Jonathan Haidt’s analysis so far does not mean religion is an unmixed blessing. But it does mean religion does some good—some significant good.

Haidt paid attention to scientific work by R.D. Putnam and D.E. Campbell and their fascinating research into religion. That research has revealed some surprising things about religions. One thing it has led to is the conclusion that religion has produced large surpluses of social capital that has benefitted not just religious adherents, but outsiders as well.

Jonathan Haidt has argued, that religions are sets of cultural practices that coevolved with the minds of humans by the process of multi-level natural selection. He has pointed out that to the extent that group-level selection occurred, we can expect religions and religious minds to be parochial. In other words, human minds concentrate on helping the in-group of humans. Yet, this is true, he argues, “even when a religion preaches universal love and benevolence.”

That may be not be intuitive, but Haidt argues that “Religiosity evolved because successful religions made groups more efficient at “turning resources into offspring.” As a result of that Haidt argues, “Religion is therefor well suited to be the handmaiden of groupishness, tribalism, and nationalism.” While those are not entirely benign forces, they can be aligned with beneficial results too. He gave the example of suicide bombing. Based on work by Robert Pape who created a database of every known suicide bombing in the last 100 years which showed that “suicide bombing is a nationalistic response to military occupation by a culturally alien democratic power…It’s a response to contamination of the sacred homeland.” Haidt asks us to look at it as if it were a fist punched into a beehive and then left in for a long time. That is rather a graphic image.

Yet it is admittedly true that most military occupations don’t lead to suicide-bombing because they don’t affect the right ideology that can rally the support of fanatical young men. Not every one is willing to die for a sacred cause. Shiite Muslims were the first to demonstrate that suicide bombing can work, as they used it to drive the United States Marines out of Lebanon in 1983. What does all this have to do with religion? Well according to Haidt,

“Anything that binds people together into a moral matrix that glorifies the in-group, while at the same time demonizing another group can lead to moralistic killing, and many religions are well suited for that task. Religion is therefore often an accessory to atrocity, rather than the driving force of the atrocity.” Either way, that is not so good.

Haidt analyzes the religious enterprise like this:

“…if you look at the long history of humanity and see our righteous minds as nearly miraculous freaks of evolution that cry out for explanation, then you might feel some appreciation for the role religion played in getting us here. We are Homo duplex.[1] We are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee.[2] Successful religions work on both levels of our nature to suppress selfishness, or at leas to channel it in ways that often pay dividends for the group. Gods were helpful in creating moral matrices within which Glauconian[3] creatures have strong incentives to conform. And gods were an essential part of the evolution of our hivish overlay;[4] sometimes we really do transcend self-interest and devote ourselves to helping others or our groups.[5]”

According to Haidt, if a person lives in a religious community, he or she has a set of norms, relationships, and institutions that work intuitively to influence your behavior without really thinking about what you are doing. An atheist does not have the benefit of that. If one is an atheist one might have a looser community with a less binding moral matrix that requires you to think through an issue. It is not intuitive. It is not automatic. To many, like me, that might actually sound appealing, but it is recipe for a society without a shared moral order. According to Haidt, we have evolved to implement our norms and to live, trade, and trust within shared moral matrices. As Haidt explains, “When societies lose their grip on individuals that allows them to do as they please, and although that sounds pleasant, it actually leads to individuals being less happy and actually leads to increases in suicide. I remember a philosophy professor of mine who use to say John Stuart Mills’ “liberty” is Emile Durkheim’s “suicide.”

As a result, Haidt argues that societies that forgo religion over several generations will suffer. He says we don’t really know that yet since atheistic societies are a relatively new phenomena so we don’t yet have the empirical evidence to back it up, so Haidt is speculating. But it is certainly interesting speculation.

So religion leads to happier lives Haidt argues. Such societies will be better or more efficient at turning resources into offspring and hence will be more successful than atheistic societies. And remember, Haidt is an atheist.

In my view, this is all very interesting speculation. I am not sure I agree, but it is worth thinking about.

