The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 14: Religion as a Business

Many religions and other spiritual practices operate partly like a business. There is marketing (proselytization, outreach), branding (symbols people wear on clothing or on necklaces), encouragement to be loyal to your brand, and criticism of other brands. But then there is also a financial commitment, leading to an organized financial structure. There is work to be done by members of this structure, with an ultimate goal—explicit or implicit—of retaining and expanding membership, eliciting volunteering efforts and financial contributions, and maintaining morale.

With some intensely tribal, high-commitment groups (fraternities are the obvious benign example, gangs the darker one), there can be an onerous initiation ritual. Social psychologists have shown that when people have to work hard, endure discomfort, or pay a steep price to join, they often become more loyal afterward—partly because the mind naturally tries to justify what it has sacrificed. Religions also commonly have initiation processes: potential members may be vetted, attend educational sessions, and then take part in some public ritual in which solemn commitments are made.

Sometimes, as with luxury business models, broad proselytization does not occur; instead, the “product” is restricted. Only a select few gain entry. In some traditions you need advanced membership—often taking years—before you are allowed to enter certain beautiful buildings such as temples, or partake in certain deep rituals. Sometimes only men are allowed into certain leadership roles or ritual spaces. These obstacles increase the allure and tend to attract people willing to contribute more commitment, time, and money. If everybody had a Rolex watch or a Gucci bag, it would cease to be as special; exclusivity is part of what makes the object feel “high-end.”

One particular feature of religion that resembles a corporate tactic is the elevation of belief alone—faith—as a key virtue. Belief without evidence is not merely tolerated; it is often praised. If a corporation could successfully propagate that idea, it would be extremely useful for marketing, since people would form loyalty to the brand without looking too closely at “reviews.” Doubt could be reframed as weakness, betrayal, or impurity. Meanwhile, “true believers” are rewarded: their status, trust, and esteem in the community rises in proportion to their loyalty.

In many cases religious institutions amass vast wealth: in property, buildings, and investments. In at least some prominent modern examples, credible reporting and public filings have described religious investment holdings on the order of tens of billions of dollars, with wider claims in some cases exceeding $100 billion—figures that are difficult to reconcile with the ordinary believer’s image of humble spiritual stewardship. And these structures often operate with significant tax advantages. In the United States, churches are generally treated as tax-exempt. In Canada, registered charities (including many religious organizations) are exempt from paying income tax while registered.

And yet, some of the most insightful cautions about wealth come from within religion itself. One of the sharpest is the line attributed to Jesus (present in all three Synoptic Gospels): “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

References

Aronson, E., & Mills, J. (1959). The effect of severity of initiation on liking for a group. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 59(2), 177–181. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0047195

— The classic effort-justification experiment: participants who endured a harsher initiation rated the group more favorably, the empirical basis for the chapter’s point that an onerous entry cost tends to deepen loyalty.

 

Canada Revenue Agency. (n.d.). Charities and giving. Government of Canada. https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/charities-giving.html

— Sets out that registered charities—including many religious organizations—are exempt from income tax while registered, and must file the annual T3010 information return.

 

Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford University Press.

— The dissonance theory underlying effort justification: people reduce the discomfort of having sacrificed for something by valuing it more highly.

 

Internal Revenue Service. (n.d.). Tax guide for churches and religious organizations (Publication 1828). U.S. Department of the Treasury. https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p1828.pdf

— Explains that churches are automatically recognized as tax-exempt under §501(c)(3) without applying, and—uniquely among nonprofits—are not required to file the annual Form 990 disclosure.

 

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. (2023, February 21). SEC charges The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its investment management company for disclosure failures and misstated filings (Press Release 2023-35). https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2023-35

— The SEC action documenting that the Church’s investment arm, Ensign Peak Advisors, used shell companies to obscure an equity portfolio shown in public filings at roughly $32–38 billion; a 2019 whistleblower complaint and subsequent reporting placed the fund near $100 billion.

 

The “camel through the eye of a needle” saying appears in all three Synoptic Gospels: Matthew 19:24, Mark 10:25, and Luke 18:25.

← Chapter 13 | Contents | Chapter 15 →

The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 13: to be a scholar, you had to study theology

For long stretches of European history, many able people who wanted to study the biggest questions ended up studying religion. That was not always because religion had the best answers. Often it was because religious institutions controlled much of the schooling, the books, and the road to public influence. If you wanted literacy, training, status, or a respected voice in your community, religion was often the main gate you had to pass through.

Before the printing press, and before secular universities became common, the Church often controlled many of the material conditions of scholarship as well: the copying of books, access to manuscripts, and much of the economic support that allowed a person to read, write, and think rather than spend life in manual labor. In practice, that often meant that to be a scholar was to be funded, housed, trained, or at least tolerated by a religious institution. That inevitably shaped what could be said, what could be explored, and how far a person could go.

This created a built-in bias. It was not just that highly capable people happened to like theology. It was that theology sat near the center of educated life. If you wanted mentors, libraries, credentials, or a place to teach and write, you often had to work inside a religious setting, or at least learn to speak its language. In that kind of system, religion could borrow prestige from the educated people who passed through it.

That distinction mattered. When people saw a brilliant, educated, generous person who was also a priest, minister, or theologian, they could easily draw the wrong lesson: if someone this thoughtful believes it, maybe the religion itself must be true. But that does not follow. A person can be wise, morally serious, and deeply useful to society while still believing things that are false. Learning and talent do not make a doctrine true.

There was another pressure as well. In many periods, if you were a serious thinker and openly challenged the religious system, you were not just risking an argument. You could lose your position, your audience, your safety, or even your life. So the historical record is not a fair contest in which every idea had the same chance to survive. People who stayed within accepted limits were more likely to keep teaching, keep publishing, and keep being remembered.

Galileo is a clear example. He used a telescope to study the sky and argued publicly that Earth moved around the sun. Today that sounds ordinary. In his time it crossed powerful religious limits. He was put on trial in 1633 and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. Whatever one thinks about all the details of the case, one lesson is plain: a scholar’s standing and safety could depend on not going too far beyond approved belief.

Giordano Bruno shows a somewhat different version of the same pattern, and it is worth getting the details right, because his case is so often misremembered. Bruno did hold radical cosmological views—an infinite universe, countless inhabited worlds—but he was burned in Rome in 1600 chiefly for theological heresy: he had denied the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, and other core doctrines. The popular image of Bruno as the first martyr for science is therefore misleading; his astronomy was a secondary matter beside his religious unorthodoxy. But that correction, far from weakening the point, sharpens it. What killed Bruno was not a scientific theory but the crossing of religious boundaries—and it is precisely the power to set and enforce those boundaries, on pain of death, that shaped which ideas could be voiced and which thinkers survived to be remembered.

And this pressure was not limited to astronomy. Reformers, translators, and other dissidents were also punished severely in different times and places. Even when the issue was not a new scientific discovery, the deeper conflict was often the same: who gets to define truth, and what happens to you if you say otherwise in public?

Europe was not unique in this broad pattern. In the Middle East and the wider Islamic world, serious learning often grew around mosques, religious schools, and scholars of law and scripture. In China, higher learning and public advancement often depended on mastery of the Confucian classics and success in the imperial examination system. In India too, advanced learning often grew around religious traditions, temple settings, monasteries, and learned priestly circles. The details differed from place to place, but the larger point remains: when one tradition controls the road to education and status, its ideas can start to look far more intellectually established than they really are.

