The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 25: Speaking in Tongues

Some religions feature unusual behaviours that are accepted as manifestations of divinity. A clear example is glossolalia—"speaking in tongues." Every culture has rituals that gesture at divine intervention in some form, and there is nothing remarkable in that. What is more concerning is the readiness to treat this as a literal case of God "speaking through" a person, rather than as a human psychological and social phenomenon.

This is not a fringe practice. Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity, in which tongues is central or at least familiar, is among the largest and fastest-growing religious movements on earth—on the order of half a billion people, most of them in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Whatever one concludes about glossolalia, it is not an oddity at the margins.

So what do we actually know about it? 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, concluded that it is a "meaningless but phonologically structured human utterance"—patterned sound. It draws heavily on the sounds and speech habits the speaker already has in their native tongue, favouring simple syllables and a narrow range of sounds. It feels like language without functioning as one. Nor is it a supernatural gift. Nicholas Spanos and his colleagues showed this experimentally: naive volunteers, given a little exposure and encouragement, could produce passable glossolalia on demand. Where it is expected, taught, and socially supported, it behaves like a learned skill.

Here is one point I want to make in my own professional voice, because a clinical description can so easily be mistaken for a diagnosis. Glossolalia is not a symptom of mental illness. As a psychiatrist I would not want anyone who practises it to close this chapter fearing otherwise. The research is consistent: its practitioners are psychologically unremarkable, and Samarin stressed that the behaviour is normal, not pathological. It is an ordinary human capacity, like singing or weeping.

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. The sense of surrender does have a measurable correlate: in a small 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. Many practise it quietly, in private prayer, and describe it as calm or soothing rather than ecstatic. So the phenomenon is broader than revivalist spectacle. But spectacle is where its social force becomes most visible.

Some of the most widely circulated recordings of tongues online are public performances by televangelists, including figures who have held real political access. I will not pretend to be neutral about these. They are showmanship. The performer is on a stage, with lighting and a sound system and a camera, and the display is timed for effect. It is showmanship of a peculiar kind, because there is nothing in it that anyone can check. If a preacher says God told him something, one can at least ask what God said. Here there is nothing to ask about. The sounds carry no meaning, so no one can evaluate them—and the performer knows this perfectly well.
What the display accomplishes is to establish the performer as a channel: someone God speaks through. Once that is established, whatever comes next arrives with the same authority. The appeal for donations. The political endorsement. The pronouncement about what the nation must do. One cannot cross-examine the Holy Spirit. I think that in some cases this is entirely deliberate. A person who can produce these sounds on cue, in front of a camera, and who then asks the audience for money, is doing something other than praying in an unusual way.

The best objection to these performances comes from inside the tradition. It is Paul's. In his first letter to the Corinthians—the founding text for the practice, and the passage to which charismatic Christians themselves appeal—Paul spends a long chapter restraining public tongues-speaking. No more than two or three should speak, he says, each in turn, and only if someone is present to interpret. If there is no interpreter, the speaker "should keep quiet in the church." He ranks intelligible prophecy above tongues, because tongues without interpretation helps no one, and he says he would rather speak five words that others can understand than ten thousand in a tongue. And he warns that if outsiders walk in on a whole congregation speaking in tongues, they will conclude the assembly has lost its mind. Paul saw the spectacle coming almost two thousand years ago and told the church not to stage it. A stadium of people speaking at once, on camera, with no interpreter, is not a loose departure from those instructions. It is the specific thing he prohibited, item by item. By the standard of the very letter that authorizes the practice, the modern performances are out of order.

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 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.

A leader skilled in spectacle and emotional orchestration can turn all of this to darker ends—manufacturing awe, certainty, and the sense that "we are witnessing the sacred." The danger was never the oddness of the behaviour. It is how easily the resulting conviction can be redirected into worldly power under the banner of a divine mandate.

I want to end somewhere other than the danger, though, because glossolalia is also the clearest illustration in this book of what I have been arguing all along. Every chapter so far has made some version of the claim that religion's benefits flow from the frame around a doctrine rather than from the doctrine itself—the relationship, the ritual, the community, the expectancy. Tongues is that argument in its purest form. Here there is no doctrine to be true or false. There is no proposition at all: no claim to assess, no theology to examine, not one word that means anything. And it still works. It still consoles, still bonds, still moves people to tears and to loyalty. Here is a room full of people deeply moved by a language nobody understands, including the person speaking it. If the content were what mattered, this could not happen.

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, usually accompanied by an altered or trance-like state, and occurring across many cultural and religious settings. Goodman documented the practice in Mexico, Yucatán, and the United States, finding similarities of rhythm and intonation across languages. Her emphasis on trance runs directly against Samarin's linguistic account, and the disagreement between them has never been settled.

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. It is a small and 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. His insistence on the second point remains the standard corrective to popular assumptions about the mental health of practitioners.

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. Practitioners scored within normal ranges on standard measures, and there was no evidence that the behaviour depended on altered consciousness. It remains the strongest empirical case that glossolalia is a normal practice performed by ordinary people.

Spanos, N. P., Cross, W. P., Lepage, M., & Coristine, M. (1986). Glossolalia as learned behavior: An experimental demonstration. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 95(1), 21–23. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-843X.95.1.21

A direct experimental test of whether glossolalia must be a spontaneous gift. Naive volunteers with no prior exposure were given brief training, including audio samples, and a substantial proportion produced fluent glossolalia on the first attempt. The result establishes that the behaviour can be learned on demand, without religious conviction, altered consciousness, or divine involvement.

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. Paul's restrictions on public tongues-speaking are at 1 Corinthians 14:5, 14:18–19, 14:23, and 14:27–28.

