Psychology of Religion – March 5, 2017 by Minnie Venable

One of the first psychologists to study religious beliefs, and to take a positive view of them, while most scientists were dismissing religion as not worthy of discussion, was William James, in his work, “The Varieties of Religious

Experience”. It’s still regarded as a valued scholarly work. James was born in 1842, and also wrote the first American psychology textbook. He was a keen Darwinian and believed that many, if not most of our behaviors, were motivated by evolutionary programming.

I’m going to skip over James for now though, except for my favorite story about him: James tried to have mystic experiences himself, using peyote and other substances, and he claimed that he never understood Hegel without the use of nitrous oxide (laughing gas). I’m sure this is why I, too, never understood Hegel.

There is a modern-day psychologist who has gained a lot of attention for his defense of religion – Jonathan David

Haidt, born in 1963. He is Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business. His academic specialization is the psychology of morality and the moral emotions. He was names one of the “top global thinkers” by Foreign Policy Magazine in 2012, and one of the top world thinkers by Prospect Magazine in 2013.

I was in love with Jonathan Haidt, for about a day. I’m quoting or summarizing some of his statements about religious belief from a TED talk he gave in 2012. (TED is an acronym for Technology, Entertainment, and Design. While early emphasis was technology and design, the nonprofit organization has broadened its focus to include talks on many scientific, cultural, and academic topics. There are no over 2000 talks available to view for free on the web) Haidt’s talk is titled “Religion, Evolution, and Ecstasy of Self-transcendence”. He says:

My talk today is about… one of the main reasons why most people consider themselves to be spiritual in some way, shape, or form. It’s about self-transcendence. It’s just a basic fact about being human that sometimes the self seems to just melt away. When that happens, the feeling is ecstatic, and we reach for metaphors of up and down to explain these feelings. We talk about being uplifted or elevated. We [sort of] climb a staircase in our minds and experience a state of altered consciousness.

This is Haidt talking about William James:

In 1902, the great American psychologist William James wrote about the many varieties of religious experience. He collected all kinds of case studies, and quoted the words of all kinds of people. One of these, Stephen Bradley, had an encounter, he thought, with Jesus in 1820. Here’s what Bradley said: “I thought I saw the savior in human shape for about one second in the room, with arms extended, appearing to say to me, ‘Come.’ The next day, I rejoiced with trembling. My happiness was so great that I said I wanted to die. This world had no place in my affections. Previous to this time, I was very selfish and self-righteous. But now I desired the welfare of all mankind and could, with a feeling heart, forgive my worst enemies.”

So note how Bradley’s petty moralistic self just dies on the way up the staircase. And on this higher level he becomes loving and forgiving. The world’s religions have found so many ways to help people climb the staircase. “But,” Haidt admits, “you don’t need a religion to get you up the staircase.” He admitted lots of people find self- transcendence in nature.

Playwright Ramsey Yelvington once said exactly the same as Haidt: “What we humans long for is self-transcendence.”

He used the words ‘to get out of our own skins; to become bigger and better than we are; to become one with something bigger than ourselves’. That happens often to actors in a play. For those who remember him, it happened for Warren McCarty when he was playing in a football game.

In Haidt’s words again:

This idea that we ‘move up’ was central in the writing of French sociologist Emile Durkheim. Durkheim believed that anything which unites us takes on an air of sacredness. And once people circle around some sacred object or value, thely’ll then work as a team and fight to defend it.

Both Haidt and Durkheim, like James, agree with Darwin. This is Haidt again:

In “The Descent of Man”, Charles Darwin wrote a great deal about the evolution of morality. Where did it come from?

Why do we have it? Darwin noted that many of our virtues are of very little use to ourselves, but they’re of great use to our groups. He wrote about the scenario in which two tribes of early humans would have come in contact and competition. He said, “If the one tribe included a great number of courageous, sympathetic, and faithful members who are always ready to aid and defend each other, this tribe would succeed and conquer the other.”

What is being implied here is that selfish and contentious people will not cohere, and without coherence nothing can be affected. Haidt closes with:

We evolved by multilevel selection, as Darwin explained. I can’t be certain if the staircase is an adaptation rather than a bug, but if it is an adaptation, then the implications are profound. If it is an adaptation, then we evolved to be religious.

But I grew suspicious of Haidt’s optimism about the value of religion. Not his explanation of how it developed or why we have it, but because I kept thinking of the dark side of it. I turned to a book by Edward O. Wilson called “The

Social Conquest of Earth”. While not a psychologist, Wilson is regarded as one of the world’s preeminent biologists and naturalists. He is the author of more than twenty books, including Pulitzer Prize winning “The Ants”, and is a professor emeritus at Harvard University. He re-stated the three fundamental questions of religion: “Where did we come from? What are we? Where are we going?”

