Believers, p.13
Believers, page 13
Certain forms of epilepsy and psychosis involve religious thinking and may lead to new commitments or abandonments of faith.
Traditional plant products that stimulate or inhibit certain circuits—long a part of many religions—produce visions, voices, and feelings of a dissolving self.
Brain damage can enhance or interfere with religiosity.
Prayer and meditation modify brain circuits and states of body and mind.
Prayer involves beliefs that can be explained in part by animism, anthropomorphism, agency detection, and other cognitive processes that lead to ideas about supernatural beings, but meditation often does not. Much meditation strives for no ideas at all, and that experience, too, can be profoundly religious. Personality psychology has explored individual differences in faith, whether due to genes or to learning.
Yet these explorations hardly exhaust the potential of scientific psychology. Consider what are called dissociations and dissociative disorders. Examples include often feeling that you are not who you are (depersonalization), that the world around you is unreal (derealization), that you can’t remember basic facts about your life, or that you have multiple personalities (dissociative identity disorder). Such disorders are often said to result from childhood trauma, but this conclusion is controversial, and very unlikely to apply to all cases. Dissociative identity disorder was a diagnostic fad in the 1980s (as multiple personality disorder); it is now once again considered rare.
Other, more common dissociative disorders are like experiences we all have had. We daydream, fantasize, and let our attention wander. We fall asleep or wake up with dreamlike visions. We can be so lost in thought or so involved in a task that we ignore our environments. We feel alienated from ourselves or exclaim, “This can’t be real!” And we sometimes briefly feel we are outside ourselves, watching our own actions. We differ in these tendencies; as with many diagnoses, dissociative disorders are one end of a continuum of human behavior.
Lisa Butler refers to “normative dissociations” and “the dissociations of everyday life.” She argues that complete absorption in a mental state or a task allows for “healthy temporary escape into alternate universes or a level of engagement that promotes optimal performance. . . . In daydreaming, absorption engages persistent concerns or unaddressed challenges, with . . . testing and rehearsal of alternatives in fantasy. . . . In dreaming, we may identify dissociation in its involuntariness and memory deficits and in the discontinuity . . . with the waking state.” Terms for these things during waking life include “spacing out,” being “in the zone,” and “highway hypnosis.” Many tasks we deliberately choose, from gardening and woodwork to reading and watching television, lead to normative dissociation. The state we are in when a task is completely absorbing and going well is called “flow,” a dimension of well-being.
Solitude is a deliberate dissociation from the social world; it is not the same as loneliness, and for many of us it contributes to well-being. It figured in the faith of Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha, and other religious founders, as well as in the practices of followers. Yet, one result of solitude is to highlight the importance of relationships—whether with supernatural agents, a sacred community, or all sentient beings. The human needs for attachment and meaning underlie faith. Uniquely among animals, we foresee our physical nonexistence. We ask why we are here and whether life has a purpose, but day to day, we worry about being alone. Faith recruits cognitive mechanisms, but they are fueled by fear, loneliness, and longing. Parents, friends, mentors, and leaders abandon us, but gods and spirits do not. They may be malevolent, but they are not indifferent. They take an interest in our actions and our destiny, and they know what we do for good and ill; even without them, in Buddhism, the karmic cycle infuses every moment with meaning. Any claim to explain belief must take into account not just thinking but the strong needs that energize thinking. This means we must listen to children, who have perhaps the strongest needs.
8
The Voice of the Child
One of Richard Dawkins’s rhetorical gambits is to show a picture from the British paper the Independent: a Nativity play with the three wise men played by, according to the caption, “Shadbreet (a Sikh), Musharaff (a Muslim), and Adele (a Christian), all aged four.” The message, clearly, was meant to be ecumenical. Dawkins asks us to imagine this change: “Shadbreet (a monetarist), Musharaff (a Keynesian), and Adele (a Marxist), all aged four.” He goes on:
It is child abuse to label a child of four with the religion of their parents. The child is too young to know what its religious views are. There is no such thing as a Catholic child. If you hear the words “Catholic child,” and the child is young, it should sound like fingernails scraping on a blackboard. There’s no such thing as a Protestant child. There’s no such thing as a Muslim child.
In case we missed the point, he has another version with the caption “Shadbreet (an Atheist), Musharaff (an Agnostic), and Adele (a Secular Humanist), all aged four.” He begs us to “please all raise our consciousness to the child abuse that is involved whenever anybody talks about a Catholic child, a Protestant child, a Christian child.”
This debater’s trick asks us to ignore that the substitutions are of different kinds. A monetarist thinks regulating the money supply is the way to stabilize economies, a Keynesian thinks it should be done with government spending, and so on. A child can’t have these ideas. But when we call a child Catholic, we do not mean that she understands Catholic theology; we mean she is growing up in a Catholic family with Catholic parents who are raising her in that faith. I dare say that by age 4 she would be more comfortable in a Catholic church than in a mosque or a synagogue, not to mention at a San trance dance or a Huichol peyote ceremony.
