The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 31: 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 practised 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 extremes 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 ultimately 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 by 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 I am equally uneasy 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 some cases religious beliefs can even 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. Indeed, 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, compassion, truthfulness, fairness, family, 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. 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, kindness, charity, humility, meditative self-care, sincere amends-making, caring for and accepting care from community members, the enjoyment of beautiful music and art, and the cultivation of 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

Frank, J. D., & Frank, J. B. (1991). Persuasion and healing: A comparative study of psychotherapy (3rd ed.). Johns Hopkins University Press.

The goods of religion travel through a shared frame rather than through any particular doctrine. Frank and Frank argue that psychotherapy, religious and shamanic healing, and other sanctioned forms of help share one structure—a confiding relationship, a healing setting, an explanatory rationale, and a believed-in ritual—and that this common structure, not the specific theory, carries much of the effect. But no secular institution yet gathers all of these elements in one place.

Lim, C., & Putnam, R. D. (2010). Religion, social networks, and life satisfaction. American Sociological Review, 75(6), 914–933. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122410386686

Panel evidence that the well-being benefits of religion flow chiefly through congregational friendship and shared identity rather than through private belief; frequent attenders with no friends in the congregation were no better off. 

Norris, P., & Inglehart, R. (2004). Sacred and secular: Religion and politics worldwide. Cambridge University Press.

The “existential security” thesis: populations facing hardship tend to be more religious, while security and prosperity drive secularization. The most secular societies function at least as well as the most devout, while cautioning that the causal arrow may run from security to secularity rather than the reverse.

Paul, G. S. (2005). Cross-national correlations of quantifiable societal health with popular religiosity and secularism in the prosperous democracies: A first look. Journal of Religion & Society, 7 (open access).

A cross-national comparison finding that the more secular prosperous democracies tend to show lower rates of societal dysfunction than the more religious ones. As the author's own subtitle concedes, it is “a first look”—ecological, correlational, and sharply criticised (notably by Rodney Stark) for the ecological fallacy and for selective measures—so it cannot establish causation. But it emphasizes the fact that there is no measurable “supernatural dividend” which appears where belief is most fervent.

Wampold, B. E., & Imel, Z. E. (2015). The great psychotherapy debate: The evidence for what makes psychotherapy work (2nd ed.). Routledge.

The major contemporary defence of the contextual (common-factors) model of psychotherapy: relationship and expectancy account for a substantial share of outcome relative to specific technique. It is the empirical backbone of the nonspecific-factors argument this book builds on, religion's benefits are real yet independent of doctrine. 

← Chapter 30 | Contents | 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.

← Chapter 27 | Contents | Chapter 29 →

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.

← Chapter 26 | Contents | Chapter 28 →

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.

← Chapter 25 | Contents | Chapter 27 →

The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 25: Speaking in Tongues

Some religions feature unusual behaviours that are accepted as manifestations of divinity. One striking example is glossolalia—“speaking in tongues.” Every culture has rituals that gesture at transcendence or divine intervention in some form, and there is nothing remarkable in that. What is more concerning, in modern times, is the readiness to treat this particular behaviour as a literal case of God “speaking through” a person, rather than as the human psychological and social phenomenon it appears, on examination, to be.

So what do we actually know about glossolalia? It usually is not the dramatic thing some imagine—suddenly speaking a real foreign language one never learned. (That claim, properly called xenoglossy, is a different matter, and does not survive scrutiny.) What tongues-speakers produce is speech-like vocalizing: it has rhythm, emotion, and a kind of word-like flow, but it does not reliably carry stable meaning or grammar the way an ordinary language does. The foundational linguistic study, by William Samarin, examined the phenomenon closely and concluded that it is a “meaningless but phonologically structured human utterance”—patterned sound without lexicon or syntax. Tellingly, it draws heavily on the sounds and speech habits the speaker already possesses in their native tongue, favouring simple syllables and a narrow range of sounds: a voice improvisation that feels like language without functioning as one. Nor is it a supernatural gift; psychologists have shown that naive volunteers, given a little exposure and encouragement, can produce passable glossolalia on demand, and where it is expected, taught, and socially supported, it behaves like a learned skill. One point deserves emphasis, because a clinical description can be mistaken for a diagnosis: glossolalia is not a symptom of mental illness. The research is consistent on this—its practitioners are psychologically unremarkable, and Samarin was at pains to stress that the behaviour is normal, not pathological, and not reducible to trance. It is an ordinary human capacity, not a disorder.