← Chapter 24 | Contents | Chapter 26 →

The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 24: Behavioural Restrictions

In discussing sacrifice I described how costly, hard-to-fake commitments bind a group together—the anthropologist Richard Sosis's account of why demanding rituals stabilize cooperation. That logic does not stop at the altar. It extends into what people may eat, how they must dress, how they wear their hair, when they may work, and what they may do with their bodies: not the dramatic offering, but the daily one.

There is an enormous variety of rules among different groups. Jews keep kosher and Muslims halal, each with an elaborate system of permitted and forbidden food. Observant Muslim women cover their hair; observant Jewish men cover their heads; Sikh men keep uncut hair beneath a turban, one of five articles of faith worn on the body. Latter-day Saints wear temple garments beneath ordinary clothes. Amish and Old Order Mennonite communities keep to plain dress—no jewellery, no ornament, prescribed cuts and colours—and among conservative Anabaptists the head covering remains a visible marker of a woman's standing in the community. Ramadan requires a month of daylight fasting; Lent, historically, forty days of abstention; Orthodox Judaism forbids a long list of activities from Friday sunset to Saturday nightfall. 

Most of these practices are only loosely related to the ordinary moral concerns most people would recognize—kindness, honesty, fairness, nonviolence—if they are related at all.
Sometimes such practices can be understood as ordinary cultural variations with obscure origins. But often the rules are treated as rigid and imperative, such that veering away from them is not merely unconventional but offensive—against the religious community, the family, or God. At times these restrictions make it difficult to live freely or comfortably.

The Mennonite faith of my childhood did not really require very much in terms of behavioural restrictions, except for one fairly trivial vestige: "dancing" was not allowed. I'm not even sure where this restriction about dancing came from. Perhaps it was associated, in prior generations, with some kind of immodesty or sexual impropriety. But as a result, this fun, wholesome, healthy art form and social skill was unavailable in our household. To this day I have a poor sense of rhythm and movement—and a shyness about it as well—and I often wished that dancing could have been part of my childhood.

These rules make loyalty visible. As William Irons argued in the foundational statement of the idea, a commitment that is expensive and hard to fake is, for that very reason, believable. Recognizable styles of appearance and behaviour mark membership: they make it easier to find fellow members, easier to distinguish outsiders, and easier to notice who might be wavering. Such rules do not merely symbolize belonging; they make unbelonging conspicuous and costly. A person who quietly stops keeping kosher may go unnoticed for a while. A woman who stops wearing the covering is visible from across the room.

Of course, many members experience these rules sincerely as discipline, modesty, reverence, or protection from vanity. Moralizing the rule is part of what gives it strength. But once a custom is linked to purity, holiness, or obedience, noncompliance ceases to look like preference and begins to look like sin.

Richard Sosis and Eric Bressler examined eighty-three nineteenth-century American communes and found that the religious ones far outlasted the secular ones—and that among the religious communes, the number of costly requirements a group imposed predicted how long it survived. The most revealing part of the finding is what did not happen: among the secular communes, costly requirements predicted nothing at all. Demanding sacrifices of a secular utopian community did not make it last longer. The difference, Sosis suggests, is that a religious justification cannot be argued with in the way a secular one can. A member who wonders why the rules must be so hard can be answered, in a secular commune, only by reasons—and reasons invite counter-reasons. In a religious commune the answer is that God requires it, and there the conversation stops. Unfalsifiability, which is an intellectual weakness, turns out in a religious community to be a considerable practical strength.

Over time, people can become deeply attached to these behavioural symbols. They can evoke powerful feelings bound up with the religion, functioning almost like a ring worn every day and night for years, beginning in childhood. The symbol stops feeling external; it becomes part of one's emotional life. A person may then feel uneasy, exposed, or guilty without it, and feel relief when surrounded by others wearing the same symbol. In this way the group's surveillance gradually migrates inward—the watchful outer eye becoming an inner one—until conscience itself begins to speak in the voice of the group. It is the same internalization I described in the chapter on object relations, where an imagined divine observer became a permanent inner companion: here an external discipline is taken so far inside that it is felt as the self.

But if the "ring," so to speak, becomes massive and cumbersome—if it begins to hinder ordinary life—then what once felt meaningful can become a burden. There is a name for this logic in biology. The evolutionary theorist Amotz Zahavi proposed the "handicap principle," using the peacock's tail as his model: a display is a believable signal of quality precisely because it is costly, since only a genuinely fit peacock can afford to drag such a thing through the world. The principle is contested among biologists, though the human evidence is more direct. A costly observance is a believable signal of devotion precisely because it carries a real practical price. The burden is part of the proof.

We see similar dynamics in many corners of modern culture—uniforms, fraternities, subcultures, luxury brands, corporate logos. Often these are harmless variations. The darker side appears when people do not wish to participate, when the rules become tools of control, or when symbols are used to police appetite, sexuality, courtship, self-presentation, and ordinary freedom. Then noncompliance is no longer treated as a harmless difference in style; it becomes a source of shame, suspicion, rejection, or punishment.

These burdens also tend not to fall evenly. In many settings, women, girls, adolescents, and sexual minorities are scrutinized far more intensely than adult men; their bodies and behaviour become the stage on which the community performs its idea of moral seriousness. It is worth noticing how asymmetrical the enforcement usually is: a rule requiring modest dress falls on a fifteen-year-old girl in a way it does not fall on the middle-aged men who interpret it. At that point the rule is no longer merely symbolic. It has become a way of distributing power—and, as I noted in discussing the abuse of children, the heaviest enforcement tends to fall on those with the least power to resist it.

