal worship, even Super Bowl advertising—work not merely by conveying a message to each onlooker but by letting each onlooker see that all the others receive it at the same moment. 

 

Pinker, S. (2025). When everyone knows that everyone knows…: Common knowledge and the mysteries of money, power, and everyday life. Scribner.

— Pinker’s recent, book-length account of common knowledge: the difference between privately knowing something and everyone publicly, mutually acknowledging it. He shows how it underlies coordination (driving conventions, paper currency, rallying behind a leader), how we generate it through signals such as laughter, tears, and blunt speech, and how we often labour to avoid it through hypocrisy, innuendo, and declining to name the elephant in the room. 

 

Pinker, S., Nowak, M. A., & Lee, J. J. (2008). The logic of indirect speech. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(3), 833–838. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0707192105

— The peer-reviewed research behind that book’s account of indirect speech: a game-theoretic analysis of why people so often communicate through innuendo, euphemism, and the veiled request, arguing that indirection preserves “plausible deniability” and keeps mutually suspected facts from hardening into common knowledge. 

A note on sources (handled as references rather than formal citations): the concept of common knowledge was given its modern philosophical form by David Lewis in Convention (1969) and analysed in game theory by Thomas Schelling and Robert Aumann; The Emperor’s New Clothes is Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of 1837.

Next Chapter

The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 27: Consciousness

There are many unanswered questions about how the universe works, and part of the wonder of science is the recognition that for every advance in understanding there are always new horizons of the unknown to explore. One existential frontier, for me, has to do with consciousness. Whatever the eventual physical account of why we have conscious, subjective experience—of memory, drives, sensations, emotions—it remains to me genuinely miraculous that such experience occurs at all.

Philosophers have a name for the puzzle: the “hard problem” of consciousness, a term coined by David Chalmers to mark the gap between the “easy” problems, which concern how the brain performs its various functions, and the genuinely hard one, which is why all that functioning should be accompanied by an inner life at all—why the lights are on inside rather than the processing simply going on in the dark.

Consciousness exists on a continuum. It has plainly been sculpted by evolutionary forces, and it is subject to enormous variation: it is diminished or gradually altered by sleep, fatigue, anaesthesia, intoxicants, and neurological disease. None of that  dissolves the mystery; it only maps its edges.

It is worth considering whether consciousness might be a property of nature itself, rather than only of a nervous system such as the brain. This is the view philosophers call panpsychism—that experience, in some rudimentary form, is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world, out of which the rich consciousness of brains is composed. Religious traditions have their own versions of this intuition—the ancient “world-soul,” the Hindu Brahman, or, less precisely, the Christian Holy Spirit—though each points to something that wills and acts, where panpsychism claims only that experience pervades the world. But it is a minority position, and it faces hard objections. A cousin of the idea has entered neuroscience, in Giulio Tononi’s “integrated information theory,” which treats consciousness as a graded quantity present, in principle, wherever information is integrated.

Some scientists have gone further and proposed specific mechanisms. The great physicist Roger Penrose—working with the anaesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff—has argued that consciousness arises from quantum processes in the microtubules of neurons, in a theory they call orchestrated objective reduction. I find such theorizing genuinely interesting and worth following, but it is definitely a minority view. In any case, I am not sure the result would change my view of the matter. Even a precise and complete physical explanation would not lessen the miracle.

I find consciousness more miraculous than free will. Whether we possess genuine free will is contested, and may yet turn out to be an illusion; but the fact of having experience at all is the one thing that cannot be doubted—it is the rock Descartes was left standing on when everything else had been doubted away. So even if the universe were entirely deterministic—or superdeterministic, the more radical thesis, associated with the physicist Gerard ’t Hooft, that even our choices of what to measure are fixed in advance—there would still be human consciousness, and it would still deserve a feeling of wonder and awe.

Some would say that the phenomenon of consciousness is a manifestation of the divine. I can be at peace with that—perhaps even taking it as a definition of the word “divine.” It is close to what Spinoza meant by Deus sive Natura, “God, or Nature.” When Einstein was asked whether he believed in God, he answered that he believed in the God of Spinoza—the lawful harmony of what exists, rather than a deity who concerns himself with human affairs. If consciousness is what one chooses to call divine, then the divine is not a being standing above nature, but the astonishing fact that nature has come, in us, to experience itself.




