The Religious Instinct in a Godless World

The religious urge is born into nearly every child. And when we do not inherit a belief system, we build our own temples.

Quillette

“There is no such thing as not worshipping,” wrote novelist David Foster Wallace. “Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.” C.G. Jung would have wholeheartedly agreed. He posited that psychic life is motivated by a religious instinct as fundamental as any other, and that this instinct causes us to seek meaning. “The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not?” Jung wrote in his autobiography. “That is the telling question of his life.” There is empirical evidence that backs up Jung’s idea of a religious instinct. Researchers have found that the less religious people are, the more likely they are to believe in UFOs. “The Western world is, in theory, becoming increasingly secular—but the religious mind remains active,” writes psychology professor Clay Routledge, in The New York Times. He notes that belief in aliens and UFOs appears to be associated with a need to find meaning.

How do we manufacture this feeling of meaning given we are the product of completely austere impersonal forces and we are transient and we will die and return our borrowed stardust to this cold universe that made it?

The compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. Traditional religions do have features that make them less likely to become devouring. They draw on ancient traditions that are often philosophically rich, and they are knitted into the social structure of our society.

That legacy consists of an elaborate set of ideas and institutions designed to safeguard human life, freedom, and dignity—from the nation-state and the rule of law to the institutions of science, health, and learning. As Tom Holland has shown in his marvelous book Dominion, all sorts of apparently secular freedoms—of the market, of conscience, and of the press—find their roots in Christianity. And so I have come to realize that [Bertrand] Russell and my atheist friends failed to see the wood for the trees. The wood is the civilization built on the Judeo-Christian tradition; it is the story of the West, warts and all. Russell’s critique of those contradictions in Christian doctrine is serious, but it is also too narrow in scope.

Atheism failed to answer a simple question: What is the meaning and purpose of life? Russell and other activist atheists believed that with the rejection of God, we would enter an age of reason and intelligent humanism. But the “God hole”—the void left by the retreat of the church—has merely been filled by a jumble of irrational, quasi-religious dogma.

Then there’s human love, there’s the beauty of a child, a tropical swim under the stars, a ravishing sunset, a Schubert quartet. There’s the art and literature of all the world. The warmth of an intimate embrace. But even if all such things leave you cold—and of course they don’t—even if you feel a ravenous need for more, what on Earth does that have to do with the truth claims of Christianity or any other religion? Even if life were intolerably bleak and empty—it isn’t, but even if it were—how could you, how could anyone, twist a need for solace into a belief in scriptural truth claims about the universe, simply because they make you feel good? Intelligent people don’t believe something because it comforts them. They believe it because, and only because, they have seen evidence that supports it. No, Ayaan, you are not a Christian, you are just a decent human being who mistakenly thinks you need a religion in order to remain so.

Enthusiasm comes from the Greek meaning “possessed by God,” and Treadwell’s rapture as he describes grizzlies has a religious fervor. … Treadwell developed a distorted sense of mission, believing that his presence in Katmai was necessary to protect the bears from poachers. Protecting bears was his “calling in life,” and he became convinced that he had been singled out to do this work. “I’m the only protection for these animals,” he states emphatically in the film. In fact, there is no evidence that the bears in Katmai were under any threat from poaching. Nevertheless, the sense of mission Treadwell felt in relation to the bears gave him a sense of a special destiny. Bears carry an undeniably numinous energy and have forever been associated with the divine in various traditions. Treadwell had indeed made contact with the infinite. However, he lacked any structure to ground these experiences.

What I love today is how science and religion are coming together and more minds are seeing purpose behind the universe and intelligence. … We don’t live in only a materialistic world. Francis Collins drove home that in every single cell in your body there’s a code of several billion instructions. Could that be chance? No. There’s no actual reason why things should be the way they are, and chance mutations couldn’t possibly lead to the complexity of life on earth. This blurring between science and religion is happening more and more. Scientists are more willing to talk about it.

If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case.

How do we worship without being eaten alive? A genuinely religious attitude in the psychological sense is an antidote to inflation. The word religion may come from the Latin religare, which means to bind fast, or place an obligation on. In contrast to puffed-up inflation, a religious attitude binds us to something larger, and puts upon us a sacred obligation to the infinite. An awareness of our dependence upon that which is larger breeds the humility without which wisdom is not possible. It reminds us that our ego is just a small part of us, and is dependent upon—and easily influenced by—irrational, unconscious forces that are beyond our full understanding.

My theory of the case held that believing Christians and other traditional believers are partially immune to such heresies precisely because they don’t have holes in their souls to be filled up by secular idols. The space for God is filled by God. I still believe that. What I failed to fully account for is that the religious can fall for false idols and false prophets, too. After all, that’s the moral of the golden calf in the first place.

At the beginning of the 20th century, champions of eugenics, nationalism, socialism, etc., claimed that Jesus was, variously, the first eugenicist, the first nationalist, the first socialist. Now Jesus is MAGA. It’s all very depressing. And annoying. But it isn’t really new. A New York Times correspondent covering the 1912 Progressive Party convention, described it as a “convention of fanatics.” Political speeches were interrupted by the singing of hymns and cries of “Amen!” “It was not a convention at all,” the Times reported. “It was an assemblage of religious enthusiasts. It was such a convention as Peter the Hermit held. It was a Methodist camp meeting done over into political terms.” The delegates sang “We Will Follow Jesus,” but with the name “Roosevelt” replacing Jesus. Roosevelt told the rapturous audience, “Our cause is based on the eternal principles of righteousness. … We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.”

An awareness of our dependence upon that which is larger breeds the humility without which wisdom is not possible. It reminds us that our ego is just a small part of us, and is dependent upon—and easily influenced by—irrational, unconscious forces that are beyond our full understanding.

Sex differences in religiosity are cross-culturally common and robust, yet it is unclear why sex differences in some cultures are larger than in others. Although women are more religious than men in most countries, religions frequently provide asymmetrical benefits to men at the expense of women. Two global analyses (51 countries and 74 countries) found that country-level gender equality was consistently and negatively associated with religiousness (i.e. religious attendance, reported importance of God and frequency of prayer) for men, more than for women, leading to a larger sex difference in religiousness in more gender-equal countries. Results were especially robust for religious attendance, and hold accounting for country-level wealth, as well as individuals' religious affiliation, the moralization of sexuality, age and education level. We interpret results through a rational choice lens, which assumes that people are more drawn to religion when it is consistent with their reproductive goals.

Sex differences in religiosity represent one of the most consistent findings in the psychology of religion, and are often described as nearly universal [1,2]. Some researchers have suggested that women (versus men) are more prone to religious beliefs because they have a greater propensity for mentalizing (the ability to reason about and represent others' minds) [3], decreased risk tolerance [4] and greater empathic concern [5]—all of which are associated with greater religious belief. Yet women are not always more religious—in some cultures, these differences are minimal or even reversed [6–8]. As of yet, it is unclear why there is cultural variation in sex differences in religiosity.