A related dark side of religious dogma is condemnation of, or discrimination against, people whose lifestyles the group does not endorse. At root this is often not uniquely religious at all. It is an ordinary human tendency—amply present in secular settings too—to exclude or denigrate those who are different, even when they are not harming anyone. Religion did not invent the tendency; but, as we have seen elsewhere, it can sanctify it, organize it, and lend it an air of cosmic authority.

Yet there are also humane strands within the same traditions that pull hard in the opposite direction. Alongside the purity language and the social policing there are scriptural moments that exalt mercy and love toward precisely those whom the surrounding culture despised: the parable in which a despised Samaritan, and not the respectable priest, proves to be the true neighbour; the insistence that in Christ there is "neither Jew nor Greek"; the prophets' impatience with meticulous ritual in the absence of justice—"I desire mercy, and not sacrifice." That tension is the revealing thing. At its best, religion asks people to transcend tribalism. At its worst, it turns tribal markers into sacred obligations.

References

Irons, W. (2001). Religion as a hard-to-fake sign of commitment. In R. M. Nesse (Ed.), Evolution and the capacity for commitment. Russell Sage Foundation.

The foundational statement of the idea that costly, hard-to-fake religious observances function as reliable signals of an individual's commitment to a group, easing the problem of trust among people who must cooperate. Irons argues that the very features of religion that look irrational from outside—expensive rituals, arbitrary restrictions, time-consuming obligations—are what make membership credible from inside. It is the theoretical seed from which the costly-signalling account of religion grew.

Sosis, R., & Alcorta, C. (2003). Signaling, solidarity, and the sacred: The evolution of religious behavior. Evolutionary Anthropology, 12(6), 264–274. https://doi.org/10.1002/evan.10120

A review of the evolutionary "costly signalling" theory of religion, arguing that demanding rituals, taboos, and sacrifices function as hard-to-fake signals of commitment to a group and its moral code. Because such displays are difficult to counterfeit, they promote trust and cooperation among believers while screening out free riders. The review also surveys the ethnographic and experimental evidence bearing on the theory.

Sosis, R., & Bressler, E. R. (2003). Cooperation and commune longevity: A test of the costly signaling theory of religion. Cross-Cultural Research, 37(2), 211–239. https://doi.org/10.1177/1069397103037002003

An empirical test using historical data on eighty-three nineteenth-century American communes. Religious communes proved far more likely to survive than secular ones, and the number of costly requirements a religious commune imposed predicted its longevity. Crucially, no such association appeared among the secular communes—a result the authors attribute to the capacity of religious justification to place demands beyond the reach of ordinary argument.

Zahavi, A. (1975). Mate selection—A selection for a handicap. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 53(1), 205–214. https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-5193(75)90111-3

The original statement of the "handicap principle": costly, fitness-reducing displays such as the peacock's tail are reliable signals precisely because only high-quality individuals can afford them. The biological version remains contested among signalling theorists—Richard Prum's aesthetic account of mate choice is a sustained argument against it—but the underlying logic, that cost guarantees honesty, is the framework on which the costly-signalling account of religion is built.

A note on scriptural references, handled as sources rather than formal citations: the parable of the good Samaritan is Luke 10:25–37; "neither Jew nor Greek" is Galatians 3:28; and "I desire mercy, and not sacrifice" is Hosea 6:6, quoted by Jesus in Matthew 9:13 and 12:7—each an instance of a tradition's own texts pressing against the tribal use of its rules.

← Chapter 23 | Contents | Chapter 25 →

The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 23: Eschatology

Many religions have teachings about the "last things"—what happens after death, and, in some traditions, how history itself will end. This broader subject is called eschatology. What concerns me most here is apocalyptic belief, the idea that history is moving toward a dramatic divine climax. In some communities there is an almost excited anticipation of the world's ending, paired with the idea of a glorious ascent of the worthy up to heaven—what many Christians call "The Rapture." Those who hold this view usually assume, of course, that they will be among the worthy.

In one form of apocalyptic belief, the world is expected to deteriorate before it can be redeemed. This can foster a passive resignation about the world's problems: these are the "end times," so why bother? Why repair a house already slated for demolition?

Another form is more hopeful: a reforming attitude that reads history as something to be improved, even perfected, in preparation for what is to come. This has fuelled movements of real moral energy—the abolitionists and social reformers of the nineteenth century, the Social Gospel, the liberation theologies, the cadences of the American civil-rights movement with its confidence that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice. Some of the most admirable moral campaigns of the modern era drew their stamina from precisely this expectation. A person convinced that history is going somewhere may work harder to help it arrive.

And there is a third possibility. The historian Norman Cohn, surveying the millenarian movements of medieval and early modern Europe, found something closer to the opposite of resignation: expectation of an imminent end more often produced upheaval—prophetic insurgencies, the seizure of cities, the settling of scores against those cast as agents of the enemy. Apocalyptic conviction did not put people to sleep; it put them in the streets.

So eschatology is not one thing, and it does not always make people passive. Rather, it destabilizes. It can send people out into the world or withdraw them from it, and which way it breaks seems to depend largely on whether believers understand themselves as hastening the end or merely as surviving it. What the two have in common is that both loosen the ordinary hold of the future on present conduct. My concern in what follows is with the quieter of the two, because in our own moment it is the one doing the most damage.

A 2022 Pew survey found that 39% of U.S. adults said humanity is "living in the end times," and that this belief tracked with lower concern about climate change: those who thought we were living in the end times were less likely than others to call climate change an extremely or very serious problem (51% versus 62%). While some of this effect is due to political leaning rather than religious belief, the political scientists David Barker and David Bearce found that belief in Christian end-times theology independently predicted weaker support for action on global warming, even after political partisanship was accounted for—an effect they attribute to a shortened "shadow of the future," the sense that there is little point in bearing present costs for a long-term benefit, since the world will not be around to enjoy it.