Saying that a child is Catholic or Muslim is much more like saying she is English or Japanese or Nigerian than it is like calling her a monetarist or a Marxist. The economic theory comparison is easily dismissed. But there is more in Dawkins’s remarks: the label “child abuse.” He is serious about this, and so are other aggressive atheists. The claim comes from an influential speech by English psychologist Nicholas Humphrey—“What Shall We Tell the Children?”—the 1997 Amnesty International Lecture at Oxford:
Children, I’ll argue, have a human right not to have their minds crippled by exposure to other people’s bad ideas—no matter who these other people are. Parents . . . have no god-given license to enculturate their children in whatever ways they personally choose: no right to limit the horizons of their children’s knowledge, to bring them up in an atmosphere of dogma and superstition, or to insist they follow the straight and narrow paths of their own faith. In short, children have a right not to have their minds addled by nonsense. And we as a society have a duty to protect them from it. So we should no more allow parents to teach their children to believe, for example, in the literal truth of the Bible, or that the planets rule their lives, than we should allow parents to knock their children’s teeth out or lock them in a dungeon.
I sometimes ask educated audiences, especially scientists, whose kids they think would most likely be the first to be taken away if it became okay for the state to decree what parents may teach their children. Then I point around the room.
This is not a philosophical argument, but it is an argument: Parents will draw a line in the sand when it comes to what they may teach their children. And often in history, not just for religious reasons, the sand along that line has been soaked with blood. Humphrey compares teaching children any faith to female genital mutilation and ritual child sacrifice. These and other forms of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse have been considered just cause for state control. So, Humphrey is calling for the systematic interruption and destruction by the state of all religious tradition, starting in childhood.
State control over religious expression has been tried historically with, let’s say, mixed results. After generations of state suppression, religions thrive in “Red” China and the former Soviet Union, although nonbelievers thrive too, in large numbers. These two states substituted, for the faiths they tried to destroy, quasi-religious ideologies with intense indoctrination and at least equal destructiveness. Soviet indoctrination lasted seventy years, yet in today’s Russia, autocratic secular rule must compromise with the Orthodox church and its 100 million followers. Even the small Jewish minority, whose religion was banned for all that time, revived its traditions; in 1993, about two years after the Soviet fall, the Congress of the Jewish Religious Organizations and Associations in Russia formed; within a decade it represented 160 organizations. In China, after sixty-five years of communism, the great majority of the people, affiliated or not, practice some form of religion, including Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, polytheistic folk traditions, ancestor worship, or a blend.
As Dawkins has remarked, religion is oddly persistent. Freud, in The Future of an Illusion, said that he wanted to see what would happen if children were raised without religious indoctrination. We now know the answer: most of those children grow up normally without religious beliefs, although many say they are spiritual. Yet it is simplistic to view the development of faith as pure indoctrination. Religiosity, variously defined, is etched in the brain, and the brain develops.
Cognitive capacities for belief grow in infancy and childhood. So does our sense of self, our feeling of unity with the world and people, and our capacities for attachment, identification, imitation, emulation, and communion. But the fact that religiousness often intensifies in adolescence belies the claim that faith is infantile. Faith trajectories in adulthood point to both maturing thought about the future and a search for meaning as life goes on. These need not end in religious commitment, but often they do. Ideally, they involve some kind of commitment—generativity, integration—that not all achieve without faith. We vary for biological reasons in how much we lean toward faith, and these differences prove that culture—indoctrination—cannot explain it all.
Research on twins—identical and nonidentical, raised together or apart—as well as adoption and other family studies, consistently shows that religion has a moderate genetic component. Identical twins, even raised apart, resemble each other more in religiosity than do nonidentical twins, and children adopted at birth resemble their biological parents. It is surprising that something as subject to personal influences—family, friends, upbringing, affiliation, marriage—as religion or spirituality could be shaped at all by genes. Many see genes as constraints on freedom, and to some extent they are, but they are also part of the essence of individuality.
How could genes do something like this? We envision a child growing up with “Now I lay me down to sleep” as a nightly ritual, mom or dad kneeling beside her, or a child on the other side of the planet in her mother’s lap while the drama of the trance dance unfolds—and we are not surprised that children grow up believing in this religious form or that. But different children have different susceptibilities. Although the “Now I lay me” child who becomes very religious will have different ideas from the devout trance-dance child, both will have the essence of faith: the belief in things unseen, and the emotions that go with it. But some children with those same experiences become skeptics as adults in either culture. Some incline toward a private religious life, some toward a public one, some toward the conventional, some with only a vague sense of the spiritual, and some with nothing at all.
By adulthood, these different children will have had different experiences, but they also will have started life with different brains. We have seen how the brain gives us—some of us—the experiences we call spiritual or religious. Some people have religious experiences because of brain activity that doctors call abnormal. Often, structural differences underlie this activity. Genes guide the initial building of circuits. But many human genes are expressed only in the brain and only in infancy. Some are shared by all normal people; they give us attachment, relationships, agency detection, mind reading, normal dissociation, and more. Other genes make us individuals.