[1] this is what Haidt refers to humans as. By that he means that humans are creature who exist at 2 levels: as an individual and as members of a larger society (group)

[2] by that Haidt means in simplified terms that we are 90% selfish individuals and 10% social members of a group

[3] Glaucon was Plato’s brother who argued that people are only virtuous when they are worried about the consequences of being caught

[4] the bee in us

[5] Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind, (2012) p. 312-313

It goes without saying that religion can be a force for good or ill. We have known for quite some time that religions can unite us, but they can also divide us. No one should know this better than a Mennonite like me. As I have said many times, when religion divides us rather than connects us, it is not actually religion at all. It is something else. In fact when religion divides us, it is not even religion. It is misnamed. It should be called anti-religion.

If the data shows (as I argued in an earlier post) that religions help people to be more generous to members of their own group, how does it help or hinder them to be generous towards non-members of that group? That is an interesting question. Robert Putnam and David Campbell wrote a book that dealt with exactly that. It was called American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us. This is where the evidence gets really surprising, because one might think that people who are generous to members of their own group, don’t have enough resources to be generous as well to non-members.

As Jonathan Haidt said,

“Putnam and Campbell found that the more frequently people attend religious services, the more generous and charitable they become across the board. Of course religious people give a lot to religious charities, but they also give as much as or more than secular folk to secular charities such as the American Cancer Society. They spend a lot of time in service to their churches and synagogues, but they also spend more time than secular folk serving in neighborhood and civic associations of all sorts.

Putnam and Campbell did not stop there. They were even more explicit:

By many different measures religiously observant Americans are better neighbors and better citizens than secular Americans—they are more generous with their time and money, especially in helping the needy, and they are more active in community life.”

 

Frankly this is directly contrary to what I always believed was the case. I first thought about this when I learned that the little town of Blumenort near to us in Steinbach had the highest rates of charitable donations per capita in Canada. At first I thought that was fantastic. It is fantastic. But, on reflection I thought that was only because Blumenort was a primarily Mennonite town and they gave most of that money to their church. I was dismissive for that reason. It turns out, based on this data, that I might be wrong.

Does that mean that my entire view of religion is wrong? The book The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt really made me seriously rethink what I thought about religion! That is amazing. I always thought I was open to new ideas. Now I had proof that this was true.

Now all of this brings up more questions. Fruitful new ideas always do that. That is a good thing. As a result I asked, what type of religion has this result? Is Islam as much a force for good as Christianity? Buddhists better than Muslims?  Are Catholics better than Mennonites? What about less institutional religions? Putnam and Campbell in from their book American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us. did not have answers to all of these questions (darn),  but they did have some useful information about such questions as well.

Jonathan Haidt reflecting on the data of  Putnam and Campbell Putnam and Campbell analyzed the data this way:

“Why are religious people better neighbors and citizens? To find out, Putnam and Campbell included on one of their surveys a long list of questions about religious beliefs (e.g. “Do you believe in hell? Do you agree that we will all be called before God to answer for our sins?”) as well as questions about religious practices ) e.g., “How often do your read holy scriptures? How often do you pray?”). These beliefs and practices turned out to matter very little. Whether you believe in hell, whether you pray daily, whether you are a Catholic, Protestant, Jew, or Mormon…none of these things correlated with generosity. The only thing that was reliably and powerfully associated with the moral benefits of religion was how enmeshed people were in relationships with their co-religionists. It’s the friendships and group activities, carried out within a moral matrix that emphasizes selflessness. That’s what brings out the best in people.”

I was not surprised to learn beliefs were largely irrelevant. I have thought that for a long time. Putnam and Campbell reject the New Atheist emphasis on belief and reach a conclusion straight out of Durkheim: “It is religious belongingness that matters for neighborliness, not religious believing.”

It’s not doctrines or even faith that matters. What does matter is to what extent does a religion help us to connect to others. Which brings me back to my fundamental principle—religion is something that helps us connect to others or even the world. That goes back to the original meaning of the Asian word religios which means connection.

I would put it this way: the more your religion leads you to feel connected with your fellows the more likely you are to be a better neighbour; the more likely you are to be a better citizen, the more likely you are to be a better person! That is what religion—true religion—is all about. Religion is what connects us to others. Religion is not what divides us from others.