References

 

Chalmers, D. J. (1995). Facing up to the problem of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2(3), 200–219. http://consc.net/papers/facing.html

— The paper that named the “hard problem” of consciousness, distinguishing the “easy” problems—how the brain discriminates, integrates information, and controls behaviour, all amenable to mechanistic explanation—from the hard one: why such processing is accompanied by subjective experience at all. Chalmers argues that no functional account closes this gap. 

 

Goff, P. (2019). Galileo’s error: Foundations for a new science of consciousness. Pantheon Books.

— The leading contemporary defence of panpsychism for a general readership. Goff argues that physical science achieved its power precisely by bracketing consciousness out of its picture of matter—Galileo’s “error”—and that treating experience as a fundamental property of the physical world is the most parsimonious response to the hard problem.

 

Koch, C. (2019). The feeling of life itself: Why consciousness is widespread but can’t be computed. MIT Press.

— An accessible presentation of integrated information theory by one of its foremost proponents, defending the view that consciousness is a graded, intrinsic property of any system whose information is sufficiently integrated—a scientifically framed cousin of panpsychism, with the striking implication that consciousness is far more widespread in nature than we assume.

 

Penrose, R. (1994). Shadows of the mind: A search for the missing science of consciousness. Oxford University Press.

— Penrose’s argument, drawing on Gödel’s theorem, that human mathematical understanding is non-computable and that consciousness must therefore involve physics beyond present theory; later developed, with the anaesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, into the orchestrated objective reduction (Orch-OR) model, which locates the relevant quantum processes in neuronal microtubules. Ingenious, but a minority view, widely criticised on the ground that the brain is too warm and noisy to sustain the coherence it requires.

 

A note on primary and historical sources (handled as references rather than formal citations): the claim that one’s own consciousness is the single thing immune to doubt is from René Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy (1641); the identification of God with nature—Deus sive Natura—runs through Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics (1677); and Einstein’s profession of belief in the God of Spinoza, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of nature rather than in the fates of human beings, was made in a 1929 reply to a New York rabbi.

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The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 26: religiosity & narcissism

The combination of religion with a narcissistic style is not hard to find. Yet, some forms of faith are bound up with humility, service, and genuine care for others. The darker pattern emerges when belief fuses with status-seeking, certainty, and a sense of group superiority. Then people insinuate—or simply assert—that their beliefs, their culture, and their moral footing are better than those of outsiders. Confidence is mistaken for virtue; self-importance masquerades as conviction; and the group may come to reward precisely the traits it ought to distrust. Psychology has a name for the particular shape this can take. We tend to picture the narcissist boasting of brains or power, but researchers describe a second variety—the communal narcissist—who pursues the very same cravings for grandiosity, esteem, and entitlement through the communal and moral domain instead: not “I am the most brilliant person” but “I am the most caring, the most trustworthy, the most righteous.” Religion, with its rich vocabulary of virtue, offers such a person an almost ideal stage.

Sanctimony is the close cousin of this: moral language used not primarily to discern right from wrong, but to signal superiority, enforce conformity, or punish dissent. In its mildest form it is mere performative piety; in harsher forms it becomes a social weapon. Here, too, there is a body of research. Philosophers and psychologists have lately analyzed a pattern they call moral grandstanding—the use of public moral talk to win admiration, status, or dominance. Its defining feature is instructive: grandstanding is identified not by the content of what is said, which may be entirely admirable, but by the motive behind it, which is the wish to be seen as moral. The words can be righteous while the engine is vanity. And the listener feels the difference—ordinary people come away feeling belittled, corrected, and morally diminished, less because a truth has been clarified than because someone wished to stand above them. It is worth noting that this research grew up largely around secular and political discourse—the call-out, the social-media pile-on—a useful reminder that none of this is the property of the religious.

