An evolutionary account of religious tolerance
Religious intolerance and its potential to fuel mass violence is a matter that
much ink has been spilled on, in psychology and elsewhere, especially now that we
live under the shadow of Samuel Huntington’s thesis about the Clash of
Civilizations. Daniel Dennett is among an increasing number of people asking, often
with war, persecution and oppression in mind, “Is religion good for you?” My
advisor Ara Norenzayan and I have been investigating religion for a few years now,
and we don’t have an unequivocal answer to Dennet’s question, in part because we
do not see religion as a solid unidimensional thing. The research that we have done
points to something of a “split personality” in religious psychology.
According to our theoretical model, one part of religion—the most religious
part—is devotion to God, the Divine, ultimate reality, and even to the broad tenets
of one’s religious tradition, whatever it may be. We call this the “devotional” side of
religion. Another part of religion—the part that is not so much about religion as it
is about setting a thick boundary around the self so that non-self can be easily
distinguished—is manifest in rigid psychological proclivities like fundamentalism,
authoritarianism, dogmatism, and the exclusive claim to religious and moral truth.
We call this the “coalitional” side of religion. Many researchers have found
abundant evidence that authoritarianism, fundamentalism, and dogmatism predict
prejudice. If religion is indeed nothing but authoritarianism, fundamentalism and
dogmatism, then there is no question that religion and prejudice are peas in a pod.
General prejudice, however, is no longer capturing people’s attention as
much as religious intolerance and violence specifically. How religion is related to
religious intolerance is a very topical question. We find, not surprisingly, that
coalitional religiosity variables are strongly correlated with religious intolerance as
well, and not just simple religious disapproval and hostility, but actual willingness to
deny civil rights to and sanction violence against religious others.
However, other more explicitly devotional aspects of religious sentiment, if
looked at separately from these coalitional aspects, do not predict religious
intolerance. In fact, in many cases, these devotional variables are actually strong
predictors of religious tolerance. This general finding illustrates the paradox of
religion’s relationship to religious intolerance. Devotional religiosity by itself
predicts religious tolerance. Coalitional religiosity by itself predicts religious
intolerance. The rub is that devotional and coalitional religiosity are so tightly
intertwined that they are difficult to distinguish empirically, so zero-order
correlations between devotional religiosity measures and prejudice tend to be null
or positive. It is only when controlling for authoritarianism or some other
coalitional variable that a potentially negative relationship is revealed.
Whether examining Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, or Buddhists,
whether samples come from East or West, are rich or poor, male or female, we
repeatedly find (a) that coalitional religiosity tends to co-occur with devotional
religiosity and (b) that while the coalitional side of religion predicts intolerance, the
devotional side predicts tolerance.
Jeremy Ginges, with whom we have teamed up to write a paper on religion
and combative martyrdom, looks at the question more behaviorally, contrasting
how regular prayer and regular attendance at religious services predicts support for
suicide attacks and other indications of support for combative martyrdom. He finds
that with both Israelis and Palestinians, support for combative martyrdom against
the outgroup is associated with organized religious attendance, but not with prayer.
This predictive contrast between prayer and religious attendance makes it
tempting to treat the coalitional-devotional religiosity distinction as a private
religiosity vs. group religiosity distinction, or an independent individualist vs.
interdependent collectivist distinction, with independent individualists being good
tolerant lovers of freedom and democracy and interdependent collectivists being evil
terrorists. This is an error. Scales that measure interdependence or collectivism
(as distinct from independence or individualism) are positively correlated with
religion scales that we consider both devotional and coalitional respectively, e.g. a
measure of religious feelings that we adapted as “divine devotion” for one of our
studies, and authoritarianism. Interestingly, interdependence was better predicted
by religious feelings (r = .46) than by religious attendance or communal orientation.
There is something inherently relational and thus interdependent about religion
generally, both in its devotional and coalitional manifestations. We consider prayer
more devotional and organized religious attendance more coalitional for reasons
unrelated to individualist vs. collectivist or solitary vs. affiliative orientations.
There are reasons to pause before categorizing prayer as devotional and
organized attendance as coalitional. Both regular prayer and regular religious
attendance are about equally likely to be associated with the assertion that one’s
God is the only true God, which we consider a prototypical example of a boundarysetting coalitional attitude. And both prayer and regular attendance are devotional
in the sense that they can reflect a sacrifice of time, resources and self to God or the
Divine. However, prayer--even prayer coordinated in a group--focuses attention on
interdependent relatedness to God or the Divine, and thus should, on average, be
primarily about religious devotion. When religious people attend church, mosque,
synagogue or temple with their co-religionists, attention to the Divine will probably
not disappear, but in many cases what is more salient is a religious leader, ritual,
other attenders, or some other marker of what distinguishes one’s religious coalition
from outsiders.