Jonathan Haidt in his book The Righteous Mind provided some more shocking insights. At least to me an admitted irreligious person. At least I proved to myself that I have at least a partially open mind to consider his point of view. Actually he changed my point of view about religion more than any other person in quite some time. He began by asking a fundamental question: does religion make people good or bad?

Atheists invariably point out that religions cause a lot of wars, genocides, and acts of terrorism. They divide people when they should unite them. Religion has been used to oppress vulnerable groups like women, children (yes children), people of colour, people with perceived deviant sexual orientations, and many others. The track record of religion is far from evenly beneficial. They are not entirely bad either.

Religious believers often claim atheists and sceptics are morally bankrupt and can’t be trusted. A character in one of Dostoyevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov said, “If God is dead all is permitted.”

Where does the truth lie? Haidt has some amazing evidence. He does not rely on faith. He relies on evidence and data. He is a scientific person. I claim to be a person who makes believes contingent on evidence.

First, Haidt points out that it is not a reasonable expectation for religion to produce unconditional altruists. It’s not going to happen. But it doesn’t have to achieve perfection to be a force for good. Haidt put the case for religion this way:

“Whatever Christ said about the good Samaritan who helped an injured Jew, if religion is a group-level adaptation, then it should produce parochial altruism. It should make people exceedingly generous and helpful toward members of their own moral communities, particularly when their reputations will be enhanced. And indeed, religion does exactly this. Studies of charitable giving in the United States show that people in the least religious fifth of the population give just 1.5 percent of their money to charity. People in the most religious fifth (based on church attendance, not belief) give a whopping 7 percent of their income to charity, and the majority of that giving is to religious organizations. It’s the same story for volunteer work; religious people do far more than secular folk and the bulk of that work is done for, or at least through, their religious organizations.”

So far I was not surprised. What he told me next though did surprise me. In fact, it shocked me, because it was directly contrary to what I had always thought.

There is also some evidence that religious people behave better in lab experiments—especially when they get to work with each other. A team of German economists asked subjects to play a game. A team of German economists asked subjects to play a game in which one person is the “truster,” who is given some money on each round of the game. The truster is then asked to decide how much money, if any, to pass on to an anonymous “trustee.” Any money passed gets tripled by the experiment, at which point the trustee can choose how many rounds of the game, with different people each time, sometimes as truster , sometimes as the trustee.

Behavioural economists use this game often, but the novel twist in this study was to reveal one piece of real, true personal information about the trustee to the trustee to the trusters, before the trusters made their initial decision to trust. The information was taken from questionnaires that all subjects had filled out weeks before. In some cases, the truster learned the trustee’s level of religiosity, on a scale of 1 to 5. When trusters learned that their trustee was religious, they transferred more money, which shows that these Germans held the same belief as did Locke (about religious believers being more trustworthy). More important, the religious trustees really did transfer back more money than did the nonreligious trustees, even though they never knew anything about their trusters. The highest levels of wealth, therefore, would be created when religious people get to play a trust game with other religious people.

There is actually some real life historical evidence that corroborates this experiment.

Many scholars have talked about this interaction of God, trust, and trade. In the ancient world, temples often served an important commercial function: oaths were sworn and contracts signed before the deity, with explicit threats of supernatural punishment for abrogation. In the medieval world, Jews and Muslims excelled in the long-distance trade in part because their religions helped them create trustworthy relationships and enforceable contracts. Even today, markets that require very high trust to function efficiently (such as a diamond market) are often dominated by religiously bound ethnic groups (such as ultra-Orthodox Jews), who have a lower transaction and monitoring costs than their secular competitors.

This is good evidence that religion does serve a useful purpose. Haidt put it this way:

“So religions do what they are supposed to do. As Wilson put it, they help people “to achieve together what they cannot achieve on their own.” But that job description applies equally well to Mafia. Do religions help their practitioners by binding them together into a superorganism that can prey on-or at least turn their backs on –everyone else? Is religious altruism a boon or a curse to outsiders?”

My conclusion is simple: People trust religious people! And that is actually quite important. It helps people to do good things together!