Some genes are expressed in the brain throughout life, coding enzymes that manufacture or remove dopamine, opioids, cannabinoids, and serotonin, as well as the receptors for those chemicals. Religious people have fewer serotonin 1A receptors, which could mean that they have more natural day-to-day stimulation of the 2A receptors involved in the brain’s own hallucinogenic effects. This is speculation, but it shows how genes could matter in religious experience. The role of genes is moderate. From studies of 72 pairs of same-sex twins (35 identical) raised apart, Thomas J. Bouchard and colleagues estimated the heritability of two kinds of religiosity—intrinsic (spirituality, belief, private experience) and extrinsic (affiliation, churchgoing, and the like)—to be 0.43 and 0.39, respectively. This would mean that being religious is about half as heritable as height, yet twice as heritable as giving or risk taking.
These are ballpark estimates, affected by gender, environment, and research methods. But it is fair to say that height is about 80 percent heritable and religiousness about half that, meaning that genes explain most of the variation in height, but less than half—even so, a substantial influence—of religiousness. Still, we can’t just think of religion as genes or environment; it involves many more specific things, and how we define and measure it is a lot more complicated than for height.
As with height, personality, and much else, the heritability of certain aspects of religion increases with age, because differences in the pace of development obscure the end point and the environment is more influential early in life. Either factor can hide heritability. In addition, the way the environment works on religiousness is not typical of most behavioral traits. For most, the shared family environment explains very little of the variation; that doesn’t mean the environment is unimportant, just that the important influences come from things that siblings experience separately—peers, schools, illnesses, accidents, and different siblings—namely, each other. But for religion, the shared environment matters more, especially in childhood and adolescence. This is the part that parents are trying to transmit to all their kids alike, and research shows that it works—for a time.
While you are in the family fold, your religious inclinations and habits (or lack of them) reflect those of the family, but when you grow up you can become your own version of yourself, in your self-tailored environment. For example, ultra-Orthodox Jewish teens may be cut off from their families when they reveal that they are gay. After this rejection they can stop pretending to be like those around them; their genes and their new chosen environment will matter more. A teenage San boy may dream of trance dancing, but if he finds out he can’t easily enter an altered state of consciousness—or is reprimanded for flirting while trying—he may become more aloof from the ritual. A girl who is at 15 a devout Christian may find at 20 that her scientific bent leads her to Darwin and Einstein, and a teacher may encourage her to doubt. Someone raised in a secular family may feel moved by the words of a TV megachurch pastor.
There are revealing specifics. Matt Bradshaw and Christopher Ellison in a 2008 twin study broke down religiousness into four parts: organizational involvement, personal religiosity and spirituality, conservative ideologies, and transformations and commitments; these were further broken down into eight. The lowest heritability was 19 percent, for childhood religiosity. “Genetic influences are sizable for several commonly employed measures of religion, including religious or spiritual service attendance (32 percent), religious salience (27 percent), spirituality (29 percent), daily guidance and coping (42 percent), biblical literalism (44 percent), exclusivist beliefs (41 percent), and being born-again or making a religious or spiritual commitment (65 percent).” These are significant effects of genes.
Tanya Button and her colleagues added a developmental dimension, studying well over a thousand twin pairs ranging from ages 12 to 18, and some of the younger pairs were studied again from the time they were 17 years old until they reached the age of 29. For an assessment of religious values, they were asked,
How important is it to you . . .
To be able to rely on religious counsel or teaching when you have a problem?
To believe in God?
To rely on your religious beliefs as a guide for day-to-day living?
To be able to turn to prayer when you’re facing a personal problem?
To attend religious services regularly?
Answers were scored from 1 (not at all important) to 4 (very important). Religious attendance was measured by the number of times the twins had been to religious services in the past year. Heritability of values increased from 29 to 41 percent between adolescence and young adulthood, while heritability of attendance changed from 9 to 34 percent. The freedom of young adulthood affected habits more than values, but genes asserted themselves in both.
Other developmental studies of religiousness add personality—the idea being that if genes (or environments), influence religious feelings, attitudes, and behavior, they might work through personality types. A standard method is the “Big Five” model: if you ask people hundreds of questions about their likes, dislikes, habits, and tendencies, you can order the answers best with statistics that sort them along five dimensions: Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness. If you think of the common meaning of these labels, you won’t be far from how scientists see them. They are designed statistically to be independent; none of them predicts much about the others. The Big Five model is a time-tested method, with decades of refinement and thousands of studies. In many different countries, personality tests yield the same factors.
One impressive application was a meta-analysis of 71 samples—over 20,000 people in 19 countries. Three main faith dimensions appeared: religiosity, spirituality, and fundamentalism. “Agreeableness and Conscientiousness were reliable correlates of religion across most samples.” This finding “generalized across adolescents, young adults, and adults. However, the relation between religiousness and the two personality factors was stronger among adults.” We can guess cause and effect from follow-up studies: personality predicts future religiousness, not the other way around. Other correlates emerge in some cultures. But Agreeableness and Conscientiousness predicted religiosity without regard to nationality, religion, sex, or age, and more strongly for adults than for teens. Earlier studies relating values to the Big Five showed that Christians, Muslims, and Jews share a hierarchy of values that embraces tradition, conformity, and benevolence but tends to reject hedonism and stimulation. These values are predicted by Agreeableness and Conscientiousness—not by how neurotic or introverted you are.