To be fair, religious institutions also preserved and passed on learning in many eras. They copied books, trained students, and helped keep scholarship alive. Several well-known universities began in religious settings or still carry that identity. So the story is not simple. But that is exactly why the bias is easy to miss. When the same institution both protects learning and sets the limits of belief, educated people will naturally be overrepresented inside that system.

You can still see a milder version of this today. Many excellent private schools, colleges, and universities are sponsored by religious organizations and maintain very high academic standards. Some of them also require students to take courses in religion, attend chapel, or absorb a broader moral and intellectual outlook shaped by a faith tradition. That does not mean these schools are weak academically; some are excellent. But it does mean that strong education and religious commitment can be packaged together in a way that makes the religion seem more intellectually confirmed than it really is.

There is a second modern echo too. In some religious schools, seminaries, tightly bound communities, and other closed systems, career paths and social acceptance can still depend on affirming the right beliefs. The penalties are usually softer now—not execution, but loss of job, loss of status, loss of community, loss of belonging. The basic pattern is similar: a belief system becomes part of the ticket into a valued world. And once again, this can make it look as though the best minds support the belief, when some critics have left, have been forced to stay quiet, or have been pushed out.

So the old link between theology and scholarship was often not straightforward proof that theology was true. Much of it grew out of history, institutional control, and control over the means of education. For long stretches of time, if you wanted a serious education, you often had to study religion; and if you wanted to keep your place in public intellectual life, you often had to stay inside religion’s limits. That alone can make religion look intellectually stronger than the evidence for its literal claims really is.

References

de Ridder-Symoens, H. (Ed.). (1992). A history of the university in Europe: Vol. 1. Universities in the Middle Ages. Cambridge University Press.

— The authoritative history of the medieval university, documenting its church-based origins and the Church’s role in the institution that became the home of higher learning.

 

Elman, B. A. (2000). A cultural history of civil examinations in late imperial China. University of California Press.

— A definitive study of the Confucian-classics civil examination system (1315–1905) that controlled access to office and status in late imperial China.

 

Grant, E. (1996). The foundations of modern science in the Middle Ages: Their religious, institutional, and intellectual contexts. Cambridge University Press.

— Argues that the religious and institutional conditions of the medieval West—above all the university, founded around 1200—actively enabled the rise of science.

 

Makdisi, G. (1981). The rise of colleges: Institutions of learning in Islam and the West. Edinburgh University Press.

— Traces the madrasa and the institutions of Islamic learning (law and scripture) in the medieval Islamic world, and their parallels with the later Western college.

 

Numbers, R. L. (Ed.). (2009). Galileo goes to jail and other myths about science and religion. Harvard University Press.

— The standard scholarly correction to the “conflict thesis,” with chapters specifically debunking the myths that Galileo was imprisoned and tortured (Finocchiaro), that Bruno was the first martyr of science (Shackelford), and that the medieval Church suppressed science (Shank)—essential for handling this chapter’s two examples rigorously.

 

Rowland, I. D. (2008). Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/heretic. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

— The standard modern biography of Bruno; establishes that his condemnation turned chiefly on theological heresy—notably his denial of the Trinity and of Christ’s divinity—rather than on his cosmology.

← Chapter 12 | Contents | Chapter 14 →

The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 12: Benefits of Unfounded Belief

Another troubling angle on all of this is that people can sometimes latch onto an unfounded or even fictional belief system, yet experience real improvements in their lives. This would cause a deepening conviction in the belief system, because the person now has lived experience that feels like proof: It worked for me. This is similar to the self-deception Trivers describes, and also similar to the way psychoanalysis could help some people even when much of its theory is wrong.  

For example, some people latch onto an extremely rigorous diet with a spurious rationale, and yet end up stabilizing a prior eating problem, bingeing pattern, or weight problem. Often what makes the diet “work” is not the theory, but the frame: the diet becomes a totalizing structure, a rule-set, a ritual, a commitment device, sometimes even a moral identity. Strong belief in the diet’s narrative can increase adherence—sometimes dramatically—especially when the belief is reinforced by “spiritual” practices, authoritative texts, a charismatic leader, and enthusiastic support from fellow adherents. The resulting improvement may have little to do with the supposed mechanism (“toxins,” “energy,” “impurity,” etc.) and much to do with ordinary behavioral ingredients: reduced ultra-processed food, fewer calories, more routine, more attention to quantities and timing, and stronger social accountability. In other words, the distinguishing features of the theory may be fictional, while the behavior change is real.

In psychotherapy, patients’ early positive expectations are associated with better outcomes, and placebo research shows that ritual and a warm practitioner relationship can produce real symptom change. In some settings, even open-label placebos—interventions people are told are inert—can still help. That matters here because it shows that the human benefit does not necessarily require the theory to be true. In some cases it does not even require deception.

It is tempting to treat these forays into unfounded belief as harmless whenever they produce visible gains. But there is a dark side. Some dietary regimens are medically dangerous; some aggravate eating disorders; and some cultivate a loyalty to the framework that discourages critical thinking. Social media can intensify the problem, especially when health-focused communities reward purity, rigidity, and bodily control.

When a person’s identity becomes fused with a belief system, they may reject better treatments when those treatments are indicated—especially if a setback is interpreted as evidence of insufficient “faith,” insufficient purity, or insufficient devotion. The harms here are not merely theoretical. In patients with curable cancers, complementary medicine use has been associated with greater refusal of conventional treatment and worse survival, with the excess mortality appearing to be mediated by delay or refusal of effective care.

These frameworks also often come packaged with community. People who join one cluster of unusual health beliefs can sometimes be pulled, by social gravity, into neighboring clusters: new spiritual doctrines, anti-vaccine attitudes, conspiratorial styles of explanation, and monetized ecosystems of coaching, supplements, retreats, and memberships. The pattern is not inevitable, but it is real enough to take seriously.

And there is another distortion worth naming: we mostly hear from the success stories. The people for whom the diet failed, harmed them, or simply became an expensive obsession rarely become public evangelists. The community’s narrative therefore becomes skewed toward “miracles,” while the quiet attrition and collateral damage remain largely invisible.

Finally, just as in religions, the next step is often proselytizing. People who believe they have found salvation—whether dietary, medical, or spiritual—tend to recruit. They may pressure friends and family to “convert,” and disparage outsiders as ignorant, impure, or closed-minded. In the context of fad diets and alternative medicine, that can do real harm to public health.

So the point is not that unfounded belief never helps. The point is that when it helps, it often does so through common human mechanisms—structure, community, meaning, identity, expectancy, and accountability—while smuggling in risks that are easy to deny and hard to reverse once the belief becomes an emblem of belonging. The deeper problem is not merely that the belief is false. It is that the benefit is misinterpreted as proof that the belief was true all along.

References

Constantino, M. J., Vîslă, A., Coyne, A. E., & Boswell, J. F. (2018). A meta-analysis of the association between patients’ early treatment outcome expectation and their posttreatment outcomes. Psychotherapy, 55(4), 473–485. https://doi.org/10.1037/pst0000169

— Across many clinical samples, more optimistic early expectations about therapy predict modestly better outcomes.

 
Johnson, S. B., Park, H. S., Gross, C. P., & Yu, J. B. (2018). Complementary medicine, refusal of conventional cancer therapy, and survival among patients with curable cancers. JAMA Oncology, 4(10), 1375–1381. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamaoncol.2018.2487

— In four curable cancers, complementary-medicine users more often refused proven treatment and had roughly double the risk of death, with the survival gap mediated by treatment refusal. 