Yet the same Pew report also found that 80% of religiously affiliated Americans agreed that God gave humans a duty to protect and care for the Earth, and that roughly seven in ten Americans overall said the Earth is sacred—a view most common among mainline Protestants and Catholics, but shared by a majority even of atheists. The strictly premillennial position—that the world will deteriorate until Jesus returns—is held by a modest minority. So religious belief does not make people indifferent to the planet; the effect is narrower than that, confined largely to a small minority holding one particular doctrine.

Apocalyptic predictions have a record of repeated failure. Specific, confident predictions of the end have been made for two thousand years. William Miller's followers awaited Christ's return in October 1844; the non-event became known as the Great Disappointment, and the movement did not dissolve but recalculated, concluding that the predicted event had occurred in heaven rather than on earth. Harold Camping named May 21, 2011, and when nothing happened, revised to October. The pattern was studied directly by Leon Festinger and his colleagues, who infiltrated a small group awaiting rescue by flying saucer from a flood prophesied for December 1954. When the flood did not come, the members did not abandon the belief; they proselytized more energetically than before. Disconfirmation, it turns out, does not reliably weaken a sacred conviction—it is far more likely to be absorbed, reinterpreted, and used as fuel. This is the same self-sealing logic I described in connection with other unfounded beliefs, operating at the scale of history.

At its rare and lurid extreme, apocalyptic conviction can turn lethal. Heaven's Gate, a fringe new religious movement that fused Christianity with UFO mythology, ended in the mass suicide of 39 of its members near San Diego in March 1997, timed to the passage of the Hale-Bopp comet, which they took for the sign of a spacecraft come to carry them to the "Next Level." Such episodes are rare, and it would be unfair to let a doomsday cult stand in for the millions of ordinary believers who hold some version of end-times expectation and lead quiet, decent, engaged lives. But it belongs to the same family as the medieval upheavals Cohn described—the active pole of a volatile belief, where the end is not merely awaited but met halfway.

The graver harm, though, is the quiet one: letting the world itself deteriorate—a destabilizing climate, a fraying environment—and handing the damage to the generations that follow. It is like leaving your campsite fouled and your fire smouldering on the reasoning that the whole forest will soon burn down anyway—forgetting that the blaze may never come, and that the next people to pitch their tents are left to live in the mess you made.

Even if the world were ending, there would be something profoundly dishonourable in greeting it with passive resignation—or worse, with a quiet flicker of comfort—rather than with help. My own field has a discipline founded on precisely the opposite premise. Palliative care begins where cure ends: when the outcome is certain and the end is close, the work does not stop, it changes. Comfort, presence, the relief of pain, the dignity of the person in the bed—these matter more as the end approaches, not less. No one in that field has ever argued that a dying patient is not worth the trouble. If that is the right posture toward a life that is certainly ending, it is hard to see why it would be the wrong posture toward the world, even if we were in our last days.

And here I return to a thread from the previous chapter. A truly admirable person does not do good in order to get into heaven; they do good because it is the right thing to do—for the intrinsic worth of the act and the welfare of others, not for the prize one might earn after death. That was Rabia's insight, set against the whole economy of reward and punishment, and it applies with equal force to the end of a single life and to the imagined end of the world. To labour for a world one will not live to see, or that one believes will not last, is not futility. It may be the purest form the moral impulse can take.

References

Barker, D. C., & Bearce, D. H. (2013). End-times theology, the shadow of the future, and public resistance to addressing global climate change. Political Research Quarterly, 66(2), 267–279. https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912912442243

A multivariate analysis finding that Americans who hold Christian end-times beliefs are less supportive of governmental action on climate change, even after controlling for party, ideology, and other factors. The authors attribute the effect to a shortened "shadow of the future"—a reluctance to bear present costs for benefits one does not expect to see realized. The effect is modest but survives statistical controls that eliminate many similar associations.

Cohn, N. (1970). The pursuit of the millennium: Revolutionary millenarians and mystical anarchists of the Middle Ages(Rev. ed.). Oxford University Press.

The classic history of medieval and early modern apocalyptic movements, from the flagellants to the Anabaptist seizure of Münster. Cohn shows that the expectation of an imminent end has more often produced revolutionary upheaval and violence than passive withdrawal, frequently directed against groups cast as agents of the enemy. It remains the strongest evidence that eschatological fervour is volatile rather than reliably quietist.

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

The classic field study of a small apocalyptic group whose prophesied flood and flying-saucer rescue failed to arrive. Rather than abandoning the belief, committed members increased their proselytizing—the observation that gave rise to the theory of cognitive dissonance. It documents the central paradox of failed prophecy: disconfirmation, for the deeply committed, often strengthens conviction rather than dissolving it.

Pew Research Center. (2022). How religion intersects with Americans' views on the environment.https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/11/17/how-religion-intersects-with-americans-views-on-the-environment/

The source of the survey figures cited here, based on 10,156 U.S. adults surveyed in April 2022. It reports that 39% believe humanity is living in the end times and that this belief is associated with modestly lower concern about climate change, while also finding that 80% of religiously affiliated Americans endorse a God-given duty to protect the Earth and that about seven in ten Americans consider the Earth sacred. The report is careful to note that the climate association is heavily entangled with political partisanship.

Zeller, B. E. (2014). Heaven's Gate: America's UFO religion. New York University Press.

The standard scholarly account of the Heaven's Gate movement, its synthesis of Christian millenarianism and ufology, and the 1997 mass suicide of its 39 members. Zeller situates the group within the wider landscape of American new religious movements rather than treating it as a mere aberration. His account is notable for taking the members' theology seriously as theology rather than reducing it to pathology.