Authoritarianism, dogmatism, fundamentalism and exclusivity lay out an
explicit, ideology-based moral and existential divide between those who are like you
and those who are the Other. Religious attendance may reinforce this divide
explicitly (through indoctrination by authorities), or more implicitly, through group
processes. To say that “group processes” can constitute coalitional processes
sounds like it implies that coalitional processes are all about interdependence and
relatedness. If true, this implies that if you can cut yourself off from all
relationships and strike out as a solitary rugged individual, then you will be immune
from coalitional processes. Of course we do not claim this. Group processes may be
a subset of coalitional processes, but narcissistic processes are just as relevant, and
measures of narcissism are strongly correlated with measures of independence
(specifically ideocentrism), as well as psychological hallmarks of individualist
cultures, like high self-esteem. While rugged individualists may be courageously
devoid of meaningful relationships, commitments, and responsibilities, that itself
will not prevent them from unquestioningly obeying the religious authorities that
they watch alone on TV, or asserting the unquestionable rightness of their beliefs, or
claiming exclusive truth for their own understanding of God.
Certainly it is plausible that a kind of individualism can emerge due to a
focus on religious devotion over religious coalition. For instance, if your
interdependence with the Divine calls you to stand against the will of your coreligionists, then you may face the prospect of being a lone dissenter in a teeming
throng of uncritical followers. Even if your lone dissent grows from
interdependence with a God who collectively embraces all humanity, still for all
intents and purposes you will look like an individualist. You may even look like a
selfish defector from group norms and responsibilities. If you gather together a few
hundred thousand dissenters and build a culture out of them, a culture designed to
legally accommodate individual dissent, cultural individualism as we know it is
likely to flourish. However, since narcissism follows close on the heels of
individualism the same way that coalitional religiosity follows close on the heels of
devotional religiosity, ironies are still likely to abound, and paradise will likely slip
just out of reach again. To very very loosely paraphrase Laozi, people always claim
to have some unfailing way to be, but there is no unfailing way to be.
If we are correct that devotional religiosity, coalitional religiosity and
intolerance have a complex and paradoxical interrelationship, the relevant question
is, “why”? The recent explosion of research into how evolutionary paradigms can
explain religion has not previously addressed this issue, but my colleagues and I
have attempted to outline in Darwinian terms why this split personality in religion
might have emerged in human consciousness.
Essentially, our extremely tentative claim is based on the idea that there may
be an optimal level of self-transcendence for evolutionary fitness, and that two coexisting but opposing processes are involved in coming to rest at this optimal level of
transcendence. This “optimal” level is more accurately called the “one that seems to
work okay”, i.e. the one common today because ancestors who reached this finite
level of self-transcendence survived long enough to reproduce surviving copies of
their genes. By self-transcendence, we mean a sense of identification that goes
beyond one’s own memories, skin, organs, nerves and bones, a sense of self that goes
beyond one’s own private experiences of pleasure and pain. When you feel part of
something larger than yourself, anything larger, we consider that a kind of selftranscendence. For practical purposes, this something-larger may be seen as being
your greater self, of which your pleasure-and-pain feeling, skin-bound self is only a
part. If you’re going to get the reproductive benefits of group cooperation—which
are numerous—some “self transcendence” can be very helpful, because you’ll
cheerfully sacrifice for the group and likely be the first in line to get group benefits
when they are distributed.
Certainly, it might often be worth your while to defect from the group—
betray the group for your own benefit—but if you make a habit of this, or worse
allow your defection to be readily perceived as an essential aspect of your character,
then you are likely to be ostracized and punished, which is not good for your
reproductive prospects. People can try faking their self-transcendence, of course,
but for every faker there’s a fake-detector, so genuine self-transcendence may serve
people better most of the time, unless they are prepared to be very clever and/or
very ruthless (see psychopathy).
Identifying transcendently with a group is very difficult when we’re used to
feeling only our own pleasures, pains, and reproductive priorities.
There are probably several cognitive-emotional avenues to this greater
identification, and many of these may be specific to the type of group involved. It is
also a relatively common (though still controversial) proposal that some of the more
powerful and mass-producible group-identification processes may be processes that
are now associated primarily with what we call “religion”. If this assertion is valid,
then we suspect that both devotional and coalitional religiosity reflect these
processes in some way.
