The Faith Instinct

by Wade, Nicholas

  Some neoatheists have tried to turn the argument on religion, saying religion is a source of immorality. By citing bloodcurdling passages from the Old Testament, they accuse Judaism and Christianity of promoting immoral doctrines. If your brother or son or daughter should entice you to worship other gods, advises an author of Deuteronomy, “Thou shalt not consent unto him, nor hearken unto him; neither shall thine eye pity him, neither shalt thou spare, neither shalt thou conceal him: But thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people. And thou shalt stone him with stones, that he die....”253

  In his book The End of Faith Sam Harris cites this passage in the course of an argument that “we have been slow to recognize the degree to which religious faith perpetuates man’s inhumanity to man.”254 Christopher Hitchens cites a similar exhortation in Numbers as “certainly not the worst of the genocidal incitements that occur in the Old Testament.”255

  But the morality of religions cannot be reduced to texts, especially ancient anecdotes that play no role in daily practice. Religions are based on rituals that generate emotional commitment to behave in certain ways. These behaviors for the most part reflect and enforce the current social consensus on what moral standards should be. Religions sometimes get out of step with the consensus—as Mormonism did with polygamy and Catholicism does with birth control—but by and large there is an interactive process between each religion and its society in establishing standards of morality and of trust.

  RELIGION HAS LONG BEEN the essential guarantor of a cohesive society. Its role is less evident in modern societies that have divided the world into sacred and secular. Still, whether religious or not, people everywhere tend to abide by their society’s moral standards, and religion plays a strong role in shaping expectations of what those standards should be. These standards are the basis of trust, on which economic activity and much else depend.

  Adam Smith described the marketplace as an invisible hand that induced each individual, by following his self-interest, to serve the common interest. But hands come in pairs. An efficient marketplace can operate only on the basis of trust. The counterpart of the invisible hand that works on self-interest is the one that induces moral self-restraint. In most, if not all, societies moral standards have been secured by religion and the fear of divine retribution.

  But the influence of religion is not confined to shaping just a society’s public life. The most intimate aspects of private life, starting with reproduction, are subject to religious regulation, for reasons discussed in the next chapter.

  9

  THE ECOLOGY OF RELIGION

  And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it. and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

  GENESIS 1:28

  Your wives are your field: go in, therefore, to your field as ye will; but do first some act for your souls’ good: and fear ye God, and know that ye must meet Him; and bear these good tidings to the faithful.

  QUR’AN 2:223

  Religion is based on an implicit negotiation with supernatural powers as a result of which they decree the rules that a society’s leaders consider to be in its best interests. If so, then religions should include many prescriptions that bear on activities critical for a society’s survival, such as its rate of reproduction and the management of natural resources. This is indeed the case. Religions, both ancient and modern, have a lot to say about marriage and sexual activity. Older religions also show evidence of elaborate concern with agriculture and ecological management, matters that in modern states have been taken over by secular institutions.

  Because people will follow rules that they believe include divine penalties for disobedience, compliance is high and the society works intensely to accomplish whatever common goals the gods have set. Such an arrangement greatly improves the chances of survival compared with a society that lacks cohesion or common purpose. But survival is by no means assured. The wisdom of the gods, as Durkheim might have noted, can be no better than the collective wisdom of the society and of its past and present leaders. From time to time societies fall under the control of irrational leaders, and when such people impute destructive commands to the gods, the result can be disastrous.

  Controlling Fertility

  The rate of reproduction is a critical parameter of existence, especially among primitive societies, and religions are a potent means of regulating fertility. Religious practice is usually set so as to increase fertility. Having too few people makes a group vulnerable to attack from more populous neighbors, whereas maintaining a high birth rate is the surest path to survival and dominance, and presents an acute demographic threat to neighbors with a lower fertility rate. But religions can also be used to ratchet down fertility if population numbers exceed the natural resources required for their support.

  There are few aspects of human reproduction to which the gods’ interest does not extend. According to the Babylonian Talmud, “The times for conjugal duty prescribed in the Torah are: for men of independence, every day; for labourers, twice a week; for ass-drivers, once a week; for camel-drivers, once in thirty days; for sailors, once in six months. These are the rulings of Rabbi Eliezer.”256

  Many societies have religious rules on the timing of intercourse, some of which capture the time of peak fertility quite well, even though the underlying physiology was unknown to the rule-makers. In Jewish law and custom, intercourse is regarded as ritually impure from the start of menstruation until 7 days after its end. The woman then goes to a ritual cleansing bath and it is her husband’s religious duty to make love to her when she returns home. The requirement ensures that the first intercourse occurs within the 3 day period of greatest fertility.

  Religious bans on contraception, like that of the Catholic church, presumably increase fertility. Mormons, among whom contraception was banned until the mid-twentieth century, have always had a much higher than usual birthrate.