.← Chapter 22 | Contents | Chapter 24 →

The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 22: Heaven and Hell

Many religions have concepts of Heaven and Hell: Heaven an eternal state of perfect happiness, Hell an eternal state of punishment. Religious doctrines often counsel people to live appropriately during their life on earth, after which they will be judged and sent to one place or the other. In some doctrines the criterion is not even that one live a good life—be kind, avoid harming others, contribute to society, leave the world better than one found it—but whether one professes belief in a very particular way. On that criterion, one could be the kindest, most helpful person in human history and still go to hell for holding the wrong beliefs; or commit the worst atrocities imaginable, an all-round hurtful person, and still go to heaven for holding the right ones.

This concept functions to bolster group affiliation, combining threat and reward. It is like a company that offers permanent safety and support if you sign a lifetime membership, agree to promote the brand, and guarantee never to deal with competitors—but that also threatens to ruin you permanently if you break the deal. The contract would contain frightening clauses, so that the mere act of challenging company policy is branded with words like "heresy" or "apostasy," discouraging anyone from questioning the status quo.

Such a system sits in contradiction to the spirit of fairness, grace, and justice—the striving toward a mature morality—present in religious doctrines at their best. An infinite punishment for a finite set of offences does not make sense. And the idea of punishing someone not for an act but for holding an idea, a belief, or a thought that fails to conform to a prescribed norm runs contrary to most people's notion of a healthy society, and to the "bill of rights" ideals that many of us, religious or not, value highly.

To be fair, the version I have just described—eternal conscious torment, awarded on the basis of belief rather than conduct—is not the only conception of hell. Many theologians have recoiled from such strict doctrine and softened it. When a tradition's own most serious thinkers find a teaching too monstrous to defend and quietly build exits from it, that is itself informative. Yet a great many religious people continue to understand hell in a literal, strict, belief-based, eternal version.

Pascal's Wager

A classic argument enlisted to prop up religious belief is Pascal's Wager. The reasoning runs roughly like this: if you believe and the religion is true, you gain Heaven and avoid Hell; if you do not believe and the religion is true, you face infinite punishment; and if the religion is false, there is little cost either way. Belief, therefore, is said to be the safest bet.

But the reasoning is invalid. First, the same logic applies to any number of mutually incompatible religions, each with its own scheme of reward and punishment—and many of them explicitly require that you renounce the others. Which religion, exactly, are you meant to choose? Pascal's own countryman Denis Diderot made the point with a shrug: an imam, he observed, "could reason just as well this way." One could as easily invent a magical rabbit orbiting the moon who grants eternal reward, or a literal Santa Claus dispensing salvation at Christmas, or Bertrand Russell's celestial teapot drifting between Earth and Mars. The wager does not tell you which claim to believe; it merely exploits fear.

Second, it is a poor moral foundation. It reduces belief to a calculation of self-interest: believe in order to profit, or believe in order to avoid pain. Yet that motive is precisely at odds with the lofty ethical language religions themselves prefer. If a deity valued sincerity, honesty, courage, and intellectual integrity, then a strategic belief adopted out of self-interest would look shallow and hypocritical—the very opposite of devotion.

Third—and this is the objection Pascal least escapes—one cannot simply decide to believe. Belief is not a lever the will can pull on demand; I cannot make myself believe that the sky is green by being offered a reward for it, and I cannot make myself believe in a god I find unconvincing merely because the stakes are high. Pascal saw the difficulty—his imagined sceptic protests, "I am so made that I cannot believe"—and his answer was to recommend going through the motions: attend Mass, take the holy water, and habit will in time "make you believe and deaden your acuteness." But this rescue destroys the argument it was meant to save. A belief manufactured by deliberate self-conditioning, adopted for the payoff, is exactly the hollow, strategic faith that the second objection says a sincerity-loving deity would despise. William James put it best: such a God would "take particular pleasure in cutting off believers of this pattern from their infinite reward." The wager thus impales itself—either belief cannot be willed, and the advice is incoherent, or it can be faked, and the faking is self-defeating.

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

Pascal's Wager, then, is not a deep argument. It is a fear-based sales pitch dressed up as prudence.

* * *

Consider the arithmetic. On average, nearly two people die every second worldwide—about seven thousand every hour, on the order of five million a month. Only a fraction of them subscribe to any one particular belief system. So if one holds a strict doctrine of Hell tied to a strict criterion of "correct belief," it follows that thousands of people every hour—many of whom lived gentle, kind, generous lives—are being consigned to eternal punitive suffering for failing to endorse the right doctrine, while many who behaved cruelly throughout their lives receive an infinite reward. Picture an all-powerful creator pushing more than one human being every second—many of them kindly elders who simply did not happen to hold the prescribed beliefs—into a flaming inferno.

If one genuinely believes this to be the fate of countless people, one is forced into a grim choice among three options: cultivate indifference to unimaginable suffering, accept a monstrous picture of how reality is run, or devote one's life entirely to converting as many people as possible before they die. Follow the last of these honestly and it leads somewhere terrible. It would make little sense to spend a life rescuing people on the merely earthly scale—as a firefighter, a physician, a therapist, a humanitarian—since any such work would be trivial beside the infinite catastrophe of eternal damnation. Proselytizing would be the only fully rational form of altruism; and if the aim were to save the most souls before death overtakes them, the coldly logical target would be the people with the least time left—the dying, the very ill, the old. The doctrine, taken with full seriousness, would make something predatory look like the highest form of love. I find that conclusion appalling, and I think most people would—which is rather the point. Almost no one, including the devout, actually lives this way. Held with full conviction, the belief would license a fanaticism that the overwhelming majority of believers visibly refuse to practise, which suggests that, at some level, very few truly hold it. Ask a believing parent whether they would rather their child die tonight in a state of grace or live a long, happy, decent life having drifted from the faith, and watch how few can give the answer the doctrine demands.