We draw on the rational choice model of religious engagement, which suggests that people adopt religious beliefs and practices depending on whether their goals are congruent with religious lifestyles [9,10]. We also take a functional approach, based on the premises that religious beliefs and practices are sensitive to context or ‘facts on the ground’ [11,12]. That is, rather than providing only symbolic benefits or comfort, many religious beliefs and rituals may be tools that developed through cultural evolution because they promote reproductive success.

In particular, religions seem closely linked to the control of reproductive behaviour. Most religions impose rules about sexuality and sex roles—who can have sex and with whom, who cares for children and how families are structured [12]. One of the most consistent correlates of religiousness worldwide is an opposition to sexual promiscuity (i.e. restricted sociosexuality [13,14]). A rational choice approach might predict that people who prefer high-investment, long-term, monogamous mating strategies will be drawn to religion precisely because it seeks to make sexual promiscuity more costly though anti-promiscuity norms and punishment [9,15,16]. None of this is to suggest that religion is necessary to control others' sexual behaviour, but that supernatural enforcement is one of several cultural tools of social control—one that is particularly powerful [17].

There is indeed evidence that religious norms and practices can affect several life-history trade-offs [18]. All organisms must choose how to allocate energy into growth, somatic maintenance and reproduction—taken holistically, there is a fitness trade-off between future and current reproduction [19]. This can be conceptualized as spanning three fundamental trade-offs: current versus future reproduction, quality versus quantity of offspring and mating versus parenting effort [20]. To the extent that religions increase paternal certainty [21,22], they can increase the incentives for men to invest in parenting [23,24]. There is also a trade-off between offspring quality and quantity, such that greater numbers of offspring are generally associated with less investment in each child [25]. This trade-off seems to be less steep among religious individuals, however, probably as a result of increased biparental care and alloparenting, in which parents, extended relatives and non-relatives provide care and resources for offspring [26,27]. Thus, religion can be especially appealing to individuals following these high-investment mating strategies, whereas people who seek sexual promiscuity may benefit more from eschewing religion.

What are the benefits of religion for women? Women invest more in offspring than men (e.g. nine months of pregnancy as well as time spent in child care), and are more discriminating in selecting mates [28,29]. Mate choice is the best way for women to advance their reproductive fitness; the regulation of monogamy that religion often affords protects that choice by incentivizing their partner to invest in their relationship and offspring. Indeed, because some males are more sought after as mates than others, these high-quality males have higher reproductive rates than females, and benefit from minimizing their investment across many offspring [30]. One straightforward benefit of religion for women, then, is it can prevent the desertion of high-value mates. That is, religious norms make it more costly for men to abandon their current mates or offspring by imposing sanctions or social pressure. This is especially true for religions that promote normative monogamy, which causes a more equitable distribution of mates [31]. In sum, women tend to be more interested in long-term exclusive relationships than men [28], and religion might appeal to them for this reason. This seems to partially explain sex differences in religiosity: some analyses have found that sex differences in religiosity disappear or are reduced when accounting for sociosexual attitudes [16].

However, religious norms often go beyond simply prohibiting promiscuity, and many religious practices seem to benefit men at the expense of women. This asymmetry can take several forms. Women may be blamed for their own rape [32] and held responsible for the sexual misconduct of men (e.g. through rules about modesty). Specific religious rituals or taboos may also benefit men at the expense of women—several scholars have outlined how veiling seems more consistent with male (versus female) interests, for instance as a tool for mate guarding [33–36]. Further, some rituals seem designed specifically to suppress female sexuality. Among the Dogon of Mali, the indigenous religion promotes menstrual taboos, which includes women being exiled in uncomfortable menstrual huts. Use of these huts (e.g. after a woman's most recent childbirth) sends an honest signal that a woman is fertile, leading husbands and their families to engage in precautions to avoid cuckoldry (e.g. postmenstrual copulation). Genetic data reveal that men who practice the traditional religion, as opposed to other religions (e.g. Christianity), have significantly lower risk of cuckoldry [21].1

For men in particular, these religious benefits might depend on context. The extent to which women and men share equal rights, responsibilities and opportunities in society (i.e. gender equality) may alter the incentives for men and women to engage with religious beliefs and practices. In cultures with less gender equality, the subjugation of women to advance men's interests might be more acceptable—and women may also be less empowered to prevent their oppression. Thus, in these countries, religion might be more useful to men as a tool of social influence. By contrast, in more gender-equal cultures that discourage restrictive religious practices for women, religion may afford fewer reproductive benefits to men because they cannot impose social control over women, and thus religion is less appealing.

Consistent with this notion, we hypothesized that gender equality would interact with sex, such that sex differences in religiousness (i.e. women being more religious than men) would be larger in more gender-equal countries. We were agnostic about what would drive this effect, only that the relationship between gender-equity and religiousness would be more negative for men than it is for women. We note, however, that many wealthy countries tend to have greater gender equality and are often more secular [41], so it would be surprising to find a positive slope for either men or women.

Our hypothesis was derived by considering several recent findings documenting a ‘gender equality paradox’—in more egalitarian societies, sex differences are often larger. This pattern has been found with sex differences in personality [42,43], moral judgements [44], career choice [45,46] and a variety of aesthetic preferences [47]. This pattern is perceived as paradoxical, as many people would intuit that gender equality would reduce inequalities or allow boys and girls to be socialized in ways that result in greater similarity. A common explanation is that egalitarian societies allow individuals to make their own decisions with fewer institutional barriers and less regard for what others might think. Rather than leading to the same outcomes for men and women, it allows them to express their diverging preferences, thereby resulting in greater sex differences [47–49].

Sex differences in religiousness may follow a similar pattern. In societies with less gender equality, men may be better able to derive reproductive benefits from religion, resulting in higher religiousness among men. For women, however, the benefits of religious behaviour may be less dependent on the cultural context; for instance, religious groups tend to provide more frequent alloparenting, and this might be the case regardless of a society's gender equality; in fact, the benefits of alloparenting could be even larger in more egalitarian societies, where people are less embedded in kin networks that might otherwise engage in alloparenting [26]. That is to say, because women can acquire substantial reproductive benefits from religious involvement, there may be greater incentive for women (compared to men) to be religious, particularly in societies that have achieved greater gender equality (figure 1).

These data show that gender equality across cultures consistently and negatively predicts religious belief and behaviour among men, but the effect is small and inconsistent for women. This interaction between gender equality and participant sex holds in most of the models we ran, even when accounting for the clustering of countries within sub-regions, the religious denominations of participants, sociosexuality, age, education and country-level wealth.

The results were particularly strong with religious attendance as an outcome; in all such models there was a consistent negative relationship between gender equality and religious attendance for men, but no effect for women. We suggest that religious attendance (versus private religious behaviour or belief) is the outcome most relevant to our hypothesis. That is, it is attendance and overt participation that we would expect to be associated with the reproductive outcomes of interest. Overt religious participation may allow men to more easily monitor women, police sexual behaviour or to signal their value as a mate via religious commitment.