  So too have many Muslim communities. Muhammad is said to have ruled polygyny legal after the battle of Badr in 624, when many of his men were killed. Polygyny probably does increase the birthrate in societies with a surplus of women. In balanced societies it seems to reduce fertility, because the richer men who can afford multiple wives are older and less fertile. The surplus of unmarried young men, however, can be helpful for military purposes.

  Bans on abortion, instituted by Islam and the Catholic church, may increase fertility. So too may arrangements that allow an infertile wife or husband to be divorced, and place no bar on the remarriage of widows. Homosexuality has traditionally been condemned in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. These prohibitions presumably reflect the belief that homosexuality will reduce a society’s overall fertility.

  While some religious rules increase fertility, others have the effect of reducing it. Some Christian churches forbade intercourse on ritual occasions, such as on Sundays or during Lent. In the Middle Ages, marital intercourse was forbidden for three 40-day periods each year, on major feast days and for three days before taking communion. Given all these restrictions, intercourse among the devout could occur on only 160 days out of 365, which must surely have reduced birthrates. 257

  The venerable Shaker community of the United States carried sexual abstinence to an extreme. Shakers separated the sexes and forbade procreation. Those who wanted children had to adopt them. The sect could therefore grow only by conversion, but turnover was high. Despite their many distinctive cultural contributions, Shakers could not flourish and their last community is now nearly extinct.

  Religious practices can also reduce fertility by raising the age of marriage, permitting abortion, increasing the spacing between children, forcing widows to immolate themselves on the husband’s pyre (the Hindu practice known as suttee), and forbidding divorce between couples who cannot have children.

  S
ome religions countenance the killing of unwanted infants. In India and other countries where sons are more prized than daughters, female babies are allowed to die in various ways. Archaeologists have recovered evidence of child sacrifice from the Inca and Moche civilizations of Peru, from the Aztecs of Mexico, and from Minoan Crete. The most egregious example of the practice is reported from ancient Carthage, where members of the nobility and others were expected to sacrifice their firstborn children to the god Ba’al Hammon. The children seem to have been placed in the arms of a bronze statue which, when the statue was heated, opened and dropped the victims into flames. According to the historian Philo, the children were sacrificed to secure favors from the god, such as safe arrival of a shipment to a foreign port.

  So compelling are religious beliefs that people throughout history have accepted the dictates of the gods as governing the most intimate aspects of their private lives. Even when the gods require actions deeply repellent to human nature, such as the sacrifice of a child, their decrees are obeyed. It was presumably in order to control population numbers that societies chose to extend the iron discipline of religion into reproductive behavior.

  Religious Adjustment of Population Size

  Religious rules like those above may thus affect almost every point in people’s reproductive lives. To any historian of religion it may seem strange that the gods, in their distant supernatural realm, are so intensely interested in the minutiae of human reproductive activities. But from an evolutionary perspective, the gods’ preoccupation with sex makes perfect sense. The rules they decree serve as a powerful method of adjusting a community’s population size to prevailing circumstances.

  Whether or not societies throughout history have in fact used religious rules to control population size cannot at present be proved. The adjustments do not seem to have been made explicitly. But the fact that these powerful methods were available strongly suggests they were put to use, even if for the most part implicitly.

  Most if not all religions regulate marriage, usually decreeing monogamy or polygyny. Marriage confers several obvious survival advantages. One, probably the origin of the institution, is that a woman has a much better chance of raising infants to adulthood if she has a man to protect her and her family. A man too has a better chance of getting his genes into the next generation if he is committed to the welfare of his children and their mother. Another highly significant benefit of marriage from a society’s perspective is that wedlock, at least in principle, settles a principal cause of strife among men, that of access to women. Marriage finalizes and sanctifies the distribution of women and is thus a central pillar of social stability in monogamous societies. In polygynous societies, a state of generally lesser stability is achieved because many young men cannot find wives and a common solution is to let them risk their lives in military exploits.

  Marriage is the most necessary institution for a society keen on reproducing itself. This and other religious rules that increase fertility confer the obvious benefit that greater numbers lead to greater military strength. But larger populations are sometimes at a disadvantage; they may leave everyone living at the edge of starvation, and indeed have done so for much of the agrarian past.

  Religious rules are formulated in tacit negotiation with the gods and include many arbitrary elements. Nor is the negotiation process necessarily conscious; religious officials are guided by tradition and what has worked in the past. So it is hard to establish cause and effect between a religious rule and its demographic impact.