This is one reason the Heaven-and-Hell framework is so morally destabilizing. It rewards fear, coercion, and tribal control—it is the same machinery of "turn or burn" I described in an earlier chapter, now generalized to the whole of humanity—while quietly undermining the best of what religion also teaches: compassion, humility, grace, and love.

There is a sentiment I find ethically beautiful, and it belongs not to Mother Teresa, to whom it is sometimes loosely attributed, but in its purest form to a figure far older. In eighth-century Basra, the Sufi mystic Rabia al-Adawiyya was said to have walked the streets carrying a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. Asked what she was doing, she replied that she meant to set fire to Paradise and pour water on Hell, so that the two veils would fall away and people would love God for God's own sake—neither from hope of reward nor from fear of punishment. Her famous prayer makes the same point: "O God, if I worship You for fear of Hell, burn me in Hell; and if I worship You in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise; but if I worship You for Your own sake, grudge me not Your everlasting Beauty." It is the exact inversion of Pascal's calculation, and the exact rebuke to the whole economy of threat and reward this chapter has described.

The same impulse surfaces across traditions: in Moses, who begs God to blot him out of the book of life rather than let his people be destroyed; in Paul, who could wish himself "accursed and cut off from Christ" for the sake of his kin; in the Buddhist bodhisattva, who forgoes his own liberation until every last suffering being is freed. To enjoy eternal bliss in full knowledge that others endure eternal torment would require a catastrophic failure of empathy; the impulse to forsake one's own salvation and sit with the damned is, by contrast, a genuine transcendence of character. And note what kind of empathy it is. It is not the warm, partial sympathy that flows most easily toward those near to us and like us—Paul Bloom's biased spotlight, which I questioned earlier in this book—but its opposite: a deliberate, reasoned compassion extended to the most distant and least deserving beings imaginable, the damned themselves. That is the form worth cultivating. It carries a final irony: the highest conceivable morality—an unconditional, self-sacrificial compassion—turns out to demand the rejection of the traditional boundaries of divine justice altogether.

References

Attar, F. al-D. (2009). Memorial of God's friends: Lives and sayings of Sufis (P. Losensky, Trans.). Paulist Press. (Original work composed c. 1230)

The principal early hagiography of the Sufi saints and the fullest source for the life and sayings of Rabia al-Adawiyya of Basra (d. 801), including the image of the torch and the water and her prayer rejecting worship motivated by reward or fear. Margaret Smith's Rabi'a the Mystic (1928) remains the standard scholarly study.

Hájek, A. (2022). Pascal's wager. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Fall 2022 ed.). Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pascal-wager/

The standard scholarly survey of the wager and its many objections, including the "many gods" problem and the question of whether belief can be willed at all. A clear account of why the argument, for all its historical importance to decision theory, fails as a reason to believe.

Hart, D. B. (2019). That all shall be saved: Heaven, hell, and universal salvation. Yale University Press.

A forceful contemporary case for universal salvation by an Eastern Orthodox theologian, arguing that eternal damnation is incompatible with the nature of God, of persons, and of freedom. It is representative of the tradition's own recoil from the doctrine of eternal conscious torment.

James, W. (1956). The will to believe. In The will to believe and other essays in popular philosophy. Dover. (Original work published 1896)

James's qualified defence of the right to believe, which nonetheless skewers the wager: a faith adopted by mechanical calculation, he writes, would lack the inner soul of faith's reality, and a deity might well take particular pleasure in cutting off believers of that pattern from their reward. The essay is also the origin of the useful notion of a "genuine option"—a choice that is live, forced, and momentous.

Kvanvig, J. L. (1993). The problem of hell. Oxford University Press.

The leading philosophical treatment of the moral difficulties raised by the doctrine of hell, including the proportionality problem—how a finite life could merit infinite punishment—and the strategies theologians use to escape it. It surveys both the retributive and the free-will defences and finds them wanting.

Lewis, C. S. (1946). The great divorce. Geoffrey Bles.

A theological fantasy advancing the "free will" view of hell, in which the damned remain by their own choice—its doors, in the book's image, locked on the inside. It is the best-known statement of the idea that hell is self-chosen rather than imposed.

Pascal, B. (1966). Pensées (A. J. Krailsheimer, Trans.). Penguin. (Original work published 1670)

The posthumous fragments containing the wager, in a single celebrated section, together with Pascal's own reply to the objection that belief cannot be willed: act as if you believed—take holy water, hear Masses—until habit produces faith. The reply is widely regarded as conceding the very weakness it was meant to repair.

Russell, B. (1997). Is there a God? In J. G. Slater & P. Köllner (Eds.), The collected papers of Bertrand Russell: Vol. 11. Last philosophical testament, 1943–68. Routledge. (Original work written 1952)

The essay, commissioned but never published in its day, in which Russell introduces the celestial teapot to illustrate that the burden of proof lies with the one making an unfalsifiable claim, not with the doubter. The image has become the standard illustration of that principle.

A note on scriptural and primary references, handled as sources rather than formal citations: the impulse to stand with the condemned appears in Exodus 32:32, where Moses asks to be blotted out of God's book rather than see his people destroyed, and in Romans 9:3, where Paul wishes himself "accursed and cut off from Christ" for the sake of his kindred; the parallel Buddhist ideal is the bodhisattva vow of Mahāyāna tradition—exemplified by Kṣitigarbha—to forgo final liberation until the hells themselves are emptied.

