The Science of Religion Part V: Rediscovering Human Nature
What the scientific study of religion really offers us
If you wrote a novel about the 2020s so far, your editor would laugh you out of the room. It’d be a literary disaster, riddled with all the cardinal sins of writing: melodrama, unbelievable plot points, cartoonish characters. But truth is stranger than fiction. A global pandemic really did tear across the world because of either poorly secured Chinese biolabs or wet-market pangolins (or both?). Elon Musk spent tens of billions to buy Twitter just so he could un-ban a cheap Christian news parody site he liked. Over in Europe, Asian soldiers are fighting European ones in grueling trench warfare that’s pulling in great powers from all over the world. And Donald Trump is president again.
Interesting times, indeed.
But against this farcical backdrop, one plot twist in particular might require a particular effort to suspend disbelief: Christianity is somehow becoming interesting again, at least among a certain set. Many Catholic dioceses reported steep rises in the number of adult confirmations this past Easter. Cool people in downtown Manhattan have been drifting toward “weird Christianity,” as, implausibly, young men in über-secular Finland are returning to church.
From comedian playboy Russell Brand and former New Atheist Ayan Hirsi Ali to historian and podcaster Tom Holland, actor and rogue Shia LeBoeuf, incoming vice president J.D. Vance, and of course me, an improbable cast of characters seems to be picking up what was until practically last year the least fashionable hobby you could have: going to church.
The journalist Justin Brierley started noticing these changes a few years ago. He’d been hosting debates and interviews with atheists and Christians since the early days of New Atheism, but around 2020, something had shifted. Atheist guests on his show suddenly weren’t quite as keen to dismiss faith as Bronze Age superstition. More and more, they were exhibiting cautious, if slightly embarrassed, interest in Christianity from an intellectual standpoint, maybe even a respect for its effects on culture.
Loss of an Operating System
This surge of new interest in Christianity has many sources. For one thing, there’s simple reaction against the New Atheist era. For more than a decade, you couldn’t Google for a new vacuum cleaner without accidentally triggering some random forum-dweller to bloviate about the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Lots of people got tired of that, and maybe they became subtly primed to listen to Christians again.
There’s also the snowballing sense of cultural upheaval and dislocation. We’re living through an enormous crisis of meaning as our old shared worldviews fall away, but nothing seems waiting in the wings to replace them. It’s truly a revolution, in the epochal sense. For the first time in well over a thousand years, a majority of English citizens say they’re not Christian. Churchgoing has plummeted in nearly every Western country, and Biblical literacy has fallen precipitously with it.
Maybe these changes don’t seem like such a big deal, but the fact is that our culture’s entire meaning system was built on Christianity. If you haven’t read — or grown up hearing — the Bible, you won’t get the references that pervade our arts and culture. Titles of books like Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, paintings like El Greco’s The Vision of St. John, even the Charlie Brown Christmas Special all start to seem like the inscrutable artifacts of a long-lost civilization rather than one’s own inheritance.1 An entire universe of meanings is just…gone.
And as the poet Novalis observed, “Where there are no gods, phantoms prevail.” People who lack meaning in life are vulnerable to all kinds of con artists and snake-oil salesmen. In the 21st century, politics wiggled into the cracks religion left behind, bringing with it totalizing new meaning systems complete with rituals of purification, totems, and scapegoats. Global liberalism morphed into a secular religion of permanent carnival.
Many people looked around at these consequences of the loss of normative Christianity and said, “Woah, dislike. Maybe we should rethink this.” Ayan Hirsi Ali, for instance, spent a decade as a rabble-rousing, anti-Islam atheist. But she recently announced that she was converting to Christianity to try to save Western civilization. Although this sounds grandiose and maybe crassly utilitarian, it’s also a perhaps natural reaction to some extreme cultural swings.
The Evidence
But now that I’ve thoroughly buried the lede, I think there’s yet another source for the growing interest in Christianity: during the New Atheist era, the scientific study of religion (SSR) came into its own as a rigorous field of inquiry. The findings that emerged from this field painted religion not as a parasitic cognitive bug, but pretty much as a normal and intrinsic feature of human nature, something we will probably always have with us and which is even often adaptive, contributing to human thriving.
Percolating slowly out into public culture, SSR findings probably helped nudge not a few smart people to reappraise their anti-religion prejudices. In European and European-descended societies, this reappraisal would tend to lead naturally to a renewed appreciation for Christianity.
The past four posts in this series have surveyed some these SSR findings. Using tools that ranged from lab psychology studies to epidemiology, SSR scholars have found that religions offer lots of tools for cooperation and social solidarity. If you’re religious, you’re likely to be less depressed, mentally healthier, (much) less at risk of suicide, and more socially plugged-in than your non-religious peers. You probably enjoy slightly better self-regulation and self-control, especially if you’re an active participant in your religious community.