A different but overlapping pattern is rigidity. Some people are deeply uncomfortable with ambiguity, with exceptions, with shades of grey, or with the possibility that decent people might disagree in good faith. They are drawn to fixed rules, sharp boundaries, and a kind of moral bookkeeping. Psychologists call this disposition a high need for cognitive closure—a craving for firm answers and an aversion to the unsettled—and it travels closely with dogmatism and with the authoritarian temperament discussed in earlier chapters. In religious life it can harden into scrupulous rule-mindedness: a chronic compulsion to monitor, confess, correct, classify, and control. In its clinical extreme this is a recognised condition, religious scrupulosity, a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder in which the sufferer is tormented by the fear of sin. The relationship is telling, and it holds for the whole of this chapter: religiosity does not, by itself, manufacture these tendencies—a person does not become obsessive because they are devout—but where the disposition already exists, religion can give it language, structure, and social reward, supplying the very content on which the anxious mind then fixes. Families and communities shaped by this mentality can grow tense, cautious, and punitive—more anxious to avoid wrongness than to cultivate goodness.

To be clear, then, none of these are "religious" traits. They are human traits—communal narcissism, grandstanding, the need for closure—all of them found in the ordinary, largely secular population, surfacing wherever there is status to be won or certainty to be craved. But religion can bless them with sacred language, allowing vanity to pass for conviction and control to pass for virtue. The irony is that the religious traditions condemn this temptation most fiercely from within. It was the conspicuously pious for whom the Gospels reserved their sharpest words—the Pharisee who prays, "God, I thank you that I am not like other men," and goes home less justified than the sinner beside him who could not lift his eyes. And the rabbis were no gentler with their own: the Talmud, too, mocks the Pharisee who wears his good deeds for show, sparing only the one who serves out of love of God. (The caricature of the Pharisees is, in fairness, unjust to what was a serious movement of piety and the root of rabbinic Judaism—the failing was never uniquely theirs.)

At its best, religion labours to humble the ego and enlarge compassion. At its worst, it hands the ego a halo, and makes severity look holy.

 

References

Gebauer, J. E., Sedikides, C., Verplanken, B., & Maio, G. R. (2012). Communal narcissism. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103(5), 854–878. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0029629

— Introduces the “agency–communion” model of narcissism, distinguishing the familiar agentic narcissist (“I am the most intelligent”) from the communal narcissist, who pursues the same grandiosity, entitlement, and craving for esteem through the moral and communal domain (“I am the most helpful,” “the most trustworthy”). The precise mechanism by which vanity can wear the costume of virtue.

 

Grubbs, J. B., Warmke, B., Tosi, J., James, A. S., & Campbell, W. K. (2019). Moral grandstanding in public discourse: Status-seeking motives as a potential explanatory mechanism in predicting conflict. PLOS ONE, 14(10), e0223749. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0223749

— A six-study empirical investigation of moral grandstanding (a concept introduced by the philosophers Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke), finding that the disposition to use moral talk for status is associated with narcissism and predicts heightened conflict. The studies were conducted largely on secular political discourse, underscoring that the pattern is general rather than peculiarly religious.

 

Miller, C. H., & Hedges, D. W. (2008). Scrupulosity disorder: An overview and introductory analysis. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 22(6), 1042–1058. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.janxdis.2007.11.004

— A comprehensive review of scrupulosity—a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder marked by pathological guilt and obsessive doubt about sin, with compulsions of repetitive prayer, confession, and reassurance-seeking. Religiosity does not cause the disorder, but in a devout sufferer it supplies its content—an illustration of religion shaping a pre-existing disposition rather than creating it.

 

Tosi, J., & Warmke, B. (2016). Moral grandstanding. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 44(3), 197–217.

— The philosophical paper that introduced the term “moral grandstanding”—the use of public moral discourse for self-promotion. Its central claim is that grandstanding is defined by motive, not content: the same righteous words may or may not be grandstanding, depending on whether they aim at moral truth or at the speaker’s own status.

 

Webster, D. M., & Kruglanski, A. W. (1994). Individual differences in need for cognitive closure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67(6), 1049–1062. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.67.6.1049

— The paper introducing the Need for Closure Scale, which measures the dispositional craving for certainty and discomfort with ambiguity—expressed as a preference for order and predictability, decisiveness, and closed-mindedness. The construct is closely related to dogmatism and to the authoritarian personality, and predicts black-and-white thinking and intolerance of dissent.

 

A note on scriptural references (handled as primary sources rather than formal citations): the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, in which the ostentatiously righteous man is the one who goes home unjustified, is Luke 18:9–14; the wider Gospel critique of performing piety “to be seen by others” runs through Matthew 6:1–6 and Matthew 23.

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