 
Kaptchuk, T. J., Kelley, J. M., Conboy, L. A., Davis, R. B., Kerr, C. E., Jacobson, E. E., Kirsch, I., Schyner, R. N., Nam, B. H., Nguyen, L. T., Park, M., Rivers, A. L., McManus, C., Kokkotou, E., Drossman, D. A., Goldman, P., & Lembo, A. J. (2008). Components of placebo effect: Randomised controlled trial in patients with irritable bowel syndrome. BMJ, 336(7651), 999–1003. 

https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.39524.439618.25

— Experimentally separates the placebo response into assessment, a therapeutic ritual, and a warm patient–practitioner relationship, showing each adds incremental symptom relief; grounds the claim that ritual and relationship can produce real change.

 
Kaptchuk, T. J., Friedlander, E., Kelley, J. M., Sanchez, M. N., Kokkotou, E., Singer, J. P., Kowalczykowski, M., Miller, F. G., Kirsch, I., & Lembo, A. J. (2010). Placebos without deception: A randomized controlled trial in irritable bowel syndrome. PLoS ONE, 5(12), e15591. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0015591

— Open-label placebos, openly described to patients as inert, still outperformed no treatment in IBS—benefit need not even require deception.

Trivers, R. (2011). The folly of fools: The logic of deceit and self-deception in human life. Basic Books.

— The evolutionary account of self-deception: sincere belief makes a performance more convincing, which helps explain why a felt benefit so readily entrenches a false theory.

 
Ward, C., & Voas, D. (2011). The emergence of conspirituality. Journal of Contemporary Religion, 26(1), 103–121. https://doi.org/10.1080/13537903.2011.539846

— Coined “conspirituality” for the convergence of alternative spirituality, wellness culture, and conspiracy belief.

← Chapter 11 | Contents | Chapter 13 →

The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 11: Evolution

In elementary school and high school, I never heard a science teacher mumble a word about evolutionary theory, much less introduce a lesson about it. The church community I grew up in would not touch this issue, except perhaps to condemn it with furrowed brows. Even in university at the time, in the late 80s, evolution was left out of my introductory biology class.

I am so grateful to have discovered evolutionary biology, mostly on my own in my early 20s. It reminded me of studying astronomy or physics or mathematics—there is an awe and wonder that comes from understanding how the universe is made, and another layer that comes from appreciating the brilliant reasoning that allowed us to understand the formation of stars, the laws of motion, and the origins of all life on Earth.

It's understandable why my church elders were silent: evolution explains the origins and diversification of life in a way that directly contradicts literal religious or mythological accounts of creation. It is certainly possible to remain religious while accepting evolution—many people do—but for some believers, evolutionary biology feels like an unacceptable affront to faith, because it replaces a story of intentional design with a story of natural processes unfolding over vast time.

There are experts in evolutionary science who can explain this far better than I can. Still, I want to set aside space for it in my own voice, because the basic logic is not hard to understand, the evidence is overwhelming, and the emotional resistance to it often has very little to do with evidence and a great deal to do with identity, belonging, and sacred narrative—topics I have already been discussing.

What follows is a tour through the core mechanism of natural selection, a few common misunderstandings, the idea of speciation, and then several side corridors that matter for this essay: cultural evolution, sexual selection, and the uncomfortable fact that even religiosity itself is shaped not only by culture, but also by temperament, inheritance, and biology.

Selection

Natural selection is the central guiding principle of evolutionary theory. The logic is profoundly simple. It requires only that we accept three basic facts:

1) Organisms vary (physically, physiologically, behaviourally).

2) Some variation is heritable (traits are influenced by DNA, even though environment matters enormously too).

3) Some traits affect reproductive success—not in a morally loaded sense of “deserving,” but in the literal sense that some variants leave more surviving offspring than others.

If a heritable trait increases the probability of leaving more surviving offspring in a particular environment, then over generations the population will contain more of that trait. If a trait reduces reproductive success, it tends to diminish. That’s it—natural selection is differential survival and reproduction acting on inherited variation, repeated over time.

You can see the basic logic everywhere, from selective breeding in crops and animals (“artificial selection”), to antibiotic resistance in microbes, to the obvious family resemblance in both physical and psychological traits among human relatives. None of this requires the belief that genes are the only cause of traits. It requires only the admission that heredity is a major contributor. A point worth emphasizing, because it is often misunderstood, is that natural selection is not about “improvement” in any moral or progressive sense. It is simply a filter that favours whatever works well enough in a local environment at a given time.

Mutation

DNA replication is highly accurate, but not perfect. Across generations there are small changes—mutations—introduced into genetic material. “Mutation” here does not mean “bad.” It simply means “change.” Most mutations are neutral, many are harmful, and a few are beneficial in a given environment. Sexual reproduction adds still more variation by shuffling existing variants into new combinations, so evolution does not work only with brand-new mutations but also with new mixes of old genetic material.

Mutations do not happen because the organism needs them. A bacterium under stress does not somehow produce the exact helpful mutation it would most like to have. At the deepest level, whether a particular copying error happens in a particular cell at a particular moment is still a fundamentally accidental event. But that does not mean every part of the genome is equally likely to change. Some kinds of DNA changes happen more often than others, and some parts of the genome have a higher probability of experiencing mutations than others. Mutation is fundamentally random in origin, but statistically biased in pattern, and those biases affect what raw material natural selection gets to work with.

When small genetic changes happen to produce a trait that improves survival or reproduction in a particular environment—say, a slightly different beak shape that lets a bird get food more efficiently—those variants will, on average, become more common. They become more common for a very simple reason: the creatures carrying the useful variant survive better and leave more offspring. Over many generations, the accumulation of such changes can produce substantial transformations, including changes in complex organs and behaviours. Darwin’s finches in the Galápagos remain a famous entry point into this idea because long-term field work and later genetic work showed how ecological pressures can shape beak traits across populations.

The Time Scale of Evolution

One reason evolution feels counterintuitive is that large organisms reproduce slowly relative to a human life. Big evolutionary changes can take thousands or millions of years, just as major geological or astronomical processes do. We do not watch a canyon form in a single afternoon, and we do not watch a star age in real time, but the evidence for those processes is still decisive. Evolution is similar: long processes are inferred from converging lines of evidence. Fossils are one line of evidence—imperfect, but immensely powerful. Fossilization is rare and biased toward certain environments and tissues, so the record will always be incomplete. Still, the overall pattern—order in time, branching diversification, and transitional forms—fits evolutionary predictions very well. Comparative anatomy, fossils, biogeography, embryology, and genetics all point to the same branching story.

Common Ancestry and Cousins

A cliché misunderstanding goes like this: “Evolution says humans descended from chimpanzees.” That is not what evolutionary biology claims. Humans and chimpanzees are not ancestor and descendant; they are cousins. And “cousin” is not just a metaphor here. It is literally the right genealogical idea: two living lineages sharing an older common ancestor. In ordinary family language, we talk about first cousins or second cousins. Chimpanzees are obviously not that kind of close cousin; if one insisted on stretching the family language into absurd distances, they would be something like our three-hundred-thousandth cousins. Current genetic evidence places the human–chimpanzee split on the order of about 6 million years ago.