From a psychological point of view, glossolalia is best understood as a learned vocal practice that can, under the right conditions, shade into an altered state of attention. Assemble the ingredients—music, group emotion, high expectation, authority cues, a shared vocabulary of the sacred—and a person can generate vocalizations that feel profoundly meaningful, and may experience the act as a surrender of control. That subjective sense has a measurable correlate: in a small but striking neuroimaging study, Andrew Newberg and colleagues found that, compared with devotional singing, speaking in tongues was accompanied by decreased activity in the frontal lobes—the seat of deliberate, intentional control—just what one might expect of a state the speaker describes as no longer steering. (The same study found no loss of the sense of self, so this is not the ego-dissolution reported in deep meditation.) But the experience is not uniform. Many practice it quietly, in private prayer, and describe it as calm or soothing rather than ecstatic. The phenomenon is therefore broader than revivalist spectacle—though spectacle is where its social force becomes most visible.

That force is easy enough to observe. Among the most widely circulated clips online are public performances of “tongues” by a prominent faith leader with close ties to a major political figure. A viewer encountering such a scene for the first time often passes through a small sequence of reactions—curiosity, unease, and then a sharper concern on realizing that the performer commands a large and fervent following and a measure of genuine political influence. There is a real puzzle here, and it is worth stating without condescension, since the people moved by such displays are no less intelligent than anyone else: how does a vocalization carrying no semantic content whatsoever come to be so persuasive? The answer, I think, is that it was never working as an argument in the first place.

This is where the social function matters most. Like the miracles discussed in an earlier chapter, and like the costly behavioural markers of the previous one, glossolalia can operate as a signal: it makes the group feel special, chosen, close to the divine in a way that 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 a betrayal. The experience itself becomes the evidence, and the shared intensity becomes the glue. This is also why argument has so little effect on it: one cannot refute a feeling, and the feeling is the point.

This can be turned to darker ends. A leader skilled in spectacle and emotional orchestration can deploy these displays as instruments of persuasion—not by offering reasons but by manufacturing awe, certainty, and the sense that “we are witnessing the sacred.” The danger was never the oddness of the behaviour. It is the ease with which the resulting conviction and allegiance can be redirected into worldly power—political authority, or the solicitation of money—under the banner of a divine mandate.

References

Goodman, F. D. (1972). Speaking in tongues: A cross-cultural study of glossolalia. University of Chicago Press.

— An anthropological and cross-cultural study arguing that glossolalia is a learned, ritually shaped vocal behaviour, often (though not always) accompanied by an altered or trance-like state, and occurring across many cultural and religious settings. A counterpoint to purely linguistic accounts, emphasising the bodily and social conditioning of the practice.

 

Newberg, A. B., Wintering, N. A., Morgan, D., & Waldman, M. R. (2006). The measurement of regional cerebral blood flow during glossolalia: A preliminary SPECT study. Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, 148(1), 67–71. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pscychresns.2006.07.001

— The first functional neuroimaging study of glossolalia. In five practitioners, speaking in tongues was associated with decreased activity in the frontal lobes compared with devotional singing—consistent with the speakers’ report of a loss of intentional control—while the sense of self appeared preserved. A small, preliminary study, but a suggestive neural correlate of the subjective experience.

 

Samarin, W. J. (1972). Tongues of men and angels: The religious language of Pentecostalism. Macmillan.

— The foundational linguistic analysis of glossolalia, concluding that it is phonologically structured but semantically empty—patterned sound that resembles language without being one—and that it draws on the speaker’s native phonology. Samarin stressed that the behaviour is learned, normal rather than pathological, and not reducible to a trance state.

 

Spanos, N. P., & Hewitt, E. C. (1979). Glossolalia: A test of the “trance” and psychopathology hypotheses. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 88(4), 427–434. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-843x.88.4.427

— An experimental and psychometric study testing—and largely rejecting—the claims that glossolalia requires a trance state or signals psychopathology. Together with the same group’s later demonstration that naive subjects can be trained to produce tongues on cue, it supports the view of glossolalia as a learnable skill practised by psychologically ordinary people.

 

A note on scriptural sources (handled as primary references rather than formal citations): the New Testament contains two distinct phenomena often conflated under “tongues”—the Pentecost narrative of Acts 2:1–13, in which the apostles are understood by speakers of many foreign languages (closer to xenoglossy), and Paul’s discussion in 1 Corinthians 12–14, in which the utterance is ecstatic and requires interpretation. It is the latter strand that corresponds to modern glossolalia.

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