  Still, religious policies affecting fertility seem too often aligned with a community’s requirements for the association to be mere chance. After a survey of religions around the world, the social scientists Vernon Reynolds and Ralph Tanner concluded there was a clear pattern between religious rules and a society’s environment. In conditions of poverty, frequent natural disasters, disease, infant mortality and low expectation of life, religions fostered the view that people should have many children. “We found this kind of religious attitude to be prevalent in many Moslem countries, in Hindu India, and in rural African societies,” they report. But where affluence prevailed, and disease and natural disasters were rare, “then religious attitudes to childbearing were anti-natalist ... This attitude we found to be characteristic of modern Westernized countries, whose primary religion is Christianity.”258

  Maintaining a high birthrate is a powerful demographic strategy, especially for small beleaguered sects threatened by larger populations. The Mormon church, for instance, achieved a growth rate of about 40 percent per decade for the first century of its existence, with a temporary spurt of 70 percent per decade in the 1980s, though its growth seems now to be leveling off. The remarkable increase, attained through both a high birthrate and a vigorous missionary program, has secured the church’s continued existence. This was in doubt during its early years when its prophet, Joseph Smith, was killed and its followers driven into exile in the frontier wildernesses of Utah. They doubtless understood that there was safety in numbers and worked to gain them.

  Pro-natalist doctrines or practices are evident in other small sects, such as the Amish, Doukhobors and certain Jewish populations, that strive to survive within larger host populations. Demographic growth and fertility can be influenced by many factors, from the spacing of children to the timing of intercourse to the issue of whether widows are allowed to remarry.

  Islam was shaped as the state religion of an expansionary Arab state. Whether or not high fertility is a continuing legacy from that period, Muslim populations in many places have a higher fertility rate than their non-Muslim neighbors. This demography has potent political consequences, as for instance in Palestine and Israel where the Muslim birthrate far exceeds that of Jews. Even in the United States Muslim population growth exceeds that of all other religious groups except Mormons, as measured by family size. In the population at large 9 percent of families report 3 or more children living at home, but 21 percent of Mormon families do, and 15 percent of Muslims.259

  The various conflicts between Muslim countries and their neighbors have been accompanied by a high birthrate in many Islamic countries and this, in the view of some observers, has had unsettling consequences. “The demographic explosion in Muslim societies and the availability of large numbers of often unemployed males between the ages of fifteen and thirty is a natural source of instability and violence both within Islam and against non-Muslims,” writes Samuel Huntington. “Whatever other causes may be at work, this factor alone would go a long way to explaining Muslim violence in the 1980s and 1990s.”260

  Demographers generally see economic factors such as affluence and education, not religion, as being the prime influences on birthrate. But religious rules may be one of the mechanisms through which these factors operate. As already noted, the early Christian church adopted strongly pro-natalist rules by elevating the status of women, promoting marriage, prohibiting promiscuity, and classifying abortion and infanticide as murder. The outlawing of abortion gave Christian women in the Roman empire a better survival rate than pagan women, many of whom died while undergoing the frequent abortions demanded by their husbands. The extra Christian women available to marry pagan men often converted their spouses. All these factors improved fertility, writes the sociologist Rodney Stark, who concludes that “superior fertility contributed to the rise of Christianity.”261

  Once Constantine legalized Christianity in the Roman empire, however, the imperative to be fruitful and multiply became less pressing. Christian hermits had begun to live in the Egyptian deserts in the third century A.D. to escape unrest and the persecution of the emperor Diocletian. Their numbers continued to grow after Constantine’s Edict of Milan in 313, in which he ended the persecution of Christians throughout the western half of the Roman empire. Monasteries were soon established throughout the eastern half of the Roman empire, and later in the West.

  By the eighth to ninth centuries, 100,000 monks were said to be living under the rule that
had been established by Basil, bishop of Caesarea, around 360. Eastern monasticism was “essentially parasitic,” writes Paul Johnson. The monks “had no economic purpose. Indeed, they were one of the spiritual luxuries a rich society could, or at any rate did, afford.”262

  Monasticism grew more slowly in the West but eventually a large fraction of the arable land of Europe had fallen into the possession of monastic estates. The European monks, however, became efficient administrators of their extensive holdings and made a more positive contribution to society.

  Nonetheless, monasteries and nunneries of any kind curtail fertility. From a biological perspective, do they represent a pathological use of religion, in a similar category to that of cultic mass suicides, or something more conducive to survival? (

  An obvious possibility is that monasticism, along with abortion and the other methods of reducing fertility, could in fact have served a practical purpose, whether or not it was consciously exercised. That purpose has to do with the nature of agrarian societies, which perhaps from near the beginning of agriculture 10,000 years ago operated under much the same conditions as those described by the Reverend Thomas Malthus in his gloomy treatise on population growth. Any increase in agricultural productivity raised living standards for a few years but induced people to have more children. Within a generation the surplus was eaten up by the extra mouths and the standard of living reverted to normal, which for most of the population was essentially a notch or two above starvation. Modern economies escape Malthus’s trap through their high rates of productivity, but agrarian economies were caught at the edge of misery, for the reasons Malthus defined, except while recovering from harsh population declines.