The same logic generalizes outward. Every living thing on Earth is, in the broad genealogical sense, our cousin. For me, this is not depressing at all. It is a source of awe—a kind of cosmic kinship. If a reader wants a visual sense of this, it is worth looking up one of the modern phylogenetic tree charts online, such as OneZoom. The exact dates of particular branching points are still being refined, but the branching structure itself is already known very well. And the scale is staggering. Humans and mice last shared a common ancestor around 90 million years ago. Mammals and birds last shared a common ancestor on the order of 310 million years ago. Humans and fish share a common ancestor on the order of 430 to 450 million years ago. We are talking about tens to hundreds of millions of years, not a few thousand.

Speciation

Over the short term, evolution often looks like shifting trait frequencies within a species. Over the long term, divergence can accumulate until populations become reproductively isolated—meaning they can no longer interbreed successfully under natural conditions. That is speciation.

Speciation is not always a sharp on/off switch. In nature it often behaves more like a continuum. The Ensatina salamander example is a real case, and it is useful because it makes that idea vivid. Around California’s Central Valley, populations of these salamanders spread in a rough loop. Neighbouring populations along the loop can still interbreed with the populations beside them. But by the time the two far ends of the loop meet again in Southern California, they have changed enough that they no longer interbreed successfully with each other, or do so only rarely. A simple analogy would be a circle of people, each speaking a dialect just a little different from the dialect of the person next to them. Each person can understand the neighbours on either side, but the person across the circle sounds incomprehensible. Ring species work something like that, except the differences are genetic and reproductive rather than linguistic. That is the point: species boundaries can emerge gradually, not by magic and not all at once.

One thing I want to state explicitly, because people often get confused here: even if a behaviour or trait has evolved, that does not mean it is morally right, or that we should accept it. Evolution describes how traits spread. It does not tell us what we ought to value.

Compromise, Not Perfect Design

Evolution also does not produce perfect design. It modifies what already exists. That is why living bodies so often look less like clean engineering and more like a history of workable compromise. Humans are full of such compromises. In adult humans, the passage for food and the passage for air share anatomy in the throat, which is one reason choking is even possible. Our spines and backs also show the costs of walking upright. The human spine has an S-shape that helps us balance over our hips and walk efficiently on two legs, but it also turns a structure inherited from four-legged ancestors into a vertically loaded column. The result is chronic stress on the lower back, high rates of disc degeneration, herniated discs, sciatica, and persistent back pain. Human childbirth is unusually difficult because pelvic form, fetal growth, and the evolution of large brains create a tight compromise. It is not as though the body is simply poorly designed. The point is that evolution works with inherited materials and trade-offs, not with fresh blueprints.

The vertebrate eye is another striking example. The retina is effectively wired backward: light has to pass through layers of neural tissue before it reaches the photoreceptors. Where the optic nerve exits the eye there is a literal blind spot, because that patch contains no photoreceptors. And because light must travel through the retinal layers first, the vertebrate eye needs compensatory tricks just to reduce scattering and preserve image quality. Müller cells help act like optical fibers to guide light through this awkward arrangement. The design also forces a trade-off between a clear optical path and the blood supply the retina needs. The system works, but it is hardly what a tidy engineer would draw from scratch. It also comes with structural vulnerabilities: the retina can detach, and when it does, vision can be permanently damaged. The octopus, whose camera eye evolved independently, ended up with a more direct setup. Its retina is everted rather than inverted, so the nerve fibers are routed behind the photoreceptors and there is no comparable blind spot.

Our jaws and teeth tell a similar story. Over time, human faces and jaws have become smaller without tooth size shrinking in perfect proportion. The result is a mismatch between tooth size and available arch space. Softer and more processed diets appear to worsen the problem by reducing the chewing demands that help stimulate jaw growth. As a result, many modern humans grow jaws that are simply too small for the full dental package they still carry, leading to orthodontic problems such as crooked teeth, and impacted wisdom teeth.

The broader point for me is simple: evolved traits are not always functionally ideal. Some have to be restrained, some have to be accommodated, and some have to be counterbalanced by culture. If we want to become more humane, we need rules, norms, education, medicine, and institutions that limit certain inherited tendencies, compensate for the problems they create, and cultivate better ones.

Cultural Evolution

A parallel kind of evolutionary logic shows up in culture. Dawkins coined the term “meme” for cultural units that replicate, but the broader point matters more than the label. Ideas, phrases, rituals, fashions, and institutions can spread, vary, compete, split, and disappear.

Language evolution is a very good example. Languages branch and drift. Over time, groups can become mutually unintelligible—they become different language “species.” Linguists can reconstruct family trees and infer common ancestors in ways that are strikingly analogous to biology. Proto-Indo-European—the distant ancestor of languages as varied as English, German, Greek, Russian, Persian, and Hindi—existed about six to eight thousand years ago. English, German, and Dutch are much closer cousins inside the Germanic family, with a common ancestor a little over two thousand years ago. French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian are cousin languages that began diverging from Latin roughly fifteen hundred to two thousand years ago. And the same logic extends beyond Europe. Mandarin and Cantonese are also cousins. Their shared recognizable ancestor lies in Middle Chinese, something over a thousand years in the past. What begins as a dialect can, given enough time and separation, harden into a clearly distinct language.

Language divergence does not require millennia only. Some changes become obvious in just the last few centuries. Afrikaans, for example, diverged from colonial Dutch over roughly the last three to four hundred years after Dutch settlement at the Cape in 1652. Even before a speech form is officially labelled a separate language, strong regional varieties can become difficult for outsiders to follow. There are strong accents within Canada, such as Newfoundland English, that can be difficult for other Canadians to understand. Mutual understanding can erode gradually long before people agree on where to draw the boundary.

While Mandarin and Cantonese are cousins, English and Mandarin are not. As I've been learning Mandarin these past few years, I've discovered what it's like to appreciate a language that shares no traceable ancestry with English at all. Somewhere far enough back there probably is a common ancestor—the ancestors of every non-African population left Africa in a single wave around sixty thousand years ago, and every human population has language. But we will never find it. The comparative method reaches back perhaps eight thousand years before the trail goes cold, because words are not copied like genes; they are replaced, one by one, until nothing recognizable survives. This is where the analogy to biology breaks. Life keeps its records in a molecule that copies itself faithfully for billions of years. Language has no direct record at all before the age of writing, and it evolves so quickly that it erases its own history.

Religions also behave this way. Doctrines split. Schisms occur. New denominations form. We see this clearly in Christianity: the East–West Schism of 1054 formalized the great split between Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christianity; the Reformation is conventionally dated to 1517; and those Protestant branches splintered further into Lutherans, Calvinists, Anabaptists, Anglicans, Methodists, Baptists, Pentecostals, and countless smaller groups. This fragmentation is not just ancient history. In the United Methodist Church, more than 7,600 U.S. congregations left between 2019 and the end of 2023, roughly a quarter of the denomination’s earlier U.S. total.

Buddhism diversified too. One line of early Buddhism led to Theravada, while Mahayana arose later as another major descendant branch around the beginning of the Common Era. Islam experienced its defining Sunni–Shia split in the struggles over succession after Muhammad’s death. The family-tree metaphor is not perfect, but it is illuminating: religions do not descend from heaven as finished products. They branch, drift, quarrel, and split inside history.

Psychologically, that has an important implication: people often treat their own local, historically contingent version of a faith as if it were timeless and universal, when in reality it carries the fingerprints of geography, conflict, institutions, inheritance, and politics.

