by Robin Hanson
Finally, we’d like to make a plea for some charity and humility, especially from our atheist readers. It’s easy for nonbelievers to deride supernatural beliefs as “delusions” or “harmful superstitions,” with the implication that believers are brainwashed into doing things they wouldn’t otherwise do. Now we, your two coauthors, aren’t religious ourselves, and we have no special love for religion. And we don’t want to deny that people are sometimes harmed by their religions. (Just ask the families of those who died at Jonestown.) Nevertheless, we think people can generally intuit what’s good for them, even if they don’t have an analytical understanding of why it’s good for them. In particular, they have a keen sense for their concrete self-interest, for when things are working out in their favor versus when they’re getting a raw deal. So whenever adherents feel trapped or oppressed by their religion, as many do, they’re probably right.14 But in most times and places, people feel powerfully attracted to religion. They continue to participate, week after week and year after year—not with reluctance but with tremendous zeal. And we’d like to give them the benefit of the doubt that they know what’s good for them.15
In fact, the vast majority of weekly churchgoers are socially well-adjusted and successful across a broad range of outcomes. Compared to their secular counterparts, religious people tend to smoke less,16 donate and volunteer more,17 have more social connections,18 get and stay married more,19 and have more kids.20 They also live longer,21 earn more money,22 experience less depression,23 and report greater happiness and fulfillment in their lives.24 These are only correlations, yes, which exist to some extent because healthier, better-adjusted people choose to join religions. Still, it’s hard to square the data with the notion that religions are, by and large, harmful to their members.
If religions are delusions, then, they seem to be especially useful ones. And to understand why, we’ll have to expand our scope beyond the supernatural beliefs and seemingly maladaptive practices.
RELIGIONS AS SOCIAL SYSTEMS
Given the other chapters in this book, it’s clear that we’re going to seek to explain religion not by looking inward, to our self-deceiving minds, but rather by looking outward, to social incentives. We’ve already seen how social incentives can lead to some pretty strange behaviors, like painting cave walls and using leeches as “medicine.” But what kind of social incentives lead us to practice religion?
The answer given by most serious scholars of religion is community. Or to give it the emphasis it deserves:
Community, community, community!
“Religion,” says Jonathan Haidt, “is a team sport.”25 “God,” says Émile Durkheim, “is society writ large.”26 In this view, religion isn’t a matter of private beliefs, but rather of shared beliefs and, more importantly, communal practices. These interlocking pieces work together, creating strong social incentives for individuals to act (selfishly) in ways that benefit the entire religious community. And the net result is a highly cohesive and cooperative social group. A religion, therefore, isn’t just a set of propositional beliefs about God and the afterlife; it’s an entire social system.27
Figure 7 shows this in the form of a diagram:28
Figure 7. Communal Model of Religion
It’s worth taking a moment to reflect on the logic of community. Communities provide benefits to the people living in them; otherwise, everyone would just live on their own.29 Some of these benefits, like safety in numbers and economic specialization, come more or less for free, simply by virtue of congregation. But many other benefits require individuals to forego their narrow self-interest in the name of cooperation.
Unfortunately, cooperation is hard. Groups that are chock full of peaceful, rule-following cooperators are ripe for exploitation. In a religious context, cheaters can take many forms. Some people might put on a show of great piety, but then mistreat others whenever it’s convenient—like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, preying on the flock. Others will simply engage in the casual form of cheating known as free-riding. This might entail people taking advantage of church services without giving anything back, or perhaps seeking help from a religious group during their time of need, but then abandoning it as soon as they’re back on their feet. Even something as simple as reading email during a sermon could be construed as cheating.
To lock in the benefits of cooperation, then, a community also needs robust mechanisms to keep cheaters at bay. We’ve seen this before (in Chapters 3 and 4 on norms and cheating, respectively). But in addition to the standard tools for norm enforcement—monitoring, gossip, and punishment—religions have a few extra tricks up their sleeve.
In the next few sections, we’ll examine various features of religion, including (but by no means limited to) supernatural beliefs. We’ll be approaching them as social technologies designed to discourage cheating and facilitate cooperation within a community. It’s in light of these goals that the stranger facets of religion begin to make sense.
SACRIFICE, LOYALTY, AND TRUST
For an individual human living alone in the woods, it never makes sense to take a resource and just throw it away or burn it up. But add a few other humans to the scene, and suddenly it can be perfectly rational—because, as we’ve seen many times, sacrifice is socially attractive.30 Who makes a better ally: someone who’s only looking out for number one or someone who shows loyalty, a willingness to sacrifice for others’ benefit? Clearly it’s the latter. And the greater the sacrifice, the more trust it engenders.