In addition, the focal results were driven by gender equality in education and economic participation, but not political power or health/survival. These results could be consistent with the view of religion as a ‘costly signal’ to indicate qualities such as trustworthiness, dedication to one's family or even simply dedication to one's group [7,37–39,62–64]; gender equality might also influence the payoffs of using religion as a costly signal. For instance, there is some evidence that women's economic dependence on men—which makes paternal certainty more critical—facilitates moralization of promiscuity [65]. It follows, then, that women who are dependent on men (i.e. when gender equality is low) may prioritize signals of paternal investment and long-term commitment; this could, in turn, incentivise men in these societies to use religion as a signal of their willingness to invest in their offspring [7,39].

One could also predict the same pattern by considering other functions of religion. For example, religion fosters cooperation and ingroup cohesion [66,67] and can help people manage their existential insecurities [41]. Indeed, religions are especially attractive to people after facing mortal threats, such as intergroup conflict [68]. One alternative explanation, then, could be that countries that have achieved greater gender equality face fewer threats that require male coalitional coordination (e.g. warfare); therefore, people (particularly men) in these countries are less likely to view religion as necessary. We reiterate, however, that our analyses are unable to reveal the mechanism behind the observed effects, or to adjudicate between alternative explanations.

Our hypothesis stems from a rational choice perspective on religion [9], suggesting that engagement in religious behaviours and beliefs might stem partly from the reproductive benefits people acquire from them [9,16,18]. Because religions often involve costly behaviour [69,70], one should expect religious engagement to be more likely when the benefits outweigh the costs. If indeed one of the functions of religion is reproductive support that often favours men over women, and if the manipulation of women in such ways (e.g. through modesty norms or proscribing sexual promiscuity) is less accepted in more gender-equal societies, the costs may outweigh the benefits for men in these societies, resulting in lower religiousness among men.

Black People Who Left Christianity Are Sharing Their Reasons Why, And They Had A Lot To Say

"Teachings about the rapture were genuinely traumatizing." View Entire Post ›

MSN

We recently asked Black members of the BuzzFeed Community to tell us the reason they left Christianity. Here are their insightful replies:

Warning: This post contains mentions of sexual abuse. 

1. "First, I never wanted to go to church, it was something my mom made us do. Second, homophobia. The last time I went to a church it was a lovely and inspirational sermon until the pastor started disparaging gays for absolutely no reason. Even at my grandfather's funeral, the pastor there managed to blame gays for the state of the world. Just random unnecessary hate."

—justchillman

2. "When I was younger, the pastor at the family church was allegedly involved in a scandal with a child and no one would do anything because he was a 'man of God.' I was instantly turned off of organized religion after finding out. That was the catalyst and the more I grew up and did some soul-searching, the more I realized I could not believe in a God that would protect a monster over a child (amongst other things as well)."

—sdhendrix182

3. "I stopped believing because my ancestors were forced to convert to what their masters believed. Plus, we pray so much and are some of the hardest believers, yet our lot in life remains the same generation after generation. I didn't understand why we were suffering so much even though we went to church and prayed so much. So, I stopped believing, stop praying and start doing and became very successful."

—Anonymous

4. "The amount of gossiping that went on in my church was astounding to me, even as a child. I always felt I had to be perfect or else I would give everyone else even more to talk crap about. The irony of the 'judge not lest ye be judged' Christians being the judgiest people I ever met was lost on them, but it made me really evaluate if I actually believed or if it was just putting on a show so I could fit in. I found out it was the latter."

—afinallullaby

5. "I was raised Catholic but as I got older, I questioned the church and its teachings more and more. A lot of it started to not make sense. When I discovered that I was nonbinary and pansexual, the church responded by forcing conversion therapy on me rather than accepting me. A God that supposedly loves everyone is not going to force that sort of hell on anyone."

—Anonymous

6. "I am a 60-year-old heterosexual African male and was increasingly bothered by the comments and jokes about gay people from the pulpit. I was a devoted and tithing member of a non-denomination mega church. My childhood years were spent every Sunday in a southern Baptist church. But I began to feel more and more uncomfortable with rhetoric that was justifying why gay lifestyles were 'unacceptable.' In short, I asked myself is this what Jesus would say or do with anyone or any group? My answer was no. This caused me to have enough doubt to question a number of teachings and stories in the bible that I was now able to look at with open eyes."

"I began to research the origins of religion and came to understand it is all about a belief, not facts. I then asked a basic question is there any area in my life where I operate on belief and not fact? With that in mind, I had to get honest and admit, I have no concrete data or facts that clearly show me there is a God. The idea of attributing what we don't understand to a God is no longer acceptable to me."

—Anonymous

7. "I grew up in church with pastors on both sides of my family. It's overwhelming as a child to be told all the things you can't do because it's a sin and you'll go to hell. Don't get me started on the teachings about relationships and sex. I wasn't allowed to date until I was 17 and once I turned 17, I was suddenly supposed to be okay with openly dating without feeling conviction. Religion played a huge part in me not dating or having significant relationships until my mid-20s and even then it still felt wrong."

"Additionally, end-time prophesy teachings (the rapture) were genuinely traumatizing. I was under constant fear that the rapture would happen and I would be left behind for some unknown sin I committed. I now have a child of my own and I REFUSE to put any sort of religious teachings in her head and I've told my parents that I will decide what's appropriate for her until she's old enough to make her own decision about religion."

—Anonymous

8. "At a very young age, I was forced to attend church. It felt like a cult. I was cognizant of the so-called church body I convened with. All I did was look and listen. Attending church continued until I was in my early teenage years. After all that I have experienced and been through I made a conscious decision that I did NOT want to be in the same place with any of those people which I will never do."

—Anonymous

9. "I didn’t grow up in church or a religious household, I was just told God exists, sin exists, and went to a few summer bible schools. As an adult, I wanted to grow my faith. The more I started reading, researching, and contemplating, I called bullcrap. It took about three years of combing through Christianity, Black Hebrew Israelites, and belief in God with no attached religious text before I settled on atheism. Honestly, I never felt more at peace or free."

—Anonymous

10. "As I got older, a lot of things in the bible just didn't add up (no mention of dinosaurs, no one could give an exact timeline of the events in the bible, the fact that the whole origins of the bible itself are a matter of debate). Not to mention that Christianity was used to keep slaves in check. I definitely have been persecuted for my stance, but I will never go back to any religion."

—Anonymous

11. "I did research on the history of the church and became very knowledgeable on all its past. Once I understood the roots of the faith, it became impossible for me to logically subscribe to it."

—Anonymous

12. "I grew up in a Baptist church in a religious extended family. My belief in some higher power diminished because of multiple reasons. Multiple friends of mine died in the same year and I just can't fathom how a higher power allows so much grief and hurt (at a personal level as well as across all of society). Mass shootings, violence, homelessness, assault, and so many heinous acts get explained away by free will, but why let people suffer if an all-powerful being could make it better? Modern Christianity is so far from the teaching of the bible. Looking at the mega-churches and the pastor and their lavish lifestyles, they're businesses."

—Anonymous

13. "I was raised in the church and the older I get, the more it seems to me how religion is used just to control the less fortunate."

—Anonymous

14. "I would say that actually reading the bible for myself without someone else's interpretation led me out of Christianity. Once I read it fully, I saw how humans created a God in their image depending on their circumstances and state of mind. While Christians will believe their God is going to save us from ourselves, the work of being better stewards of the Earth and each other falls on us. We must evolve into better humans."