 

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The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 21: Historical Atrocities

Humans have engaged in every manner of atrocity, and despite the horrors of the past century, we see repeatedly—across earlier centuries as well—how easily cruelty can be normalized, ritualized, and justified. The human capacity for harm is ancient. What is especially sobering is how often the major religions have managed to make cruelty feel righteous. Faith is not the only cause of human violence, but it has been very effective at sanctifying it.

Many historical atrocities have occurred under the banner of religion, especially when religious identity fused with conquest, state power, or tribal domination. Charlemagne's campaigns against the Saxons (772–804) are an early example, fusing military conquest with forced Christianization. Saxon resistance was treated as defiance of Christian rule. Forced conversion was backed by severe legal penalties, including death for refusing baptism. The suppression of Saxon resistance led to episodes of mass killing, including the notorious Massacre of Verden in 782, where, according to the Frankish annals, 4,500 Saxons were beheaded in a single day. Some historians question the accuracy of this figure, but no one doubts that the campaign was brutal.

The Crusades (1095–1291) likewise included mass killing justified in religious terms. The Rhineland massacres of 1096 saw crusader mobs fall upon the Jewish communities of Speyer, Worms, Mainz, and Cologne, forcing conversion or death. And when Jerusalem fell in 1099, Muslims and Jews were slaughtered.

The Thirty Years' War (1618–1648)—which began as a struggle between Catholic and Protestant rulers within the Holy Roman Empire before widening into a broader conflict—became one of the most devastating catastrophes in European history. Ending with the Peace of Westphalia, it killed several million people and laid waste to wide stretches of central Europe, with some German territories losing a third or more of their population and the worst-hit areas more than half.

The Spanish Inquisition (established in 1478 and not abolished until 1834) built a machinery of religiously motivated coercion and intimidation. It targeted conversos—Jews who had converted to Christianity, often under intense pressure—and later Moriscos, Muslims who had likewise been baptized, as well as Protestants. The exact death toll is debated—modern estimates put the executions in the low thousands, far below the figures of popular legend—but the essential point is not: it was a system designed to enforce conformity through fear, punishment, and, in many cases, execution.

Other episodes fit the same pattern. The witch hunts of early modern Europe and its colonies, which I discussed in an earlier chapter, ran from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries and produced perhaps 100,000 trials and around 45,000 executions, the great majority of the victims women. These persecutions were not merely random superstition; they were tied to a specifically Christian demonology that linked "witchcraft" to heresy, to Satan, and to a cosmic struggle against evil. The same logic appeared in campaigns against peoples classified as pagan or heathen. In the Baltic Crusades, military orders such as the Brothers of the Sword and later the Teutonic Knights pursued conquest together with Christianization, and forced conversion was part of the programme. In Muslim history, the language of jihad was at times used to frame warfare—but it should be emphasized that jihad does not simply mean "holy war," and in Islamic thought it has long encompassed moral and spiritual struggle as well.

Colonial movements in later centuries often used religious language—"civilization," "salvation," missionary uplift—as moral cover for extraction and domination. Leopold II's Congo Free State (1885–1908) was not simply a Belgian colony but effectively Leopold's personal possession. It was presented as a humanitarian venture that would end slavery and bring religion and modern life to the Congolese. In practice it became a regime of forced labour, hostage-taking, mutilation, and terror, likely causing millions of deaths, though the exact figure is disputed. It was wrapped in Christian and "civilizing" rhetoric, and missionaries were part of that colonial world—though many of them later helped expose the abuses.

The transatlantic slave trade and the slavery it fed (spanning roughly the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries) were likewise defended by many religious leaders and institutions, often through distorted readings of scripture. One recurring example was the so-called "Curse of Ham"—in fact Noah's curse on his grandson Canaan, later twisted into a supposed justification for African slavery—even as other religious figures, the Quakers most prominently, became central to the abolitionist movement. The point is not that religion uniquely caused the exploitation, but that it was repeatedly available to sanctify it.

The same pattern appears in Canadian history. "Christianization" was one motive—alongside the state's assimilationist policy—behind the residential school system. Church-run schools began earlier, but by the 1880s the federal government had adopted an official policy of funding residential schools across the country, and the last did not close until 1996. More than 150,000 First Nations, Inuit, and Métis children passed through these church-run, state-funded institutions, which were designed to sever children from their families and cultures and were marked by widespread abuse. Thousands died, and the records remain incomplete.

The Spanish conquest of the Americas, beginning with Columbus in 1492 and intensifying with Cortés's overthrow of the Aztec empire in 1519–1521, likewise brought catastrophic Indigenous death and cultural devastation. Disease accounted for much of the mortality, but religious institutions were deeply entangled with the colonial project. Conquerors often invoked the Requerimiento—an official legal demand, drafted by Spanish authorities and read aloud before conquest, which asserted the Pope's authority and Spain's claim to the land, demanded submission to the Crown and acceptance of Christian preaching, and threatened war, enslavement, and dispossession for refusal. In practice it was frequently read—in Spanish or Latin—to people who could not understand a word of it, sometimes with no translation at all. To be fair, some clergy, most famously Bartolomé de las Casas, later fought publicly against the abuse of Indigenous peoples.

It would be a distortion, though, to leave the impression that this is a Christian failing in particular. The examples above are drawn largely from the Christian West, because that is the history I know best and the record most fully documented in the languages I read—not because other traditions have been innocent of the same logic. As the sociologist Mark Juergensmeyer has documented, the sacralization of violence is a cross-traditional phenomenon, recurring across Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism, and Buddhism alike. Buddhist nationalist movements in Myanmar and Sri Lanka—the tradition most often imagined in the West as constitutionally peaceful—have in recent years inflamed mob violence and persecution against Muslim minorities. Hindu nationalism has been entangled with deadly communal violence in India. Warfare and persecution have repeatedly been waged in the name of Islam, which has also been riven by its own lethal divisions. None has clean hands.