Devotional religiosity perhaps engages the more transcendent part of the
process, enabling the existential and moral inclusion of other people in one’s sense
of self. Coalitional religiosity, however, may have developed through Darwininian
selection processes to always shadow these expansive processes. Those whose
devotional processes were appropriately shadowed with coalitional processes would
be more likely to successfully reproduce. Those who died off heirless perhaps had
their devotional processes insufficiently constrained, and expanded their sense of
self to a “non-optimal” level of self-inclusiveness. Include too much and too many as
self and you may be perceived as dangerous to what could have been your group,
insofar as your group competes with other saliently distinct groups for scarce
resources. Include your group’s rivals and enemies as the self and you may find
yourself either killed or defamed as a traitor, or perhaps completely without a posse
to back you up when that rival group you welcome with open arms decides to kill
and eat you. If coalitional religious processes are a pragmatic check on the
expansive devotional processes, this implies that the devotional processes themselves
can be very open ended. Indeed, religion often assigns teaching authority to figures
who morally and existentially include all humanity, including even rival religions,
even enemies. A religion may even revere an authority who faced persecution by
group authorities for being too inclusive and all-embracing.
However inclusive a religion’s basic doctrine or central figure is, however,
devotion to this religion will inevitably invite coalitional processes that shadow the
devotion, simply because those who behave exactly like the revered religious figure
are not likely to survive and reproduce. The psychological upshot of our
phylogenetic history may that most of the world’s religious devotees will be easily
convinced that some boundary-setting rigidity is necessary to make their devotion
sincere. If you really believe in the revered all-embracing figure, you must
necessarily lay down belief in all alternative figures; you must join a finite, welldefined community of people who revere the all-embracing figure; you must try to
convince non-believers to revere the all-embracing figure, etc. It may not be such a
big step from this coalitional shadowing of devotion to feel obliged to kill and
conquer those who do not revere the all-embracing figure—suddenly a far cry from
actual devotion to the figure’s all-embracing example.
This tracing of religious ironies brings us to the present day. There are those
who would like to see some noble battle fought between tolerant religious people and
intolerant religious people where tolerant religious people finally win, vanquishing
religious intolerance, violence and evil forever. A variation on this wish is the wish
that non-religious people (all tolerant and enlightened) vanquish religious people
(all intolerant and fatuous) forever, vanquishing both evil and stupidity. If you
could not see that this idea was absurd before, hopefully its absurdity grows clearer
in light of our research. Whether because of evolutionary constraints or for some
other reason, it appears to be quite difficult to have a viable religion without both
devotional and coalitional processes being widely activated among its professors,
and so the potential for tolerance and intolerance will exist to some extent in all
religions. Since religiosity is measured in contrast to non-religiosity, the flip side of
this is that non-religiosity has both tolerant and intolerant aspects as well, tolerance
presumably predicted by the lack of authoritarianism, dogmatism, etc. and
intolerance predicted by the feeling of alienation from devotional relatedness.
The way I see it is that the potential for tolerance and intolerance will
necessarily exist both among the conquering heroes who claim to be tolerant and
among the those whose mothers and children the heroes kill in order to wipe out the
violent evil consequences of intolerance. The idea of trying to bring more religious
tolerance to the world with war, especially war fought by dropping bombs on whole
communities of people, invading their countries and stealing their resources, has
always been absurd. Theft and murder hardly seems like a great way to bring out
the seed of tolerance that exists in the hapless targets of our tolerant aggression. But
if the best case scenario of such a war is that it will spill the bloody intestines of
those with a psychological mix of tolerance- and intolerance-predicting
psychological proclivities and empower those with a psychological mix of toleranceand intolerance-predicting psychological proclivities, then the pointlessness of it
should be that much clearer.
The following papers and presentations lay out some of this research:
Hansen, I.G., Norenzayan, A., Ginges, J. & Dar-Nimrod, I. (2006, July). Would the world
be more peaceful without devotion to God? Paper presented at the Annual
Meeting for the International Society of Political Psychology, Barcelona, Spain.
Hansen, I. G., & Norenzayan, A. (2006). Religion, evolution and intolerance.
Manuscript in preparation for submission to Personality and Social Psychology
Review.
Hansen, I. G. & Norenzayan, A. (2006). When how you believe matters more than what
you believe: Religiosity and religious intolerance among Christians and
Buddhists. Manuscript submitted to Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
Hansen, I. G. & Norenzyan, A. (in press). Between Yang and Yin and Heaven and Hell:
Untangling the complex relationship between religion and intolerance. In P.
McNamara, (Ed.), Where God and Science Meet: How Brain and Evolutionary
Studies Alter Our Understanding of Religion. Greenwood Press/Praeger.
Ginges, J., Hansen, I.G. & Norenzayan, A. (2006). Religion and support for combative
martyrdom. Manuscript in preparation.