—Anonymous

15. And "I was baptized at 12 and literally a year later I started to question my faith. So I read the bible in full. So many questions that many refuse to logically answer besides the usual 'Have faith.' I have not found anyone that can explain to me why God needed to kill all the animals except for the only two of own their kind on Noah’s ark when it was the humans who sinned. So many inconsistencies and not to mention man has touched the bible. What better way to control people than saying promises of heaven or being condemned to hell? I consider myself an agnostic atheist."

—Anonymous

Submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity. 

Is Religion Good for Humanity?

A clue: no. (Plus: 'sophisticated theology', a friend who would kill me, and why Tom Holland is wrong.)

danieljamessharp.substack.com|Daniel James Sharp

As a good old-fashioned New Atheist type, I have long been of the view that religion is most certainly not good for humanity. At best, it is irrelevant to the task of creating happy, free, and prosperous societies. At worst, it is an enemy of truth and a driver of hatred and conflict.

Let’s take truth first. The question at hand isn’t really about the veracity or otherwise of religion, but I think most people would consider truth, all else being equal, to be a good thing for humanity, as I do. This is by no means a given, I concede, and we shall have to skate over difficult metaphysical and epistemological questions about what exactly we mean by ‘truth’. But if we believe that truth (meaning, broadly, the accurate understanding of reality) is good, then religion, almost by definition, cannot be good for us.

I’m not one of those milquetoast atheists who hedges their bets, let alone a respectably stuffy agnostic. No, I think one can say, with great confidence, that Christianity, Islam, and the rest are utterly false. We know, and even believers have had to admit, that all the holy books are riddled with historical error, scientific illiteracy, and contradiction.

We know, for example, that they don’t provide a truthful cosmology, let alone cosmogony. The world did not come into being because an ancient Norse cow named Auðumbla was thirsty. Allah did not create man from clay. Yahweh Elohim did not bring about the universe in six days before retiring for cocktails on the seventh. In short, every single religion simply got it wrong. Their accounts of our origins are called creation myths for a reason—and the living religions are no less mythical than the dead ones.

If religion was our earliest, most feeble attempt to understand reality, it has long been superseded by the discoveries of science and the inquiries of philosophy. ‘Sophisticated theologians’, to employ Jerry Coyne’s deliciously condescending term, might be able to rescue their faith by making it so symbolic and abstract that their god might as well not exist (“the ground of all being” and all that), but this is hardly stirring or convincing stuff. Such theologians are as wrong, wrong, wrong as the most doltish of creationists, and the contortions of their attempts to salvage the unsalvageable simply reinscribe the falsehood of their starting point.1 They make that which is merely wrong into something that is not even wrong. Worst of all, they make what could be enjoyable and (very occasionally) wise mythology into something tedious.

You might agree with all of this but reply that it hardly matters. So what if people believe bunk? Well, for a start, believing such nonsense isn’t harmless. It’s easy to consider belief in palpably false religious ideas as an eccentric holdover from a more primitive time. But let us not forget just how utterly corrosive religion was, when it had real power, to the pursuit of knowledge.

One example will suffice: the Dark Ages. Now, before you start furiously writing in to tell me that scholars do not, any longer, consider the medieval period to have been an age of darkness, I am well aware of the fact. I know that scholars of the Middle Ages take it almost personally when this crude view is expressed. Undoubtedly, it produced great scholars, literature, art, and architecture. But however much we might nuance our understanding of the Middle Ages, there remains one irrefutable kernel of truth in the old view: it took around a thousand years for modern science to emerge in Christian Europe.

Only with the fragmentation of the old order wrought by the Reformation could science and Enlightenment really take off. At the very least, we can say that Christianity didn’t help science in the slightest (indeed, science arose in many non-Christian times and places before and during the heyday of Christian domination), but there are serious scholars, like Richard Carrier and Andrew Bernstein, who lay the blame for this thousand-year gap squarely at the feet of Christianity. Elsewhere, the great flowering of inquiry and learning in the Muslim world, embodied by the advanced, multicultural civilisation of Al-Andalus, was killed in its cot by religious dogmatism. Islam eventually chose Al-Ghazali over Ibn Rushd, all but closing the Muslim mind—and we are still suffering for it.

What could have been, had the civilisations of antiquity, which were well along the path to modern science, not collapsed, had Christianity not put an end to the inquiries and methods of the ancients, had the spirit of Ibn Rushd triumphed over fundamentalism in the Muslim world? We will never know, thanks to religious bigotry.2

And all this without even taking into account modern religious idiocy! It wasn’t so long ago that schools across America were being hounded by cretinous creationists and their cheaply tuxedoed descendants in the Intelligent Design crowd who rejected Darwinism and opposed it being taught in classrooms. Even now, because of faith, millions upon millions of Americans disbelieve in the central theory of biology. How can the inculcation of such ignorance be good for humanity?

Questions of truth and knowledge aside, what of the social effects of religion? We live in a generally secular age, in which religion (or at least some religious sects, and mostly in the West) has been mostly defanged. I think this explains why so many people have a hard time understanding that genuinely held delusional beliefs can be a powerful motivator to action. This is why we find it hard to comprehend the cruelty of medieval inquisitors and the murderousness of modern jihadists. We rationalize their evils as being rooted in grievances or economics. But make no mistake: religion is an extraordinarily effective engine of evil.

It's not much of an exaggeration to say that one could pick almost any conflict at random, historical or contemporary, and quickly see the poisonous influence of religion. Putin’s war on Ukraine, for example, like the missiles with which he slaughtered Syrians, has been blessed by the Russian Orthodox Church. Putin sees himself as the restorer of a pure Russianness, one based on a rejection of secular and liberal modernity and in search of an imperium over which to rule. For him, Russia is the last great hope of Christianity and traditional values, and Moscow is the “Third Rome”.

To head off another likely response: I am not saying that religion is the sole cause of every conflict. But it appears, one way or another, as motivation or motivator, in most of them, and makes them even harder to resolve. As Christopher Hitchens put it in his 2007 broadside against religion, god is not Great, “Religion has been an enormous multiplier of tribal suspicion and hatred.”

It is not so much that religion causes war (though it is very capable of that) as that it makes it worse. Take Israel/Palestine: here there is a perfectly fair and reasonable two-state solution. But religious fanaticism on both sides makes this solution impossible. Fighting over land is bad enough, but as soon as one or both sides declare said land to be theirs by divine right, the possibility of a peaceful solution vanishes.

In motivating people to action, religion is uniquely dangerous. If you believe you are doing the work of god, of the supreme ruler and moral arbiter of the universe, then almost nothing will convince you to stand down. Even when it isn’t the (or a) root cause of violence, once it is introduced into the equation, peace becomes much harder to achieve.

Now, to the question of morality. Is religion a guarantor of good action? I think what I have said shows that it clearly is not. But if religion can motivate people to great evil, surely it can also motivate great good?