Sexual Selection

Another important evolutionary idea is sexual selection: traits can spread not because they help survival directly, but because they affect mating success. The peacock’s tail is the classic case—beautiful, costly, cumbersome, and yet selected because it becomes desirable within the mating preferences of the species. Darwin understood that biology is not only about staying alive long enough to reproduce; it is also about courtship, display, preference, and attraction. Richard Prum has argued, persuasively in my view, that sexual selection can include a genuinely esthetic component: preferences themselves can become evolutionary forces, and traits can spread because they are found attractive, not merely because they advertise some practical advantage.

None of which makes us peacocks. But human mate choice does attend to looks, voice, movement, confidence, style, humour, conversation, and perhaps aspects of intelligence itself. Some theorists—notably Geoffrey Miller—have argued that traits such as humour, creativity, artistry, music, and parts of intelligence may have been shaped at least partly by sexual selection because they function as displays: they can signal mental agility, creativity, or the ability to hold another person’s attention. The evidence is mixed and the details are debated, but the idea is serious. 

Temperament, Inheritance, and Religion

Religiosity itself is not only cultural. Which particular religious group a person belongs to is largely a cultural and family-transmitted matter. But the broader tendency to be religious at all—to find religion important, compelling, consoling, or identity-defining—shows a meaningful inherited component. Twin research repeatedly suggests that adult religiosity has a moderate hereditary component, but the size depends a great deal on what exactly is being measured. Broadly speaking, estimates often land from the high 20s into the low 60s. More outward or socially enforced measures tend to sit lower, while more inward, identity-heavy, or conversion-like dimensions can sit higher. And when researchers say that some dimension of religiosity has a heritability of 60%, they do not mean that 60% of one person’s religion is “caused by genes.” They mean that, in the population being studied, about 60% of the variability between people on that trait is statistically associated with genetic variability.

What matters more here than raw ability is cognitive style. Some people are more comfortable sitting with analytical doubt and ambiguity; others are more drawn to certainty, authority, and the reassurance of a shared communal answer. Neither style is a measure of intelligence or its absence. (Meta-analyses do report a modest average negative association between intelligence-test scores and religiosity, but the effect is small, appears to have weakened over time, is substantially explained by education, and tells us nothing about any individual believer—a great many brilliant people are religious.)

A trait dimension that is relevant here is schizotypy—not a disorder, but a normal spectrum of personality involving vivid imagination, unusual perceptions, openness to magical ideas, and a strong tendency to find patterns. Most religious people sit nowhere near the high end of it. But someone who is more prone to unusual inner experiences, and to sensing hidden connections, may be more likely to interpret those experiences as messages, revelations, or signs coming from outside the self. Schizotypy itself appears to be moderately heritable, often estimated in roughly the 30% to 50% range, and higher levels of its unusual-experiences dimension are repeatedly associated with stronger paranormal belief.

Moral psychology belongs here too. As the psychologist Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues have documented, some people are more temperamentally drawn to moral themes like loyalty, authority, and purity; others prioritize harm reduction and fairness more strongly. These inclinations appear to be at least partly heritable as well, though the size of that effect is debated. Religions, especially organized and more traditional ones, tend to be associated with stronger emphasis on loyalty, authority, and purity, with less emphasis on harm reduction and fairness. That is one reason some people feel deeply at home in religious cultures while others experience them as alienating.

None of this makes religiosity a defect or a symptom. It makes it one more dimension of the ordinary variation in human temperament—as deeply rooted in our nature as personality, taste, or political disposition. That, in a sense, is the deepest point of this chapter: the religious impulse is not an alien intrusion into human life but a natural product of the same evolutionary and developmental forces that shaped everything else about us.

Conclusion

Once a person really absorbs the logic and evidence for evolution, as I did in my early 20s and beyond, it becomes difficult to look at literal creation myths in the same way again. For me, this shift does not drain the world of meaning. It opens the door to a deeper, steadier awe: reverence for reality as it actually is.

References

Alford, J. R., Funk, C. L., & Hibbing, J. R. (2005). Are political orientations genetically transmitted? American Political Science Review, 99(2), 153–167. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055405051579

A landmark twin study, drawing on more than ten thousand twin pairs, showing that political and social attitudes carry a substantial heritable component while party identification does not. The pattern mirrors what has been found for religion: the broad disposition is partly inherited, but the particular affiliation is learned within the family. It helped launch the study of the genetics of political temperament.

Claridge, G. (Ed.). (1997). Schizotypy: Implications for illness and health. Oxford University Press.

The standard scholarly treatment of schizotypy as a normal, continuously distributed feature of personality rather than a disease category. It assembles the evidence that traits such as unusual perceptions, magical thinking, and openness to anomalous experience vary across the whole population. Some temperaments are more inclined to read inner experiences as messages from beyond the self.

Dagnall, N., Denovan, A., Drinkwater, K., Parker, A., & Clough, P. (2016). Toward a better understanding of the relationship between belief in the paranormal and statistical bias: The potential role of schizotypy. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 1045. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01045

A study of 254 volunteers testing which dimension of schizotypy best predicts paranormal belief, using the Oxford–Liverpool Inventory alongside the Revised Paranormal Belief Scale. Of the four schizotypy factors, Unusual Experiences—perceptual aberrations and magical thinking—showed the strongest association with paranormal belief, while the negative dimension showed none at all. The authors also found that paranormal belief mediated the relationship between unusual experiences and errors in judging randomness, and they caution that self-selection by people already interested in the paranormal may inflate the association.

Dawkins, R. (1976). The selfish gene. Oxford University Press.

The landmark popular statement of the gene-centred view of evolution, which reframes organisms as vehicles built by genes to propagate themselves. It also introduced the term "meme" for a unit of culture that replicates, varies, and competes much as a gene does. 

Franze, K., Grosche, J., Skatchkov, S. N., Schinkinger, S., Foja, C., Schild, D., Uckermann, O., Travis, K., Reichenbach, A., & Guck, J. (2007). Müller cells are living optical fibers in the vertebrate retina. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(20), 8287–8292. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0611180104

A study showing that the vertebrate retina is optically "inverted"—light must pass through layers of neural tissue before reaching the photoreceptors—and that specialized Müller glial cells act as living optical fibers guiding light through this awkward arrangement. The finding is sometimes offered as evidence that the eye is well engineered after all. But the human eye uses a compensatory workaround for a suboptimal inherited design that still leaves a blind spot and a vulnerability to retinal detachment. The octopus's independently evolved eye has neither problem.

Graham, J., Haidt, J., & Nosek, B. A. (2009). Liberals and conservatives rely on different sets of moral foundations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96(5), 1029–1046. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0015141

The core empirical statement of moral-foundations theory, showing that liberals and conservatives draw on partly different moral intuitions: conservatives weight loyalty, authority, and purity more heavily, while liberals emphasize harm and fairness. These "binding" foundations tend to be elevated among the more religious. Some temperaments feel at home in traditional religious cultures while others find them alienating.

Grant, P. R., & Grant, B. R. (2014). 40 years of evolution: Darwin's finches on Daphne Major Island. Princeton University Press.

A synthesis of four decades of field research on the finches of Daphne Major in the Galápagos, the modern successor to Darwin's own observations. Year-by-year measurement shows ecological pressures—drought, food supply, competition—reshaping beak size and shape across generations, evolution observed almost in real time. 