Friends and family make sacrifices for each other all the time. But we can’t sacrifice for every person we might meet for an ephemeral, one-off interaction. The solution that religions have struck upon is for members to make ritual sacrifices in the name of the group. In nominal terms, many sacrifices are made to a god, but following Durkheim, we should note that God often functions as a symbol for society. So whenever people make a sacrifice to your god, they’re implicitly showing loyalty to you—and to everyone else who worships at the same altar.31
Crucially, rituals of sacrifice are honest signals whose cost makes them hard to fake. It’s easy to say, “I’m a Muslim,” but to get full credit, you also have to act like a Muslim—by answering the daily calls to prayer, for example, or undertaking the Hajj. Actions speak louder than words, and expensive actions speak the loudest.
Personal sacrifices, then, are a way of “paying one’s dues” to a social group. Some groups require a large upfront payment in the form of an initiation ritual, like a fraternity hazing or military boot camp. By setting up barriers to entry and forcing initiates to pay a high cost, groups ensure that only the most devoted and committed are admitted as members.32 Regular religious rituals work the same way, but rather than (or in addition to) requiring one large upfront cost, these are smaller ongoing costs—a way of paying dues on a weekly or yearly basis.
These rituals of sacrifice take many different forms, depending on which type of resource is being sacrificed. Food, for example, is a common offering, whether it’s an animal sacrifice, a libation, or fruit left at the temple for the gods. Money is sacrificed through alms, tithing, and other acts of charity. Health is sacrificed by fasting, and in much more graphic displays by mortification of the flesh (e.g., self-flagellation). During the Mourning of Muharram, for example, some Muslims beat themselves bloody with chains, swords, and knives—an extreme sacrifice showing equally extreme devotion.33 Some types of pleasure are also foregone in the name of religion, as when people abstain from drugs, alcohol, and certain sexual practices, or when a Catholic gives up chocolate for Lent.
Time and energy are perhaps the easiest resources to waste, and we offer them in abundance. Examples include weekly church attendance, sitting shiva, and the Tibetan sand mandalas we saw earlier. This helps explain why people don’t browse the web during church. Yes, you probably have “better things to do” than listen to a sermon, which is precisely why you get loyalty points for listening patiently. In other words, the boredom of sermons may be a fe
ature rather than a bug.
Status is sacrificed by many acts of worship, especially rituals that involve the body, like kneeling, bowing, and prostrating.34 Jesus famously washed the feet of his disciples. Even the simple act of wearing a yarmulke is understood as a symbolic way for Jews to humble themselves before God. Less symbolically, many practices also serve to stigmatize practitioners in the eyes of outsiders. By wearing “strange” clothes or refusing to eat from the same plates as secular folk, members of a given sect lose standing in broader society (while gaining it within the sect, of course).35
Fertility isn’t often wasted, but when it is, it’s wasted in a big way, as when religious leaders take vows of celibacy.36 Note that positions of greater trust and authority require larger sacrifices; if the Pope had children, for example, his loyalty would be split between his family and his faith, and Catholics would have a harder time trusting him to lead the Church.37
Some rituals combine many different resources into a single sacrificial act. A pilgrimage like the Hajj is a cornucopic offering of time, energy, money, and sometimes health, all “wasted” for the sake of cementing one’s dedication to Islam. In exchange for these acts of devotion, a pilgrim earns greater trust and higher standing among other Muslims, both back home and around the world.
Note, however, that a community’s supply of social rewards is limited, so we’re often competing to show more loyalty than others—to engage in a “holier than thou” arms race. And this leads, predictably, to the kind of extreme displays and exaggerated features we find across the biological world. If the Hajj seems extravagant, remember the peacock’s tail or the towering redwoods.
But note, crucially, that sacrifice isn’t a zero-sum game; there are big benefits that accrue to the entire community. All these sacrifices work to maintain high levels of commitment and trust among community members, which ultimately reduces the need to monitor everyone’s behavior.38 The net result is the ability to sustain cooperative groups at larger scales and over longer periods of time.39
Today, we facilitate trust between strangers using contracts, credit scores, and letters of reference. But before these institutions had been invented, weekly worship and other costly sacrifices were a vital social technology. In 1000 a.d., church attendance was a pretty good (though imperfect) way to gauge whether someone was trustworthy. You’d be understandably wary of your neighbors who didn’t come to church, for example, because they’re not “paying their dues” to the community. Society can’t trust you unless you put some skin in the game.
Even in the modern world, religious observance continues to be an important social cue. To give just one example, Americans seem unwilling to support an atheist for president. A 2012 Gallup poll, for instance, found that atheists came in dead last in electability, well behind other marginalized groups like Hispanics and gay people.40 In fact, Americans would sooner see a Muslim than an atheist in the Oval Office.41 An atheist kneels before no one, and for many voters, this is a frightening proposition.
PROSOCIAL NORMS
Like all communities, religions are full of norms that constrain individual behavior. These norms can be especially useful, both to the community at large and to individual members,42 especially when properly calibrated to the economic and ecological conditions the group is facing.
Let’s take a look at two common sets of religious norms.
One set concerns how to treat others. All major world religions understandably condemn theft, violence, and dishonesty, but they also celebrate positive virtues like compassion, forgiveness, and generosity. Charity is one of the main pillars of Islam, for example, while Christians are exhorted to “love thy neighbor” and “turn the other cheek” after a perceived wrong. Jains practice an extreme form of nonviolence extending to all animals, even insects. Certainly all this cooperative niceness has its advantages, and groups full of nice people tend to outcompete those full of nasty people. The problem, of course, is how to keep cheaters from ruining the party.