You might object that most of these horrors were really about land, power, and tribe, and that religion was merely the pretext. Charlemagne wanted Saxony, and Leopold wanted rubber. But my claim was never that religion is the sole cause of human cruelty; it is that religion is extremely good at sanctifying cruelty that would otherwise have met more resistance. A sanctification is more dangerous, because a pretext can be seen through, while a sanctification is believed. People acting out of tribal self-interest still have to deal with their conscience. But with religion, self-interest can be framed as the will of God—hell behind every hesitation and a congregation to bless the outcome. In that case, the conscience that might have objected is recruited to the cause instead. That is the specific contribution religion has so often made: not to invent the cruelty, but to remove the brakes.

Of course, violence and atrocity have flourished outside religion as well, and the secular ideologies of the twentieth century—fascism, Stalinism, Maoism—justified horrors of their own on an industrial scale. So the claim here is not that religion is the uniquely guilty party in the long history of human cruelty. The claim is narrower: that religion has repeatedly proved able to take ordinary, decent people and persuade them that cruelty is holy—and that it has not been a reliable protection against humanity's worst impulses. Cruelty, as I argued earlier, does not originate in belief. But belief has been remarkably good at blessing it.

References

Goldenberg, D. M. (2003). The curse of Ham: Race and slavery in early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Princeton University Press.

Traces how the Genesis story of Noah's curse on Canaan was gradually transformed, in extra-biblical interpretation, into the "Curse of Ham" used to justify the enslavement of Africans. Goldenberg shows that the racial reading is absent from the text itself and emerged only later. Stephen Haynes's Noah's Curse covers its long afterlife in American proslavery thought.

Hochschild, A. (1998). King Leopold's ghost: A story of greed, terror, and heroism in colonial Africa. Houghton Mifflin.

The standard popular history of Leopold II's Congo Free State, documenting the forced-labour rubber regime and its vast death toll, together with the missionaries and reformers who exposed it. Hochschild describes the killing as "of genocidal proportions" while noting that it was not, strictly, a planned genocide. The religious "civilizing" rhetoric that accompanied the venture is shown to be thin cover for an essentially economic extraction.

Juergensmeyer, M. (2003). Terror in the mind of God: The global rise of religious violence (3rd ed.). University of California Press.

A comparative study of religiously motivated violence across Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism, and Buddhism, arguing that the sacralization of conflict is a cross-traditional phenomenon rather than the property of any single faith. Juergensmeyer examines how religious framing transforms ordinary grievance into cosmic struggle, raising the stakes and lowering the restraints on violence. For the Buddhist cases specifically, see also Jerryson and Juergensmeyer's Buddhist Warfare (2010).

Kamen, H. (1998). The Spanish Inquisition: A historical revision. Yale University Press.

The leading revisionist history, which dismantles the inflated "Black Legend" figures and places executions over the Inquisition's full span in the low thousands. Kamen situates the institution within its political context without minimizing its machinery of fear. The result is neither the cartoon of popular legend nor an apology, but a sober account of bureaucratized religious coercion.

las Casas, B. de. (1992). A short account of the destruction of the Indies (N. Griffin, Trans.). Penguin. (Original work published 1552)

The Dominican friar's eyewitness denunciation of Spanish cruelty toward Indigenous peoples, addressed to the Crown. A foundational document of conscience from within the colonial Church, and the most famous contemporary protest against the conquest. Its very existence complicates any simple account of religion's role, since the sharpest early critic of the atrocities was himself a priest.

Levack, B. P. (2006). The witch-hunt in early modern Europe (3rd ed.). Pearson Longman.

The standard synthesis of the European witch trials (c. 1450–1750). Careful regional accounting yields a consensus near 45,000 executions out of roughly 100,000 trials—far below the figures of popular legend—and locates the persecutions within Christian demonology and the law. Levack is particularly good on how learned theology and local fear reinforced one another.

Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. (2015). Honouring the truth, reconciling for the future: Summary of the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.

The official summation of Canada's residential school system, which it characterizes as "cultural genocide." It documents the more than 150,000 First Nations, Inuit, and Métis children who passed through the church-run, state-funded schools, the thousands who died, and the incompleteness of the records. It remains the authoritative account of the system's scale, intent, and human cost.

Tyerman, C. (2006). God's war: A new history of the Crusades. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

A comprehensive single-volume history of the crusading movement, covering the Rhineland massacres of 1096 and the slaughter that followed the fall of Jerusalem in 1099, as well as the theology that framed holy war. Tyerman is attentive both to the genuine religious motivation of the crusaders and to the political and material interests entangled with it.

Wilson, P. H. (2009). The Thirty Years War: Europe's tragedy. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

The definitive modern history, which stresses that the war was as much dynastic and political as confessional, and assesses the demographic catastrophe—on the order of a quarter of the German population—without recourse to the most exaggerated figures. Wilson's account is a useful corrective to the idea that the war was a purely religious conflict, while making clear how thoroughly confessional identity shaped it.

A note on primary documents, handled as sources rather than formal citations: the figure of 4,500 executed at Verden comes from the Royal Frankish Annals; the death penalty for refusing baptism is set out in the Capitulatio de partibus Saxoniae (c. 782–785); the conquest demand is the Requerimiento of 1513, drafted by Juan López de Palacios Rubios; and the scriptural passage behind the "Curse of Ham" is Genesis 9:20–27, in which Noah curses his grandson Canaan.

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