Koenig, L. B., McGue, M., Krueger, R. F., & Bouchard, T. J., Jr. (2005). Genetic and environmental influences on religiousness: Findings for retrospective and current religiousness ratings. Journal of Personality, 73(2), 471–488. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6494.2005.00316.x

A twin study finding that the heritability of religiousness is moderate but strongly age-dependent: genetic influence is weak in childhood, when shared family environment dominates, and rises substantially by adulthood. The result helps explain why estimates of the heritability of religiousness vary so widely across studies. The broad tendency to be religious carries a real inherited component.

Kumar, S., Stecher, G., Suleski, M., & Hedges, S. B. (2017). TimeTree: A resource for timelines, timetrees, and divergence times. Molecular Biology and Evolution, 34(7), 1812–1819. https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msx116

A description of TimeTree, a public database that synthesizes thousands of molecular studies into consensus estimates of when evolutionary lineages diverged. It is the source of the divergence-time figures used in this chapter—human and chimpanzee, human and mouse, mammal and bird, human and fish. The exact dates continue to be refined, but the branching structure they describe is already well established.

Lewis Center for Church Leadership. (2024). Twenty-five percent of churches disaffiliated from the United Methodist Church. Wesley Theological Seminary. https://www.churchleadership.com/leading-ideas/twenty-five-percent-of-churches-disaffiliated-from-the-united-methodist-church/

The final tally of congregations that formally left the United Methodist Church between 2019 and the end of 2023, reporting that roughly a quarter of U.S. congregations disaffiliated. The report also compares the characteristics of departing and remaining churches.

Linney, Y. M., Murray, R. M., Peters, E. R., MacDonald, A. M., Rijsdijk, F., & Sham, P. C. (2003). A quantitative genetic analysis of schizotypal personality traits. Psychological Medicine, 33(5), 803–816. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291703007906

A twin study of 733 female twin pairs using the Oxford–Liverpool Inventory of Feelings and Experiences, the standard instrument for measuring schizotypy across the general population. Heritability was estimated at roughly 50% for most dimensions and lower—about 37%—for delusional ideation, with the best-fitting models attributing the remainder to individual rather than shared family environment. The positive and negative components of schizotypy proved relatively independent genetically, which suggests the trait is not a single inherited quantity but a cluster of partly separate ones.

Miller, G. F. (2000). The mating mind: How sexual choice shaped the evolution of human nature. Doubleday.

An argument that distinctively human traits—humour, art, music, creativity, and aspects of intelligence—were shaped partly by sexual selection, functioning as displays that advertise the qualities of the mind producing them. Miller treats courtship, not only survival, as a major engine of human mental evolution. 

Prum, R. O. (2017). The evolution of beauty: How Darwin's forgotten theory of mate choice shapes the animal world—and us. Doubleday.

A modern revival and defense of Darwin's largely neglected "esthetic" theory of mate choice, which holds that preferences themselves can become evolutionary forces. On this view, a trait such as the peacock's tail spreads because it is found beautiful, not merely because it signals some practical advantage. Biology is not only grim survival calculus but also a matter of attraction, display, and taste.

Rosindell, J., & Harmon, L. J. (2012). OneZoom: A fractal explorer for the tree of life. PLoS Biology, 10(10), e1001406. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001406

A description of OneZoom, an interactive, zoomable map of the evolutionary tree of life designed to make the scale of common ancestry vivid and explorable. It renders the whole of life as a single connected structure a reader can navigate. 

Smith, K. B., Alford, J. R., Hibbing, J. R., Martin, N. G., & Hatemi, P. K. (2017). Intuitive ethics and political orientations: Testing moral foundations as a theory of political ideology. American Journal of Political Science, 61(2), 424–437. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12255

A twin analysis testing whether the individual moral foundations are the stable, heritable dispositions that moral-foundations theory implies. The authors found considerable instability in moral foundations over time and only limited evidence of heritability for the separate foundations. The paper represents one side of an unsettled debate, set here against Zakharin and Bates (2023), which reaches a stronger conclusion.

Wake, D. B. (1997). Incipient species formation in salamanders of the Ensatina complex. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 94(15), 7761–7767. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.94.15.7761

The classic analysis of the Ensatina salamanders as a ring species: populations spread in a loop around California's Central Valley, each able to interbreed with its neighbours, until the two ends of the ring meet in the south and no longer interbreed successfully. It is one of the clearest natural demonstrations that species boundaries can form gradually rather than all at once. 

Zakharin, M., & Bates, T. C. (2023). Testing heritability of moral foundations: Common pathway models support strong heritability for the five moral foundations. European Journal of Personality, 37(4), 485–497. https://doi.org/10.1177/08902070221103957

Two twin studies testing the heritability of the moral foundations with models designed to separate genuine genetic influence from measurement error. Unlike Smith and colleagues, the authors find significant heritability for both the "binding" and the "individualizing" moral domains. The paper represents the other side of the current debate over how far moral temperament is inherited.

Zuckerman, M., Silberman, J., & Hall, J. A. (2013). The relation between intelligence and religiosity: A meta-analysis and some proposed explanations. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 17(4), 325–354. https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868313497266

A meta-analysis of sixty-three studies finding a modest negative association between intelligence and religiosity—a mean correlation of about −.24 for religious belief in the main samples. The authors propose several explanations, including a tendency for more intelligent people to resist conformity and to prefer analytic over intuitive thinking. Later re-analyses report that the association has weakened over time and is substantially explained by education.

← Chapter 10 | Contents | Chapter 12 →

The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 10: Reading List & Discussion

I realize it's odd to include a reading list in the middle of a book—and this is the second similar chapter in a row. But it feels right to me.  I mean this list as a set of recommendations. Reading is a great joy of life, and people don't read enough these days. Also the list captures some of the authors and ideas that have been most influential in my life, and I think it's important for you to know some of my own scholarly background about the topic of religion: 

1. When God Talks Back, by Tanya Luhrmann. One of the best books for understanding how religious experience becomes subjectively real. Luhrmann is not trying to prove that God exists; she is trying to understand how people come to experience God as vivid, intimate, personal, and responsive. This is a very important distinction. If one wants to understand religion properly, it is not enough to say that believers are mistaken. One must also understand how prayer, inner speech, imagination, attention, social reinforcement, and expectation can combine so that an invisible relationship feels emotionally real. This book is especially valuable because it helps one understand believers without condescension. It is possible to reject the supernatural claims while still taking the psychology seriously.

2. Religion Explained, by Pascal Boyer. Boyer is asking why certain kinds of religious ideas are so easy for human minds to generate, remember, and transmit. Gods, spirits, ancestors, invisible agents, taboos, and rituals do not have to be imported into human culture from some supernatural realm. They arise very naturally from ordinary cognitive tendencies—our readiness to detect agency, infer intentions, remember striking stories, monitor threats, and think about social obligations. Religion, in this view, is not evidence of revelation. It is evidence of the structure of the human mind.

3. In Gods We Trust, by Scott Atran. A very important book in the cognitive and evolutionary study of religion. Atran helps show that religion is not simply a “belief system” in the abstract, but something that grows out of ordinary human cognition and then becomes woven into kinship, coalition, morality, identity, and emotional life. This is helpful because many religious people imagine skepticism as though it were merely a refusal to accept a few doctrines. But religion is usually much more socially and psychologically embedded than that. Atran is denser and more scholarly than some of the other authors on this list, but he is worth the effort. He helps explain why religion is persistent, why it is so often resistant to contradiction, and why sacred ideas can motivate extraordinary loyalty and sacrifice.