One solution, as we’ve seen, is costly signaling, which helps keeps less-committed people out of the group. But just as important are the mechanisms for norm enforcement that we saw in Chapter 3: monitoring and punishment. For all the talk of universal love and turning the other cheek, it’s important to note that religious communities do frequently punish transgressors, whether by censuring, shunning, or stoning them. In fact, these two strategies—traditional norm enforcement, plus paying “dues” through costly rituals—reinforce each other. After you’ve paid a lot of dues, made a lot of friends, and accumulated a lot of social capital over the years, the threat of being kicked out of a group becomes especially frightening. And this, in turn, reduces the need for expensive monitoring.43
The other important set of religious norms governs sex and family life. As Jason Weeden and colleagues have pointed out, religions can be understood, in part, as community-enforced mating strategies.44
Human mating patterns vary a lot around the world and depend on many factors, like resource availability, sex ratios, inheritance rules, and the economics of childrearing. One particularly interesting pair of strategies represents a divide in many Western countries (the United States in particular). On one side is the mating strategy pursued by members of the traditional, religious right, which involves early marriage, strict monogamy, and larger families. On the other side is the strategy pursued by members of the liberal, secular left, which involves delayed marriage, relaxed monogamy, and smaller families.
Of these two mating strategies, the traditional one functions best in a tight-knit community, since it benefits from strong communal norms. As such, religious communities tend to frown on anything that interferes with monogamy and high fertility, including contraception, abortion, and divorce, along with pre- and extramarital sex.45 If you’re someone who wants to follow this mating strategy, it behooves you to be around like-minded people who will help keep everyone in line. When the whole community is aligned on this, there are a lot of advantages. Babies will be born and raised in two-parent households, fathers will have confidence in their paternity, and everyone can spend less energy monitoring and policing their spouses for fidelity.46 High fertility also means everyone will help with child-rearing, and more generally will support and encourage family life (vs., say, careerism).
To the secular mentality, many of these norms—like the one against contraception—make little sense, especially on moral grounds. Why shouldn’t an individual woman be allowed to use birth control? But in a tight-knit community, each woman’s “individual” choices have social externalities. If you’re using birth control, you’re also more likely to delay marriage, get an advanced degree, and pursue a dynamic, financially rewarding career. This makes it harder on your more traditional, family-oriented neighbors. Your lifestyle interferes with theirs (and vice versa), and avoiding such tensions is largely why we self-segregate into communities in the first place.
RITUALS OF SYNCHRONY
“Religion is a myth you can dance to.”—Andrew Brown47
Modern armies no longer line up in neat rows and charge each other from opposite sides of a battlefield. Strangely, however, they still train that way, for example, during marching drills. This practice is useful, it turns out, not to prep for actual battle conditions, but to build trust and solidarity among soldiers in a unit.
Our species, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, is wired to form social bonds when we move in lockstep with each other.48 This can mean marching together, singing or chanting in unison, clapping hands to a beat, or even just wearing the same clothes. In the early decades of the 20th century, IBM used corporate songs to instill a sense of unity among their workers.49 Some companies in Japan still use these practices today.
In 2009, Stanford psychologists Scott Wiltermuth and Chip Heath demonstrated this synchrony–solidarity effect experimentally. They first asked groups of students to perform synchronized movements (such as marching around campus together), then had them play �
�public goods” games to measure the degree to which individuals were willing to take risks for the benefit of the group. What they found across three experiments is that “people acting in synchrony with others cooperated more in subsequent group economic exercises, even in situations requiring personal sacrifice.”50
Religions are understandably keen to take advantage of this effect. Almost every major religious tradition involves some form of synchronized movement. Hare Krishnas, for example, use song and dance in their religious practice and public outreach. Most modern Christians don’t dance as part of their worship, but early Christians did (at least until the Middle Ages),51 and most congregations even today continue to chant and sing in unison. Even shared silence can foster solidarity, like in a Quaker meeting house, or when an otherwise boisterous congregation takes a moment to pray quietly together. When daily life is clamorous, even a few seconds’ reprieve, taken in the context of fellowship, can be a powerful experience.
SERMONS
It’s easy to see how sermons help promote cooperation within a religious community. Without them, how will people know which values to uphold, which norms to follow, and how to punish cheaters? But a sermon is more than just a lecture, its utility more than mere education. It’s also a ritual, a means of transforming social reality—one that we participate in simply by attending.
Here’s how it works. When you attend a sermon, you’re doing more than passively acquiring information. You’re also implicitly endorsing the sermon’s message as well as the preacher’s leadership, the value of the community, and the legitimacy of the entire institution. Simply by attending, you’re letting everyone else know that you support the church and agree to be held to its standards. The pews aren’t just a place to listen; they’re also a place to see and be seen by fellow churchgoers.