And all things being equal, you’re also more likely to get married and have children, and your children are more likely to grow up to be reasonably stable, and to have kids of their own.
Seen through a scientifically neutral lens, then, religion turns out to be basically good for individual fitness. The New Atheist claim that religion is a maladaptive byproduct of our error-prone brains comes out looking simply untrue. We tested it, and the data came back saying, “Nope.”
Caveats
None of this, of course, means that religion per se is always beneficial. The cooperative benefits of religion mostly only extend to other members of one’s own religious in-group; ask any northern Nigerian how well Christians and Muslims are “cooperating,” or look at the conflicts in Israel, to get a sense of just how limited religious cooperation can be. Even the Russia-Ukraine war, which is largely being fought between Orthodox Christians,2 has deep religious roots.3
So religion, like any adaptive trait, is liable to cause harm in proportion to its benefits. Religion binds people into tribes and nations, but then those tribes or nations make war all the more effectively against others. It organizes and streamlines social life, clarifying roles and regulating behavior, but in so doing it constrains possibilities and limits curiosity, preventing us from seeing beyond the conventional moralities of our tribes.
As a double-edge sword, religion is in good company with other human capacities.
Science, for instance, helped us synthesize fertilizers so that farmers could feed billions more people than ever before. Science really did fly us to the moon, and it continues to develop cures for diseases. And science built the internet, of course.
But eight billion people means enormous pressure on resources and potentially permanent damage to Earth’s climate. Space technologies can easily be diverted to wartime use. We can synthesize super-viruses as well as cures. And the internet…well, if that’s not a mixed bag, what is?
The difference between science and religion on this front isn’t that one is reliably beneficial and the other reliably detrimental. Both are full of trade-offs, like most things in life. The difference is that religion shows many signs of being essentially innate, or somehow built in to the human code, while science is a recent and potentially fragile invention.
This means that the older liberal dream of science eventually replacing religion, making it obsolete, is probably a fantasy. We’re far more likely to lose the skills and institutions for science — after a civilizational collapse or other black-swan event, say — than we are ever to leave religion behind.
If civilization ever collapses, in fact, we can expect many of the old human defaults to reassert themselves. Religion would almost certainly be among the first.
Rediscovery of Human Nature
Which brings me to my final point: the scientific study of religion is really the rediscovery of human nature. Its subject matter is basically the negative space in the modern worldview. This worldview was always founded on questionable anthropological assumptions, and SSR is, in essence, correcting a lot these assumptions.
To see what I mean, let’s do an expedited survey of the anthropological foundations for modernity.
First, we moderns fundamentally question authority and cultural transmission. We’re supposed to be skeptical of beliefs that can’t be empirically verified (e.g., in God), because such beliefs seem to reflect slavish trust in traditional authority. Only by breaking the shackles of mindless obedience will we finally perceive the world as it truly is: Sapere aude!
Therefore, second, to be truly objective, you need to leave behind not only human authority, but personal or cultural biases of any kind. So modernity elevates science as the preeminent, or even the only, reliable means to knowledge, with the “view from nowhere” as its ideal. The more objective and detached you get, the harder, more serious, and more reliable your knowledge becomes.
Modern views about knowledge in turn shape modern views of society.
Over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, professionalized science became the central legitimating institution, broadly replacing the Church. Today, scientific institutions fulfill both technical and sacral functions. They provide new technologies, but they also preach and enforce a cultural “imaginary”: our shared vision of the world and how we fit into it.
The view from nowhere is therefore baked in to our society from the top down. It cashes out politically as the third feature of modern anthropology: a kind of aspirational universalism, which ultimately assumes that borders must be melted down, particularities transcended, and (for some) even genders overcome so that the real truth can be revealed behind them, where it was waiting all along.
Science, of course, is methodologically universalistic. A successful theorem should be elegant and simple enough to explain many different phenomena. But science is also inherently reductionistic. It tends to see parts as more real than wholes. Particle physics is more reliable than sociology. DNA is more real than love.
Fourth, then, modernity sees humans as primarily independent, “pre-social” individuals, who are fundamentally autonomous. The state of nature precedes any tribe or group. Margaret Thatcher summed up this axiom in a famous quip: “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women.”
This reverence for autonomy allows for mutually beneficial social contracts, which might be entered and exited according to their usefulness. But it doesn’t really allow for what Christians covenantal relationships, which are committed, even sacred, and often preexist the individuals who partake in them.