4. Big Gods, by Ara Norenzayan. A very useful book for thinking about the social success of religion. Norenzayan explores the idea that belief in morally interested, watchful supernatural beings may have helped large societies sustain cooperation among strangers. Even if one grants this in part, it does not rescue the truth of the supernatural claims. It simply shows that false beliefs can sometimes have functional social effects. That distinction is central to the argument of this book: a belief can be adaptive, comforting, socially useful, and still not be true. One can debate the exact historical sequencing of all this, but the core psychological and sociological point is extremely useful. If people feel watched, judged, and morally monitored—even by an invisible being—they may behave differently. Religion may therefore function, in some settings, as a kind of supernatural social surveillance system.

5. Modes of Religiosity, by Harvey Whitehouse. Especially useful for thinking about ritual. Whitehouse argues that religions often cluster around two broad patterns. In one, there are rare, emotionally intense, highly memorable rituals that bind small groups very tightly. In the other, there are frequent, repetitive, lower-arousal practices that support larger, more orderly, more bureaucratic communities. Once one sees this, many religious differences stop looking mysterious. They look more like different cultural technologies for shaping memory, commitment, group identity, and social structure.

6. The Varieties of Religious Experience, by William James. Though it is well over a century old, James’s classic still has few equals as a sympathetic, psychologically serious study of religious experience. James wanted to describe—carefully, and without contempt—what conversion, mysticism, saintliness, and the “sick soul” actually feel like from the inside, and what they do for the people who undergo them. He took the experiences seriously as data while remaining agnostic about their causes. One can hold that the metaphysics is mistaken and still insist that the experience is real, important, and worth understanding. James is also a useful reminder that the naturalistic study of religion is not a recent invention; it has a long and humane pedigree.

7. Books about cognitive biases, such as Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. This is relevant to religion because many religious beliefs are stabilized by well-described biases. Ingroup loyalty can produce “belief bubbles,” in which people preferentially consume ideas that support their faith and avoid exposure to ideas that challenge it. Beliefs become intertwined with identity and group safety, so a logical challenge can feel like an attack rather than a discussion. Some other cognitive biases include the following:

-Ad hominem attacks against people who challenge religion. A famous target of this was Charles Darwin—a gentle, humble, family-oriented man, with a patient style of meticulously gathering and weighing evidence—who was subject to various criticisms of his character, integrity, and motives as part of a technique to discredit his ideas. Another variant is to attach a discrediting label to the critic—“arrogant,” “godless,” “elitist,” a “so-called expert”—so that the label, rather than the argument, does the work of dismissal.

-Reactive devaluation. Following ad hominem attacks, there is the further step of dismissing evidence not because of its quality, but because one does not like the person expressing it. Conversely, evidence is embraced irrespective of its quality because one likes the messenger, knows the messenger well, or feels loyalty to that person because of past positive experiences.

-The availability cascade. Various religious ideas can seem more believable or persuasive simply because of repeated exposure, sometimes over a lifetime. These ideas are easier to call to mind, more salient in memory, and this can fool people into thinking they are more accurate or more obviously true, irrespective of evidence.

-Confirmation bias. This is when one looks for evidence in a biased way, collecting individual items that support a previous position, while not attending to—or even being aware of—evidence against that position.

-Anchoring. This is the tendency to stick to an original position. One becomes “rooted” to a baseline stance—in this case, religious belief—and later judgments remain biased toward that starting point even in the face of dissonant evidence.

-The sunk cost fallacy. This is sticking to an original position even when there is strong evidence against it, with the reasoning that one has invested so much time, effort, identity, and devotion into the belief that it feels like too much of a loss to let it go.

8. Books about tribal psychology, such as The Power of Us, by Jay Van Bavel and Dominic Packer. One of the core causes of religion is its tribal nature. Tribalism is an innate human tendency to form groups we value and protect—almost always at the expense of outsiders. The origin stories of many religions contain an implicit tribalism: one chosen group receives the “true” revelation, while the rest of humanity is left out unless it is successfully converted. Even the best missionary efforts cannot reach everyone—and historically there have been delays of centuries or millennia—so the theological structure often implies that billions of people are excluded from salvation or relegated to punishment for reasons having nothing to do with character. This contradicts the spirit of justice and universal benevolence many religions claim to endorse. Many texts also describe divinely endorsed violence against outgroups—neighbouring tribes, rival cities, entire peoples. Notably, in these accounts the divine intervention rarely involves help to resolve conflicts peacefully.  

9. The Better Angels of Our Nature, by Steven Pinker. A data-rich and genuinely hopeful account of one of the most important facts about our species: that violence—war, homicide, torture, cruelty as public entertainment—has declined dramatically over the long course of history. What I admire most is its range; Pinker draws on psychology, history, political science, anthropology, economics, and statistics to establish not only that earlier ages were far bloodier than our own, but why the tide has turned—the rise of stable government, commerce, literacy, an expanding circle of empathy, and the growing authority of reason. It is the kind of scholarship I love best: an argument assembled from many disciplines at once, none of which could have reached the conclusion alone.

For the purposes of this book, the salient question is where religion falls in that ledger, and Pinker's answer is not flattering. He finds that most religious belief and practice has, on balance, pushed the wrong way—partly through the ingroup mindset that discounts the human worth of non-believers, and partly through the authoritarian cast of sacred authority itself, which makes cruelty toward outsiders easier to sanctify. The great humanitarian reforms—the retreat of slavery, torture, and judicial savagery—owe more to the secular Enlightenment than to any doctrine. This is not to say religion has done no good; it is to say that the long decline of violence is largely a secular achievement.

Pinker is careful—and so am I—not to mistake this for a promise. The statistics of war follow a "tail-heavy" distribution, in which a catastrophe larger than any yet recorded remains entirely possible, above all in the nuclear age. What has improved is not the ceiling on horror but the underlying odds; and those, at least, are moving in the right direction.

10. The Folly of Fools, by Robert Trivers—especially the chapter on religion. Trivers, one of the great evolutionary biologists of the past generation, argues that deception can confer survival advantages in the natural world. He goes further: the most effective deception often requires some degree of self-deception, because sincere belief makes the performance more convincing.

A related point about religion and self-deception concerns the afterlife. A soldier who no longer fears death because of fervent belief in Heaven may be more willing to fight; and, at worst, may feel fewer qualms about killing or about the suffering of civilians, if the entire moral narrative has been reframed as divinely endorsed. The same logic can be extended far beyond the battlefield. Once earthly suffering is downgraded as temporary, and eternal reward is made the real currency of value, almost any cruelty can be redescribed as necessary, justified, or trivial in the larger cosmic accounting.

More broadly, this collective self-deception can bring real psychological comfort and social cohesion, while also creating vulnerability to manipulation. Leaders can channel the group toward intergroup conflict, persecution of outsiders, or financial exploitation—bolstered by moral certainty and a belief that “God is on our side.”

11. Determined, by Robert Sapolsky. Sapolsky marshals a mountain of evidence that behaviour has many deterministic causes: genetic influences over long time scales, brain changes due to childhood experience, hormonal fluctuations, and immediate environmental conditions. “Free will” is at minimum far less free than most people assume, and for some individuals—given their biology and life history—following certain moral rules will be far harder than for others. This connects to a classic problem in religious dogma: the tension between an all-knowing, all-powerful deity and meaningful human freedom. If a deity knows the entire future with certainty, it begins to resemble a fixed script—God watching a movie whose ending was known all along, including who ends up rewarded or punished. A religious apologist may reply that human logic does not apply to divine matters, but once you do that consistently, you also weaken the very logic by which the religion argues for itself.