No doubt many charitable people have been inspired by their faith. But there are many other reasons to be moral, and ethics has been a concern of philosophy for far longer than most modern religions have existed. Religion is simply unnecessary for morality while often being the cause of immorality. While the capacity for morality is the same whether one is afflicted with religion or not, religion’s unique power makes it particularly dangerous when it comes to inspiring evil. Humanism is quite enough to enkindle virtue; adding the divine makes no difference. In other words, moral actions are moral regardless of the supernatural, while evil can be made moral if you think god is on your side. Anything can be justified if you believe you are doing god’s work. (I have often thought that all religious morality, not just the subset of it so tellingly named ‘divine command theory’, is relativism dressed up as absolutism—and as hazardous as both.3)

Though we can’t re-run the tape to produce a definitive answer to the question of whether religion has overall been good or bad for humanity, perhaps we can draw some conclusions from the state of our existing societies. Put very broadly, and with the caveat that the causation/correlation relationships are complex, the data shows that more religious societies are poorer, less safe, and less happy while more secular societies are richer, happier, and more just. If religion is good for us, why should this be so?

I would also argue more directly that nobody with even a shred of dignity or decency would wish to live in an extremely religious society. We have seen, and can see even now, what such societies look like, and it is not pretty. One need only look at the Muslim world or pre-Enlightenment Europe to see that where religion rules, tyranny and poverty are the norms. If you think religion is good for you, I invite you to consider living in a society where it reigns supreme; I think you will be rushing back to the decadent, post-Enlightenment, secular West very quickly.

I know that the temptation to champion traditionalism and religion against the tide of Critical Social Justice (or, colloquially, and although it’s a term I’ve come to dislike, ‘wokeism’) is very strong. But consider: is championing another vile dogma really the solution? Of course it isn’t.4 (Besides, wokeism is hardly the greatest threat in the world today; jihadist Islam and the grotesque alliance of Trumpism with Christian nationalism in the U.S., are, I would argue, much graver ones.) The solution is to keep fighting for free, secular societies based upon reason and universalism and human rights. This fight, and the societies produced by it, count among humanity’s greatest achievements. Much better to go forward in this enterprise, rather than embracing religion (or wokeism).

One last thing remains. There is the question of meaning. Without religion, without the supernatural, how can humans even bear to get up in the morning? I think I have obliquely answered this already: secular societies are happier. But I’d like to add that this, to me, is an impoverished view of humanity. Without delusion, it essentially says, what’s the point?

Well, there is art, and literature, and science, and philosophy; there are friends and family; there is sex, and parties, and music, and love. What more meaning can you possibly need? If you need the supernatural to find the transcendent, I pity you.

In the end, I can make weaker and stronger versions of my argument. At its strongest, I can say that religion is not just harmless but harmful. At its weakest, I can say that religion is irrelevant. Either way, religion is not positively good for us. We have no need of it. Humanity is weak and foolish, yes, but it also contains what Saul Bellow in his great novel The Adventures of Augie March so beautifully called the “universal eligibility to be noble”.

I submit, finally, then, that the highest, noblest path that humanity can pursue is one without religion. We must face the uncaring universe with our chins up. Abandoning religion is not a guarantee of utopia (indeed, utopia is unattainable anyway), but it is a good start. We are mere apes, yes—but apes capable of art and science and love. Supernaturalism, which is the core of religion, is a distraction from, even a negation of, this most important and inspiring of truths.

So let’s reject the false, dangerous delusions of religion, and be worthy of humanity—that is, of ourselves.

--

1 There isn’t space to go into much detail on the arguments for and against the existence of a deity in this essay, including the more ‘sophisticated’ ones for, but I recommend Coyne’s book Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (2015) for a robustly atheistic and utterly fatal recent overview, especially of the very silly attempts by the theological sophisticates to rescue their faith.

2 On the point about how advanced ancient civilisations were compared to what came after, I rely again on Richard Carrier—in particular, on his books Science Education in the Early Roman Empire (2016) and The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire (2017). Outlines of Carrier’s views on this and related subjects can be found in numerous essays on his website, especially ‘The Mythical Stillbirth of Science in Greece’ (April 27, 2017), ‘Yes, the Dark Ages Really Were a Thing’ (September 28, 2019), and ‘What Exactly Was the Scientific Revolution?’ (July 24, 2022).

As a bonus, I can’t help but mention that Carrier has expertly dismantled Tom Holland’s view that Christianity is unique and essential to Western civilisation in ‘No, Tom Holland, It Wasn’t Christian Values That Saved the West’ (April 28, 2019). This piece was written in response to a Spectator essay by Holland, which appeared before Holland published his book-length exposition of his thesis, yet Carrier’s refutation of the article is as destructive to the then-unpublished Dominion as it is to the Spectator piece. I only mention this because a particular brand of Christian, and some non-believing but Christianity-friendly conservatives, seem to think that Holland’s view is an original, profound, irrefutable knockdown of secularism.

3 An anecdote on this point. A few years ago, recording a podcast with a religious friend in which we were arguing over religion and morality and so on, I tested divine command theory out on him (at about 38:50 onward). Would you obey, I asked, if you truly believed God was speaking to you right now, telling you to go through to the kitchen and pick up a knife and stick it into my throat? After some prevarication, he confirmed that yes, he would obey this command. So much for absolutist morality, then—thrown to the wind on the whim of a celestial being, whose might makes right! Relativism dressed up as absolutism, indeed. Humans are so much better than the gods we have invented.

4 On April 29 of this year, Angel Eduardo wrote a very good piece for the Center for Inquiry blog on this very topic: ‘No, We Don’t Need to Go Back to Church’. In it, he puts the point very well: “Trading dogma for dogma is no solution at all.”

No, We Don't Need to Go Back to Church | Center for Inquiry

centerforinquiry.org

So much has been said about “wokeness” being a religion that it can fill a book—perhaps several. John McWhorter has written one, and it wouldn’t surprise me if we see more in the next few years. I’ve quibbled with McWhorter a bit about the “religion” label, not simply because many find it inflammatory and it tends to shut conversations down, but also because it really is inaccurate. “Wokeness” isn’t literally a religion. There are legal and institutional reasons this distinction matters, and I often worry that the comparison McWhorter and others make causes more miscommunication than elucidation on the topic.

I can understand the comparison, however. Having grown up Catholic, it’s impossible for me not to see the resemblance. I’ve often said that a great deal of the seemingly insane and incongruous behavior displayed by many of those we call “woke”—and, unsurprisingly, by many of those we call “anti-woke” as well—only makes sense through a religious lens. Much of their precepts are taken on faith rather than evidence; much of their tenets are considered unquestionable; much of their logic seems circular and self-fulfilling; and many of their adherents behave in vicious and intolerant ways toward those who disagree. I still think that’s true, and I think McWhorter is right when he posits that alien anthropologists would have trouble distinguishing these relatively new dogmas from the more standard iron-age fare we’re all used to.

However, I think that same familiarity is causing some of us to misfire when it comes to what we should do about it. A certain cohort seem to believe not just that “wokeness” is a religion, but that it is a replacement religion—a pernicious new ideology meant to fill the hole left by our collective secularism. As we moved away from the church, they argue, we still had that deeply human need for meaning, community, and purpose. We needed something to get us out of bed, to make our lives feel important, and to make ourselves feel a part of something greater. Those desires had to get fulfilled somehow, and what some of us found were the political ideologies currently wreaking havoc on our discourse and institutions. As a result of these new dogmas, we seem hopelessly polarized and incapable of productive communication; we consume ourselves with out-group hostility and in-group factionalizing; and we use social media to feed our worst instincts and desires.

