God and country
Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history
Harvey Whitehouse et al.
Nature, forthcoming
Abstract:
The origins of religion and of complex societies represent evolutionary puzzles. The ‘moralizing gods’ hypothesis offers a solution to both puzzles by proposing that belief in morally concerned supernatural agents culturally evolved to facilitate cooperation among strangers in large-scale societies. Although previous research has suggested an association between the presence of moralizing gods and social complexity, the relationship between the two is disputed, and attempts to establish causality have been hampered by limitations in the availability of detailed global longitudinal data. To overcome these limitations, here we systematically coded records from 414 societies that span the past 10,000 years from 30 regions around the world, using 51 measures of social complexity and 4 measures of supernatural enforcement of morality. Our analyses not only confirm the association between moralizing gods and social complexity, but also reveal that moralizing gods follow — rather than precede — large increases in social complexity. Contrary to previous predictions, powerful moralizing ‘big gods’ and prosocial supernatural punishment tend to appear only after the emergence of ‘megasocieties’ with populations of more than around one million people. Moralizing gods are not a prerequisite for the evolution of social complexity, but they may help to sustain and expand complex multi-ethnic empires after they have become established. By contrast, rituals that facilitate the standardization of religious traditions across large populations generally precede the appearance of moralizing gods. This suggests that ritual practices were more important than the particular content of religious belief to the initial rise of social complexity.
Group-Based Relative Deprivation Explains Endorsement of Extremism Among Western-Born Muslims
Milan Obaidi et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although jihadist threats are regarded as foreign, most Islamist terror attacks in Europe and the United States have been orchestrated by Muslims born and raised in Western societies. In the present research, we explored a link between perceived deprivation of Western Muslims and endorsement of extremism. We suggest that Western-born Muslims are particularly vulnerable to the impact of perceived relative deprivation because comparisons with majority groups’ peers are more salient for them than for individuals born elsewhere. Thus, we hypothesized that Western-born, compared with foreign-born, Muslims would score higher on four predictors of extremism (e.g., violent intentions), and group-based deprivation would explain these differences. Studies 1 to 6 (Ns = 59, 232, 259, 243, 104, and 366, respectively) confirmed that Western-born Muslims scored higher on all examined predictors of extremism. Mediation and meta-analysis showed that group-based relative deprivation accounted for these differences. Study 7 (N = 60) showed that these findings are not generalizable to non-Muslims.
His Land and the Origins of the Jewish-Evangelical Israel Lobby
Daniel Hummel
Church History, December 2018, Pages 1119-1151
Abstract:
The 1970 release of His Land, a religious documentary about Israel produced by Billy Graham's film studio, World Wide Pictures, took the evangelical world by storm. It was shown to hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of churchgoers and encapsulated the mix of prophecy beliefs and cultural arguments that cohered a decade later into the Christian Zionist movement — a major component of the religious right. Surprisingly, American evangelicals were not the only fans of His Land. American Jews, led by the American Jewish Committee (AJC), helped make the film an international success. AJC officials organized ecumenical screenings and kept detailed records of the film's reception, praising it as “an authentic interpretation” that “strengthen[s] the current interreligious discussion on the Middle East question.” By 1971, the AJC was showing this unabashedly evangelical film to Jewish audiences in synagogues and community centers. Through reconstructing His Land's production and reception, this article provides a new interpretation of the origins of bipartisan, Jewish and evangelical support for Israel in the late-twentieth century. It recasts the rise of a Jewish-evangelical pro-Israel lobby as an important religious episode to understanding the rise of the religious right and the continuing importance of confessional and theological identity even in the era of the “culture wars.”
Education and religious decline: Evidence from the Canadian compulsory schooling laws
Maryam Dilmaghani
Education Economics, May/June 2019, Pages 287-307
Abstract:
The present study assesses how education impacts religiosity. Education is instrumented using the changes in the Canadian school leaving age laws. The data are from the Canadian General Social Surveys collected between 1990 and 2011. The effects of education on both affiliation status and religious attendance are considered. Education is found to cause a higher likelihood of unaffiliation and a considerably lower frequency of religious attendance. The fall in the religious attendance rates is found to be stronger among Roman Catholics. Possible channels of impacts are explored.