12. Books about evolutionary psychology, such as Spent, by Geoffrey Miller. Useful for thinking about status, mating displays, consumption, and the ways our evolved social psychology can drive behaviour that we later dress up in rational language. Human beings are very good at post hoc moralizing and self-justification. Religion often provides an especially elegant vocabulary for motives that are much more ancient and much less noble than they appear on the surface.

13. The Battle for God, by Karen Armstrong. A history of fundamentalism that is very engaging and full of illuminating case examples. Armstrong’s key point is not simply that fundamentalists are ignorant or backward. Her point is that fundamentalism is, in important ways, a modern reaction to modernity—a kind of militant piety or panic in response to rapid, disorienting social change. She emphasizes the clash between older religious ways of making meaning and a new world dominated by scientific rationality, secular institutions, modern states, and aggressive cultural change. She is also very good at describing how fundamentalist movements often turn religion into a quasi-rational system of certainties, as though sacred myth had to be defended in the language of science, politics, and ideology.

This is particularly relevant to Darwin, modern science, and women’s rights. In the Protestant world especially, fundamentalism became deeply bound up with resistance to biblical criticism, Darwinian evolution, liberal theology, and secular education. Later, these same movements often fused with backlash against women’s rights, sexual liberalization, and other social changes seen as attacks on a divinely ordained hierarchy. When a belief system is predicated on absolute certainty and a rigid, divinely ordained order, a ballot box for a woman, a secular classroom, or an evolutionary biology textbook can feel not like progress but like an existential threat to the cosmic order. Armstrong is especially useful because she shows that fundamentalism is not a timeless, “pure” form of faith. It is a highly modern response to the painful transformation of modern life.

14. Joseph Campbell, especially The Power of Myth and Myths to Live By. These were favourites of mine in young adulthood, though they can feel a little dated now. Campbell was a great storyteller with a strong interest in comparative mythology. He saw myths as sources of poetic insight about history, humanity, and morality—insights that evaporate if you insist on literalism.

After reading Campbell, I came to see that “it’s just a myth” doesn’t have to be insulting. A myth is not a historical account, but it is a portrait of a culture and its evolving moral imagination. Of course, myths are also edited over generations and often carry ideological agendas—sometimes to justify the power structures of the day. Taking a myth literally is like watching a great movie and then treating it as a documentary and instruction manual, policing behaviour by quoting isolated lines of dialogue, while denouncing all other films as blasphemy. We easily do this with Greek mythology, but many people refuse to do it with modern mythologies.

15. Scholars of archaeology, the history of the Ancient Near East, the history of religious texts, and philosophy. Look for scholars with strong credentials and serious methods, as you would in any discipline. Bart Ehrman is an excellent place to start. One should be acquainted with scholarship on the origins and editorial histories of religious texts: multiple versions, translation issues, theological agendas, and the ways texts absorb and transform motifs across cultures. Richard Elliott Friedman, Israel Finkelstein, Neil Silberman, and Mark S. Smith are all very useful in this regard.

A caution: as with many polarized topics, there are also plenty of apologists—sometimes persuasive, sometimes contemptuous of contrary evidence—who can reproduce the very dynamics they claim to be rising above.

16. The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins. An influential and widely read critique of religious belief from a scientific standpoint, with particular attention to religion’s harms. Dawkins is at his best when he is clear, fierce, and empirically grounded. But he sometimes falls short in affirming the psychological and sociocultural causes and benefits of religion—benefits that can exist even when the supernatural claims are false. Despite these issues, this is one of the most impactful and important books I have ever read.  

17. The philosophical works of Bertrand Russell, particularly those in which he discusses religion. Russell remains one of the clearest philosophical critics of religion. He is especially good at exposing bad arguments that have survived mainly because they are old, emotionally resonant, or repeated with confidence. There is also something refreshing about reading someone who is sharp, logical, unsentimental, and completely unintimidated by sacred tradition.

18. Richard Dawkins’s science books, especially The Ancestor’s Tale and The Selfish Gene. These are excellent introductions to genetics in general and evolutionary biology in particular, with wonderful case studies highlighting specific organisms and biological systems. For example, it is incredibly interesting to understand the genetics of bee reproduction and how this influences the behaviour and social organization of bees. The classic “birds and bees” talk really should be updated to include this.

These books also showcase Dawkins as one of the great science communicators, and they demonstrate that evolutionary biology can be wonderfully interesting. It has always bothered me that university students can obtain science degrees—sometimes even in biology—without ever reading books like these. Another very good book about the history and texture of genetics is She Has Her Mother’s Laugh, by Carl Zimmer.

19. Works reviewing controlled studies on paranormal claims—psychic ability, ghosts, miracles, and related subjects. This includes James Randi’s work over many years, and skeptically oriented psychologists such as Richard Wiseman, who has written and spoken extensively about how “paranormal” experiences can arise from priming, suggestion, environmental factors, memory distortion, coincidence, and cultural expectation.

The fairest claim here is not that every study has always been negative, but that after decades of investigation, paranormal claims have not produced a robust, reliably replicable body of evidence. Many “hits” are better explained by coincidence, selection effects, remembering the hits and forgetting the misses, motivated interpretation, and the cognitive biases that flourish in emotionally charged settings.

20. Astronomy Today and other good introductory astronomy texts. An introductory astronomy textbook is genuinely thrilling—even just aesthetically. I think everyone should understand how planets, stars, and galaxies form, what they are made of, the time scales involved, and the astonishing reasoning that has helped us understand the universe.

A modern cosmic perspective does more than show that many old cosmologies were factually wrong. It shows how provincial they were. Many religious worldviews were formed in a pre-Copernican mental universe. Once one has learned even a little astronomy, it becomes much harder to take ancient sky-centered metaphors as literal descriptions of reality.

This list is obviously selective. But these are among the books and research traditions I would most want a reader to have in mind while reading the rest of this book.

References

Armstrong, K. (2000). The battle for God: A history of fundamentalism. Alfred A. Knopf.

Atran, S. (2002). In gods we trust: The evolutionary landscape of religion. Oxford University Press.

Boyer, P. (2001). Religion explained: The evolutionary origins of religious thought. Basic Books.

Campbell, J. (1972). Myths to live by. Viking Press.

Campbell, J., & Moyers, B. (1988). The power of myth (B. S. Flowers, Ed.). Doubleday.

Chaisson, E., & McMillan, S. (2017). Astronomy today (9th ed.). Pearson.

Dawkins, R. (1976). The selfish gene. Oxford University Press.

Dawkins, R. (2004). The ancestor's tale: A pilgrimage to the dawn of life. Houghton Mifflin.

Dawkins, R. (2006). The God delusion. Bantam Press.

Ehrman, B. D. (2005). Misquoting Jesus: The story behind who changed the Bible and why. HarperSanFrancisco.

Finkelstein, I., & Silberman, N. A. (2001). The Bible unearthed: Archaeology's new vision of ancient Israel and the origin of its sacred texts. Free Press.

Friedman, R. E. (1987). Who wrote the Bible? Summit Books.

James, W. (1902). The varieties of religious experience: A study in human nature. Longmans, Green.

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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