And much like those who look back on exes with rose-colored glasses because they’re miserable being single, the proposed solution is that we should all go back to church.

Given the desperate circumstances and heightened stakes the culture war seems to have created, I can understand the desperation. But we mustn’t make decisions from a place of desperation. There’s a good reason you and your ex broke up. Trading dogma for dogma is no solution at all.

Yes, our pattern-seeking brains are hard-wired to search for and create meaning amid life’s chaos. We are deeply social animals and have evolved to crave community and connection. We’re soothed by ritual, comforted by camaraderie, and need to feel a sense of purpose in our lives. Religions have historically provided these things, but at an incredibly high risk of intolerant and sometimes murderous dogmatism and tribalism, resistance and hostility toward scientific and social progress, and centuries of warfare and oppression. Let’s not forget just how steep that price has been, or else we might find ourselves a bit too enthusiastic about going backward.

I understand that plenty of people would resent the idea that returning to church is going backward. They believe that secularism was the true regress—particularly with respect to fulfilling those desires for meaning, community, and purpose. I, of course, must disagree. I often liken being traditionally religious today to running Windows 95 on a brand new MacBook Pro. You’re free to do it, and it may work for you, but there are far better ways to get what you want and more without the obvious drawbacks and outdated operating system. The energy you’ll inevitably put into working out all the bugs to make your system compatible with the twenty-first century would be better spent simply developing a new one. That doesn’t mean the new ones will automatically be good for us, however. We’re still human, after all, and prone to the same failings as our ancestors. If these political ideologies are serving as sources of meaning and purpose for people, it’s because a better alternative has yet to be presented—not because it’s impossible.

I happen to know that we can find meaning, community, and connection without believing a single thing on insufficient evidence, hating a single human being, or devolving into factions of rancor and division. I know because I’ve done it, and I’m far from alone. All it takes is an acknowledgement of what we know is true about the world around us and a broader perspective on what makes us human.

Look around. We are, each of us, interlocking and overlapping circles of identity and individuality, both unique and unified in our differences. We share 99 percent of our DNA, and yet within that 1 percent we are breathtakingly diverse and multifaceted. We are each a singular, inimitable expression of beauty and wonder; children existing within a fraction of an eye blink of history. We are individual waves in one ocean—together but apart, one and a multitude, infinitesimal and infinite. Everyone I meet is at once a stranger and my own long lost sibling. I see myself in them and them in me. We are, as Carl Sagan once said, a way for the cosmos to know itself. We are stardust. Every atom in our bodies, and in everything we see around us, was forged in the heart of a star, billions of years ago. We are, as George Carlin once put it, simultaneously greater than, lesser than, and equal to the universe. In a concrete, fundamental way, we are all manifestations of the cosmos—colliding, arguing, and disagreeing, but also uniting, befriending, loving, and working together to build a better world for ourselves and, by extension, for others.

Every word of that is true. It requires no faith, causes no hatred, and insists on no dogma. It’s also beautiful and can serve as the core of a sensible, scientific, and secular kind of spirituality.

I’ve always found it strange that the question “What is the meaning of life?” is considered unanswerable. The answer is in the capacity to ask the question. The meaning of life is to experience it and make it as good as we can for as many of us as we can. We will never be here again, and that is why every moment is a gift. Consciousness is its own reward.

Many people claim not to be moved by these notions, but I can’t fathom what could be greater, more numinous, more edifying, more unifying, and more comforting than the idea that we are at once in, of, and about the universe. If we’re looking to fill a God-shaped hole, we need look no further than ourselves and one another. We created that hole to begin with.

Our current political ideologies are terrible substitutes for the things we’re looking for, it’s true. There’s still a baby we haven’t quite figured out how to completely save without the bathwater—but that’s not an argument for keeping the bathwater. Religions had a head start by a few millennia, so it’s unsurprising that they’re further along and still getting by despite their flaws. To say that the psychologically and socially positive aspects of religion haven’t been adequately replaced isn’t a sign of failure; it’s a statement of purpose. It means that there’s still a great deal of exploration and discovery ahead of us.

I’m ready for it.

We are walking wonders of creation—miracles, in the only sense of that word worth its salt. The only thing I need to believe to find meaning, community, and purpose in life is in our capacity as human beings to do better together. I’ve seen too much of that already to believe anything else.

“I think humanity has a streak of madness, a precinct of the mind where magic expels reason.

Without a shred of evidence, all societies have invented invisible heavens, hells, gods, devils, angels, demons, and the like.”

-- John A. Haught

The Global God Divide

A median of 45% across 34 surveyed countries say it is necessary to believe in God to be moral and have good values. However, public opinion on this question, as well as the role of God, prayer and religion varies by country, region and economic development.

www.pewresearch.org

What is the connection between belief in God and morality? And how important are God and prayer in people’s lives? Pew Research Center posed these questions to 38,426 people in 34 countries in 2019.

Across the 34 countries, which span six continents, a median of 45% say it is necessary to believe in God to be moral and have good values. But there are large regional variations in answers to this question.

People in the emerging economies included in this survey tend to be more religious and more likely to consider religion to be important in their lives, and they are also more likely than people in this survey who live in advanced economies to say that belief in God is necessary to be moral. Differences occur within countries as well. In general, people who are relatively nonreligious are more inclined than highly religious people in the same countries to say it is not necessary to believe in God to be a moral person.

Despite variances in religious observance, a median of 62% across the countries surveyed say that religion plays an important role in their lives, while 61% agree that God plays an important role in their lives and 53% say the same about prayer. Since 1991, the share of people who say God is important to them has increased in Russia and Ukraine, while the opposite has occurred over the same time span in Western Europe.

In the eight Western European publics surveyed, a median of just 22% say belief in God is necessary to be moral, while in the six Eastern European nations studied, a median of 33% share the same view. Prior research establishes the European continent as increasingly secular on the whole, though among Europeans, there are notable differences between Eastern and Western countries in attitudes toward religion and religious minorities.

Opinions on whether belief in God is necessary to have good values vary by region

Of all 13 countries surveyed in the European Union, Greece has the largest share of residents who tie belief in God to morality (53%), followed closely by Bulgaria (50%) and Slovakia (45%). Still, in many countries on the European continent, relatively few people say it is necessary to believe in God to be moral, including just 9% in Sweden, 14% in the Czech Republic and 15% in France.

Less than half in both Canada and the U.S. say belief in God is necessary to be moral (26% and 44%, respectively). (For more on religion in the U.S., go to “In a Politically Polarized Era, Sharp Divides in Both Partisan Coalitions.”)

By contrast, nearly everyone surveyed in Indonesia and the Philippines (96% each) draws a connection between belief in God and having good values. And nearly eight-in-ten (79%) in India say the same. But in East Asia, South Koreans are somewhat split on this question (53% say it is necessary, 46% say it is not), while smaller shares in Japan (39%) and Australia (19%) take the view that it’s necessary to believe in God to be a moral person.