Wilson says we humans have a miserable lack of self-understanding. He writes mostly about religion as a collection of myths from our deep ancestral past, which explained all we knew at the time about the physical world and ourselves as being supernatural in origin. “Yet,” he asks, “who or what is the focus, the reason for organized religion still, today?” Is it an entity that may not even exist? Perhaps it really is God. Or, perhaps, it is no more than a tribe united by a creation myth. If the latter, religious faith is better interpreted as an unseen trap, unavoidable during the biological history of our species. In the interest of better understanding ourselves, Wilson says, and I’m paraphrasing liberally:

Our lives are restrained by the two laws of biology: all living things and all of life’s processes follow the laws of physics and chemistry; and all living things and all of life’s processes have arisen through evolution by natural selection.

We need more detail about natural selection as mentioned by both Darwin and Haidt, since this is where most of our trouble in understanding ourselves comes from. Our ancestors were one of only two dozen or so animal lines ever to evolve into multi-generational groups who live and work together, cooperatively. In all other such groups, like ants and bees, they are able to do this only because they are all related. In multilevel natural selection, at the higher level, groups compete with [other] groups for food and other resources, so natural selection favors cooperative social traits among members of the same group. At the lower level, simultaneously, members of the same group compete with one another for whatever personal advantage might exist – more food, more mates – which leads to self-serving behavior. The opposition between the two levels of natural selection has resulted in a chimeric genotype in each of us.

It renders each of us part saint (cooperative) and part sinner (inclined to cheat for personal advantage).

The struggles born of multilevel selection are also where the humanities and social sciences (including psychology) dwell.

Humans are fascinated by other human beings. We watch and analyze our relatives, friends, and enemies. Gossip has always been our favorite occupation, from hunter-gatherers to royal courts. To weigh as accurately as possible the intentions and trustworthiness of those who affect our own personal lives is both very human and highly adaptive. It is also adaptive to judge the impact of others’ behavior on the welfare of the group as a whole. Civil law is the means by which we moderate the damage of our inevitable failures.

In addition to the two levels of our evolved nature, we still live in a largely mythic, spirit-haunted world, which Wilson says we owe to our early history.

The only way our ancestors could explain it all was through the creation myth, and every creation myth, without exception, affirmed the superiority of the tribe that invented it over all other tribes. Organized religions and their gods, although conceived in ignorance of most of the real world, were unfortunately set in stone in early history.

So, Wilson was a lot more pessimistic about religion than Haidt, but he finally comes back to an upside:

The same biological and historical circumstances that led us into the sloughs of ignorance have in other ways served humanity well. Organized religions preside over the rites of passage, from birth to maturity, from marriage to death.

The offer the best a tribe has to give: a committed community that gives heartfelt emotional support, welcomes, and forgives.

Still, Wilson blasts the myths and gods of organized religion because, he says, they are “stultifying and divisive”.

Because each is just one version of a competing multitude of scenarios that possibly can be true. Because they encourage ignorance. Because the distract people from recognizing problems in the real world. Because they often lead us in wrong directions with disastrous consequences. Commitment to a particular faith, Wilson says, is religious bigotry. Here is his proposal:

A good first step toward the liberation of humanity from these oppressive forms of tribalism would be to repudiate, respectfully, the claims of those in power who say they speak for God, are a special representative of God, or have exclusive knowledge of God’s divine will. Included among these purveyors of theological narcissism are would-be prophets, the founders of religious cults, impassioned evangelical ministers, ayatollahs, imams of the grand mosques, chief rabbis, Rosh yeshivas, the Dalai Lama, and the Pope. Humanity has suffered enough from the grossly inaccurate history told by mistaken prophets.

We may be the only group in church this Sunday who wouldn’t feel their guts had been kicked out by now. I feel a little shaken.

I need to return to William James. James believed that some people seemed to be “born happy, able to create their own well-being, able to see the world as fundamentally good, and people as basically kind. Your first birth, as a baby, was for these folks the only birth required to see the world aright.” His favorite example of this sort of person was

Walt Whitman, of whom James said, “He has infected [his readers] with his own love of comrades, with his own gladness that he and they exist.” On the other hand, James uses himself as an example of a “sick soul, who seems to need the remedy that religion offers for the ills of the world, who needs to be born again”.

I like this story because part of me feels like James might be right – that some people need some form of organized religion to help them live in and cope with this world. Part of me feels like pluralism is a good idea, fundamentally, if we could just figure out some way to avoid the evils that humans can do in the name of their God, their religion, their collection of myths.

Wilson believes we would be better off with an ethic of “simple decency to one another, the unrelenting application of reason, and acceptance of what we truly are.” While that sounds great to me too, it also sounds – well, pretty difficult to achieve.

Now, I feel a need to speak in our defense for being this religious community. This tribe, this beloved community of ours, believes in the free, responsible, and intellectually honest search for truth. This tribe understands biological evolution. This tribe – us – we – earnestly try to accept human kind for what we really are – part good, and part downright rotten. In any case, we accept that religious beliefs are the products of our history and our biological evolution.

I really wish Edward O. Wilson knew us – knew Unitarian Universalism – knew this beloved community which seeks to provide each of us with heartfelt emotional support. This community which welcomes and forgives; which provides the best a tribe has to offer, as he said himself.

So we come back together here every Sunday, not because we are united by a creation myth, but in order to re- experience the feeling on the staircase; the sacredness of self-transcendence; our connectedness. I’m glad we are all here. Our community. Something bigger and better than ourselves.