A passionate patriot has a covenantal relationship with her land and people. An employee of a faceless conglomerate has a purely contractual relationship with his employer. Modernity can only really handle the latter.
And covenantal relationships are inextricably bound up with ritual. Adam Seligman, a sociologist of religion at Boston University, loves to use the example of buying flowers for your wife. Do you always feel like buying flowers? Maybe not. But (ideally) you do it anyway, at least somewhat regularly.
That’s what a ritual is: a prescribed action with no practical or economic purpose, one you do purely because it’s the conventional thing to do. Yet doing the conventional thing — performing the ritual — is precisely what strengthens our relationships with others. Going to Mass for Catholics or celebrating the 4th of July for Americans both work like this.
Fifth and finally, though, modernity tends to perceive such conventional actions and rituals as empty, even superstitious: a holdover from our former days of obsequious allegiance to authority.
Instead, modernity’s framers, thinkers like Thomas Hobbes and Immanuel Kant, championed a de-ritualized life that, they believed, would let us live like grownups rather than children, free persons rather than slaves. Instead of doing things just because they’re conventional, we should only do things we rationally understand. This will mark us out as enlightened and mature. Hobbes, for example, argued that freedom from superstition (by which he mostly meant Catholic ritual) is a prerequisite for modern citizenship, which demands independence, self-reliance, and responsibility.4
The View from Nowhere Is Weird
All told, then, liberal-modern anthropology sees faith in invisible beings, deep cultural commitments, and ritual as essentially aberrant. Unexpected. So we study them. We dust off our lab coats, fire up the statistics software, and run studies to investigate why and how humans — who are supposed to be independent, autonomous, rational contract-makers, after all — nevertheless keep throwing weird glitches like gods, rituals, and sacrifice.
This research quickly expands beyond the strict boundaries of “religion.” It finds itself taking on topics like national rituals, sacred values, ancestor worship, and strongly committed groups in general. These phenomena are all extremely widespread in human culture, but they look pretty odd if you expect humans to be individualistic, free-floating, rational utility maximizers.
See what I mean? The scientific study of religion is actually the study of everything that looks strange or inexplicable about humanity from the perspective of liberal modernity.
Yet this branch of science keeps discovering facts that are ultimately incompatible with that very perspective.
Once you comb through the evidence, religion seems intrinsic to human nature and frequently adaptive, and ritual turns out to probably be basic for human social life. SSR reveals that what looked aberrant was never aberrant at all.
Religions, rituals, and covenants were the norm. Always will be.
It’s the highly autonomous, contractual Homo economicus floating around in a view from nowhere that turns out to be really weird.5
This means that the findings of SRR do more than upend some minor, late-modern academic prejudices. They actually begin to undermine the very anthropology that grounds the modern era.
Just like the resurgence of interest in Christianity, our current cultural upheavals have many causes, from economics to technological changes. But I think one of those causes, and maybe not a small one, is the fact that our entire societal operating system is crashing headlong into reality. Science is revealing that humans just aren’t what liberal-modern, Enlightenment thinkers, along with their 20th- and 21st-century heirs, have taught us we are.6
For decades, conservative philosophers have argued that the anthropological foundations of liberal modernity are false. SSR offers a wealth of empirical support for this claim, even if many of the researchers involved in it would side strongly with modernity. The scholars produce the data. After that, it’s out of their hands. And I think that, as it fans out into the public, the findings of SSR are contributing to a shift that’s far larger than any of us.
That’s why I’ve been writing this series. What we’re seeing is the breakdown of a centuries-old but false view of human nature and — if we’re lucky — its replacement with something more true. We shouldn’t be surprised if a few cultural leaders and misfits are already sniffing out this change.
Case in point: my spellcheck didn’t even recognize “Absalom,” the favorite son of David.
Along with atheist North Koreans, and Muslim Yemenis, and probably a bunch of others we haven’t found out about yet.
Putin sees Ukraine as the spiritual homeland of the Russian people, the place where Vladimir the Great led the 10th-century Kievan Rus’ to convert to Byzantine Christianity. So he really doesn’t want it to become part of NATO.
Incidentally, this is why architecture for globalist or universalist institutions always looks clean and sleek, stripped of ornamentation. Fluted pilasters or Gothic arches are basically solidified ritual, full of repetition, defined by convention to send messages of coherence and commitment. To the UN, this looks like superstition, so they build International Style skyscrapers.
Let me emphasize that this interpretation of SSR is mine. I’m not speaking for the field. As far as I know, there’s no flood of SSR scholars lining up to get baptized in the great cathedrals of Europe or the Anglosphere. But like COVID (?), their ideas have slipped out of their labs.