Among those in the Middle East and North African nations surveyed, at least seven-in-ten in Lebanon (72%), Turkey (75%) and Tunisia (84%) think belief in God is necessary to have good values. Israelis are split on this question, with 48% of the population on either side.

Additionally, strong majorities in each of the sub-Saharan African nations surveyed say belief in God is necessary to be moral. Over nine-in-ten in Kenya and Nigeria (95% and 93%, respectively) connect belief in God with morality, while 84% of South Africans are of the same opinion.

Majorities in all three Latin American countries surveyed say that belief in God is necessary to be moral, with the highest share in Brazil (84%). Catholicism remains the largest religion in Latin America, and majorities of Catholics in all three nations surveyed think it is necessary to believe in God to be moral.

Strikingly, both Russia and Ukraine have seen an evolution of opinion on this question, but in opposite directions. Russia has seen an 11 percentage point increase since 2002 in the share who say belief in God is necessary to have good values, while Ukraine has seen an 11-point drop. Aside from Russia, only two other countries – Bulgaria and Japan – have seen significant increases in the share of their publics who hold this opinion (17 points and 10 points, respectively). In addition to Ukraine, four other countries – Mexico, Turkey, South Korea and the United States – have seen significant decreases in the percentage of their publics who say belief in God is necessary to be moral.

Differences in views on belief in God and morality by GDP per capita

Overall, respondents in nations with lower gross domestic product are more likely to say that belief in God is necessary to be moral and have good values. In other words, there is an inverse relationship between GDP per capita and the percentage of the public that draws this connection between belief in God and morality. Statistical analysis shows a strong inverse correlation, with a coefficient of -0.86.

For example, in Kenya, which has the lowest GDP per capita of all 34 nations included in this analysis ($4,509 in 2019) 95% of respondents express the view that belief in God is integral to being moral.

By contrast, only 9% of respondents in Sweden – which has one of the highest GDP per capita of the nations surveyed ($55,815 in 2019) – say belief in God is necessary to be moral. This pattern is consistent with prior research that has found that Europeans tend to be less religious than people in many other parts of the world.

On an individual basis, those who earn at or above the median income threshold in most nations are significantly less likely to say that belief in God is necessary for morality. The largest difference between those at different income levels is in the U.S., where there is a 24 percentage point difference between those below the median income and those at or above it.

Most countries surveyed display generational gaps on the question of whether belief in God is necessary in order to be moral and have good values. In keeping with past analyses that found younger adults are generally less religious by several measures, 18- to 29-year-olds are the least likely to say it is necessary to believe in God to be moral. In a majority of the 34 countries surveyed, those ages 50 and older are significantly more likely than those ages 18 to 29 to think that belief in God is necessary for morality.

This is especially true in South Korea, where 64% of older adults take the position that belief in God is connected with morality, while only one-fifth of younger South Koreans say the same. The gap between adults ages 50 and older and adults ages 18 to 29 is equal to or greater than 20 percentage points in South Korea, Greece, Argentina, the U.S., Mexico, Poland, Japan, Hungary, Bulgaria and Slovakia.

Age gaps on this question are present in nearly every region of the world. In Nigeria, Tunisia, Turkey and Brazil, at least seven-in-ten people in every age group agree that belief in God is necessary to morality. However, in the Czech Republic and Sweden, no more than two-in-ten people in every age group take that position. In no country surveyed were 18- to 29-year-olds more likely than older age cohorts to say that it is necessary to believe in God to be moral.

More education connected with belief that God is not necessary to have good values

In most European and North American countries surveyed, individuals with more education are less likely to say that belief in God is necessary to be moral. This pattern closely tracks the connection between income levels and the way people answer this question, because there is a significant correlation between educational attainment and earnings.

In addition, there are differences on this question among respondents at different education levels in several other nations included in the 2019 survey. In 24 out of the 34 countries surveyed, respondents with higher levels of education are significantly less likely to say belief in God is necessary to be moral. There are no significant differences among the other 10 countries included in the survey.

In 15 countries surveyed, those on the ideological right are significantly more likely to say it is necessary to believe in God in order to be moral and have good values (ideology is self-reported and varies by country). Majorities of those on the right in the U.S., Greece, Argentina and Israel say that belief in God is necessary for morality; less than half of those on the left in those countries say the same. The left-right gap exceeds 30 percentage points in the U.S., Poland and Greece.

Though only about one-in-ten right-leaning Swedes say that it is morally necessary to believe in God, the right-left gap persists even in Sweden: Just 2% of those on the left say the same. Those on the right also are significantly more likely to say it is necessary to believe in God in order to be moral in Hungary, Spain, Canada, Argentina, Germany, Israel, Brazil, Australia, South Korea, the UK, the Netherlands and Sweden.

Slovakia is the only country surveyed where those on the left are more likely to say that it is necessary to believe in God in order to be moral: 49% of those on the left in Slovakia agree, compared with 33% of those on the right.

The importance of religion varies around the globe

In most of the countries surveyed, more than half of the public says religion is either “very important” or “somewhat important” in their lives. However, Europeans generally show less religious commitment on this measure than people in other regions.

When asked about the importance of religion in their lives, majorities in 23 out of 34 countries say religion is very or somewhat important to them. This includes nine-in-ten or more in Indonesia, Nigeria, Tunisia, the Philippines, Kenya, India, South Africa, Brazil and Lebanon.

Majorities in several of these countries have particularly high levels of religious commitment, saying religion is very important their lives. Such attitudes are common in Indonesia (98%), the Philippines (92%), Tunisia (91%), Brazil (84%), India (77%), Turkey (71%), Lebanon (70%) and all African countries surveyed – 93% in Nigeria, 92% in Kenya and 86% in South Africa.

Meanwhile, the European countries in the study tend to have much smaller shares who say religion is either very or somewhat important in their lives, including 22% of adults in Sweden, 23% in the Czech Republic, 33% in France and 39% in both the Netherlands and Hungary.

In multiple European nations, pluralities say religion is “not at all” important in their lives. This is the case in the Czech Republic, France, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom, where adults are more likely to say religion is not at all important in their lives than to choose any other answer option.

On the other hand, more than six-in-ten respondents in Greece, Poland and Italy say religion is very or somewhat important in their lives. More people in Greece say religion is at least somewhat important to them (80%) than in any other European country. Lesser majorities in Germany, Slovakia, Lithuania (each at 55%) and Bulgaria (59%) say religion is at least somewhat important to them.

[Continued...]