Aversion to playing God and moral condemnation of technology and science
Adam Waytz & Liane Young
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, 11 March 2019
Abstract:
This research provides, to our knowledge, the first systematic empirical investigation of people's aversion to playing God. Seven studies validate this construct and show its association with negative moral judgements of science and technology. Motivated by three nationally representative archival datasets that demonstrate this relationship, studies 1 and 2 demonstrate that people condemn scientific procedures they perceive to involve playing God. Studies 3–5 demonstrate that dispositional aversion to playing God corresponds to decreased willingness to fund the National Science Foundation and lower donations to organizations that support novel scientific procedures. Studies 6a and 6b demonstrate that people judge a novel (versus established) scientific practice to involve more playing God and to be more morally unacceptable. Finally, study 7 demonstrates that reminding people of an existing incident of playing God reduces concerns towards scientific practices. Together, these findings provide novel evidence for the impact of people's aversion to playing God on science and policy-related decision-making.
Women want the heavens, men want the earth: Gender differences in support for life extension technologies
Uri Lifshin et al.
Journal of Individual Differences, forthcoming
Abstract:
Efforts are being made in the field of medicine to promote the possibility of indefinite life extension (ILE). Past research on attitudes toward ILE technologies showed that women and more religious individuals usually have more negative attitudes toward ILE. The purpose of this research was to investigate whether gender differences in attitude toward indefinite life extension technologies could be explained by religiosity, afterlife beliefs, and general attitudes toward science. In four studies (N = 5,000), undergraduate participants completed self-report questionnaires measuring their support for life extension as well as religiosity, afterlife beliefs, and attitude toward science (in Study 3). In all studies, men supported ILE more than women, whereas women reported greater belief in an afterlife. The relationship between gender and attitude toward ILE was only partially mediated by religiosity (Studies 2–4) and by attitudes toward science (Study 3).
Prayer and Charitable Behavior
Shane Sharp
Sociological Spectrum, forthcoming
Abstract:
I propose a theoretical framework to understand how prayer influences charitable volunteering and financial giving. Drawing on work from symbolic interaction and cognitive psychology, I argue that individuals’ concepts of divine others become more cognitively accessible during the act of prayer. Because most people attribute the characteristics of omniscience and the desire for humans to help others to divine others, people are more likely to help known and unknown others the more cognitively accessible divine other concepts are to them. This lead to the prediction that frequency of prayer will be positively and linearly association with the frequency of volunteering, frequency of giving money to charity, and amount of money given to charity in a year. Using data from the General Social Survey, I find evidence for my argument. Frequency of prayer is positively and linearly associated with these charitable behaviors, even after controlling for other religiosity and sociodemographic variables.
Supernatural norm enforcement: Thinking about karma and God reduces selfishness among believers
Cindel White et al.
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Four experiments (total N = 3591) examined how thinking about Karma and God increases adherence to social norms that prescribe fairness in anonymous dictator games. We found that (1) thinking about Karma decreased selfishness among karmic believers across religious affiliations, including Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, and non-religious Americans; (2) thinking about God also decreased selfishness among believers in God (but not among non-believers), replicating previous findings; and (3) thinking about both karma and God shifted participants' initially-selfish offers towards fairness (the normatively prosocial response), but had no effect on already fair offers. These supernatural framing effects were obtained and replicated in high-powered, pre-registered experiments and remained robust to several methodological checks, including hypothesis guessing, game familiarity, demographic variables, between- and within-subjects designs, and variation in data exclusion criteria. These results support the role of culturally-elaborated beliefs about supernatural justice as a motivator of believer's adherence to prosocial norms.
The Effects of Religious Attendance and Evangelical Identification on Media Perception and Political Knowledge
Ben Gaskins
Politics and Religion, forthcoming
Abstract:
Scholars have shown that religious activity can prepare individuals for civic activity by endowing them with the skills and motivation to engage in politics. Others, however, assert that religious dogmatism may lead to disengagement with the secular world and politics more generally. These two perspectives have resulted in contradictory findings on a key aspect of civic ability: political knowledge. I argue that while religiosity may indeed increase individuals’ engagement in a wide array of political activities, including some aspects of political knowledge, religious commitment decreases the ability to acquire accurate information about certain types of political facts. This argument is tested with a number of national surveys, and I find that while religion has a mixed effect on knowledge of general political structures and actors, it increases the perception of media hostility, which leads to lower levels of political knowledge about policy-specific surveillance information.
Moralizing gods, impartiality and religious parochialism across 15 societies
Martin Lang et al.
Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, 6 March 2019
Abstract:
The emergence of large-scale cooperation during the Holocene remains a central problem in the evolutionary literature. One hypothesis points to culturally evolved beliefs in punishing, interventionist gods that facilitate the extension of cooperative behaviour toward geographically distant co-religionists. Furthermore, another hypothesis points to such mechanisms being constrained to the religious ingroup, possibly at the expense of religious outgroups. To test these hypotheses, we administered two behavioural experiments and a set of interviews to a sample of 2228 participants from 15 diverse populations. These populations included foragers, pastoralists, horticulturalists, and wage labourers, practicing Buddhism, Christianity, and Hinduism, but also forms of animism and ancestor worship. Using the Random Allocation Game (RAG) and the Dictator Game (DG) in which individuals allocated money between themselves, local and geographically distant co-religionists, and religious outgroups, we found that higher ratings of gods as monitoring and punishing predicted decreased local favouritism (RAGs) and increased resource-sharing with distant co-religionists (DGs). The effects of punishing and monitoring gods on outgroup allocations revealed between-site variability, suggesting that in the absence of intergroup hostility, moralizing gods may be implicated in cooperative behaviour toward outgroups. These results provide support for the hypothesis that beliefs in monitoring and punitive gods help expand the circle of sustainable social interaction, and open questions about the treatment of religious outgroups.
Cross-cultural support for a link between analytic thinking and disbelief in God: Evidence from India and the United Kingdom
Michael Stagnaro et al.
Judgment and Decision Making, March 2019, Pages 179–186
Abstract:
A substantial body of evidence suggests that favoring reason over intuition (employing an analytic cognitive style) is associated with reduced belief in God. In the current work, we address outstanding issues in this literature with two studies examining the relationship between analytic cognitive style (as measured by performance on the Cognitive Reflection Test) and belief in God. First, prior research focused on Judeo-Christian cultures, and it is uncertain whether the results generalize to other religious systems or beliefs. Study 1 helps to address this question by documenting a negative correlation between CRT performance and belief in God, r = −.18, in a sample of 513 participants from India, a majority Hindu country. Second, among 150 participants from the United Kingdom, Gervais et al. (2018) reported the first and (to date) only evidence for a positive relationship between CRT and belief in God. In Study 2, we assess the robustness of this result by recruiting 547 participants from the United Kingdom. Unlike Gervais et al., using the same items, we find a negative correlation between CRT and belief in God (r = −.19). Our results add further support to the argument that analytic thinking undermines belief in God.
Institutionalization of Islam in Secular Europe: The Influence of State–Religion Relations on Anti‐Muslim Attitudes
Serdar Kaya
Policy Studies Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study examines church–state relations in Europe, and analyzes their influence on anti‐immigrant attitudes. The literature explains this relationship primarily with religious demographics, or state privileges for the majority faith. Alternately, this study focuses on the status of the majority religion. It argues that, in countries with a national church, citizens are more likely to consider the institutionalization of a new religion to be occurring at the expense of the national heritage, and react negatively. To test that hypothesis, the study focuses on Muslim immigrants in Europe, and builds an index that gauges the extent to which European states institutionalize Islam. Then, employing multilevel regression analysis, it investigates how the institutionalization of Islam influences anti‐Muslim prejudice in different contexts of church–state regimes. Individual‐level data come from the latest wave of the European Values Study, and cover 31 countries. Findings indicate that, in European countries with a national church, institutionalization of Islam increases anti‐Muslim prejudice. In countries without a national church, however, institutionalization leads to tolerance. These results confirm the continuing relevance of religion on the national level in Europe, despite the decline in individual religiosity.
God, Germs, and Evolution: Belief in Unobservable Religious and Scientific Entities in the U.S. and China
Jennifer Clegg et al.
Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, March 2019, Pages 93–106
Abstract:
Adults in the U.S. and China were asked to make judgments about the existence of a variety of scientific and religious entities, including God, germs, and evolution. Overall, participants expressed more confidence in the existence of scientific as compared to religious entities. This differential confidence in the two domains emerged in China as well as in the U.S. Moreover, it emerged even when participants were questioned about items attracting a lower overall level of consensus. Nevertheless, the religious beliefs of individual participants moderated the degree of differentiation between scientific and religious entities. Adults reporting low levels of religiosity expressed greater belief in the existence of scientific than religious entities but adults reporting high levels of religiosity expressed equivalent levels of belief in the existence of each domain. This pattern emerged in both China and the U.S. Testimony about unobservable phenomena has a similar impact on adults’ pattern of beliefs across two historically distinct cultures.