Religious people do not generally have better life satisfaction than atheist and non-religious people, according to research by the University of Cologne. The study, conducted by Katharina Pohls, Thomas Schlosser, and Detlef Fetchenhauer, examined the relationship between religion and life satisfaction in a cultural comparison across 24 countries. Using data from the World Values Survey, the researchers compared the life satisfaction of people who self-identified as either highly religious, weakly religious, not religious, or specifically atheist, and who lived in countries with different levels of average religiosity and standard of living. The findings revealed that when taking the influence of these country characteristics into account, there were no significant differences between indistinct non-religious and highly religious individuals’ or between atheist and highly religious individuals’ level of life satisfaction – which contrasts common belief. Weakly religious individuals, however, were significantly less satisfied with life than highly religious individuals. “Previous research has predominantly found evidence for a universal and linear relationship between religiosity and life satisfaction, which has led to the conclusion that highly religious people are more satisfied with life than non-religious people” says Katharina Pöhls. The reason for this belief is previous studies were mainly focused on US American samples, without taking the influence of differences between countries into consideration, as well as not differentiating between (non)religious subgroups. The researchers also found that atheist individuals' life satisfaction increased significantly when they lived in countries with many other individuals who identified as either indistinct non-religious or atheist. This could be due to atheist individuals being discriminated in more religious societies – simply using the label atheist may be perceived as an expression of blasphemy and provocation, which may lead to social exclusion. “The impact of religion on life satisfaction depends on multiple factors, amongst others, the type of (non)religious subgroup to which an individual belongs, the country’s social norm of religiosity, and the societal level of development,” says Katharina Pöhls. The study was published in the Journal of Happiness Studies.

Abstract

Previous research has frequently found a positive relation between religiosity compared to non-religiosity and psychological well-being. Recent studies have demonstrated differences between types of non-religious individuals and the relevance of a fit between individual (non-)religiosity and characteristics of the country a person is living in.

This study combined the previous (partially) competing lines of research for the first time and examined the connection between self-identifying as specifically atheist, non-religious without further distinction, weakly religious, or highly religious and life satisfaction.

World Values Survey data of 24 countries worldwide that vary in their social norms of religiosity and societal levels of development were used for a quantitative intercultural comparison (N = 33,879).

In contrast to most previous research, a multilevel regression analysis showed no differences between highly religious, indistinct non-religious, and atheist individuals’ level of life satisfaction when the fit between individual (non-)religiosity and country characteristics was included. Weakly religious individuals though were significantly less satisfied with life than highly religious individuals.

Thus, our results indicate that only in religious societies, identifying as non-religious/atheist is related to lower life satisfaction. When controlling for the context, a curvilinear relation between (non-)religiosity and life satisfaction emerged. Additionally, atheists differed in their sensitivity towards the social norm of religiosity from indistinct non-religious individuals—their well-being varied dependent on living in a country with many other secular individuals or not.

These results demonstrate differences between subgroups of (non-)religious individuals and they call into question a general benefit of religiosity for subjective well-being independent of societal context.

On January 3, 2022, CESifo released a resounding preliminary paper on the social implications of withdrawing religious education from the academe. The article claimed that the “staggered termination of compulsory religious education led to more equalized gender roles, fewer marriages and children, and higher labor-market participation and earnings.”

The paper, authored by Munich-based researchers, also claimed that removing religious education in the academe “did not affect ethical and political values or non-religious school outcomes.”

CESifo, a global research network to advance economic policies using evidence-based data, was founded by Hans-Werner Sinn more than two decades ago.

The authors used data from post-war Germany where eleven states ended compulsory religious education. The reform allowed parents to choose whether to enroll their children in the same religious education classes or the recently offered Ethics class provided as an alternative.

Bavaria in southeast Germany was the first state to officially terminate mandatory religious education, while Hamburg and North Rhine-Westphalia followed as late as 2004. This provided the authors with the necessary data to compare adults who had taken religious education longer than most.

The paper found that the earlier termination of compulsory religious education translated to reduced private and public religiousness.

Another interesting finding showed that lesser religious education allowed adults to have an equal take on gender roles. This also translated to a significant increase in labor market participation while reducing the number of marriages and children.

The paper also discovered that removing religious education from schools did not negatively affect “reciprocity, trust, risk preference, volunteering, and life satisfaction.” “Attending the nondenominational (non-religious) subject ethics does not lead to lower levels of ethical value,” the paper added.

Religious decline does not equal moral decline, says researcher

Morality is not rooted in religion, and religion matters less for moral values now than it did thirty years ago, says a researcher. Based on

ScienceDaily

Morality is not rooted in religion and religion matters less for moral values now than it did thirty years ago, says a University of Manchester researcher.

Dr Ingrid Storm's findings, based on her analysis of European survey data, found that religious decline does not equal moral decline.

According to Dr Storm, whose research is published in Politics and Religion, involvement in religion makes most difference to morality in the most religious countries, and matters less for moral values now than it did in the 1980s.

"Religion has been in sharp decline in many European countries. Each new generation is less religious than the one before, so I was interested to find out if there is any reason to expect moral decline" she said.

Her study found that religion is only related to some moral values, and more so in religious countries and when people do not trust the state.

The respondents to questionnaires in 48 European countries over the period from 1981 to 2008 were asked how often they would justify various contentious behaviours, which she classified into two moral dimensions.

The first is about the individual going against tradition, for example it includes justifying abortion and homosexuality. The second moral dimension is more about justifying behaviours that are against the law and could harm others, such as lying, cheating and stealing.

Dr Storm said: "More Europeans are now willing to justify behaviours that go against tradition, but attitudes have not changed when it comes to breaking the law or harming others.

"As religion has declined in Europe there has also been an increase in acceptance of personal autonomy on issues concerning sexuality and family. Each generation is more liberal on these issues than the one before. In contrast, we find no evidence that moral values have become more self-interested or anti-social."

The research also found that religious people are slightly less self-interested on average, but this can largely be accounted for by their age. This is because the average religious person is older than the average nonreligious person, and older people, whenever they were born, are less likely to justify self-interest values.

"Religious faith and worship also makes most difference to morality in the most religious countries. To be effective, religious norms need to be validated by a moral community of other religious friends and family and social and political institutions" concluded Dr Storm.

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Journal Reference:

1. Ingrid Storm. Morality in Context: A Multilevel Analysis of the Relationship between Religion and Values in Europe. Politics and Religion, 2015; 1 DOI: 10.1017/S1755048315000899

"Countries with a high percentage of non-believers are among the freest, most stable, best-educated, and healthiest nations on earth.

When nations are ranked according to a human-development index, which measures such factors as life expectancy, literacy rates, and educational attainment, the five highest-ranked countries - Norway, Sweden, Australia, Canada, and the Netherlands - all have high degrees of non-belief. Of the fifty countries at the bottom of the index, all are intensely religious. The nations with the highest homicide rates tend to be more religious; those with the greatest levels of gender equality are the least religious.

These associations say nothing about whether atheism leads to positive social indicators or the other way around. But the idea that atheists are somehow less moral, honest, or trustworthy has been disproven by study after study."

-- Greg Graffin

America’s Epidemic of Empty Churches

Religious communities often face a choice: Sell off the buildings they can no longer afford, or find a way to fill them with new uses.

www.theatlantic.com|Jonathan Merritt

Many of our nation’s churches can no longer afford to maintain their structures—6,000 to 10,000 churches die each year in America—and that number will likely grow. Though more than 70 percent of our citizens still claim to be Christian, congregational participation is less central to many Americans’ faith than it once was. Most denominations are declining as a share of the overall population, and donations to congregations have been falling for decades. Meanwhile, religiously unaffiliated Americans, nicknamed the “nones,” are growing as a share of the U.S. population.