Abstract

God is a concept by which we measure our pain.

John Lennon, cited by J Jost

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Monday, 22 April 2002
Tuesday, 5 February 2008

Christianity and Social Deprivation

Religion might be a response to social deprivation. Suffering and deprivation in this life is compensated for by the notion that things are better in the next. If this is true, it is easy to see why rulers would want to encourage religion among the masses. Certainly Karl Marx saw the relevance of it.

This Pew Poll of religious attitudes in different countries plotted relative to their per capita income is unequivocal. People in poor countries are more religious worldwide, except in the US, the richest country in the world whose people must think themselves deprived in some sense.

Christianity was originally eschatological and many Christian beliefs still are. E T Clark studied 200 small sects in the USA and found they:

• expected the end of the world soon, so there was not much point in aiming to change it;
• valued frugality, making a virtue out of necessity for their poor members;
• emphasised simplicity of worship, in simple churches and tabernacles, to avoid cost;
• emphasised the salvation of the poor and the meek, who would be exalted, and the rich and powerful cast down, when the world ended.

This is the extreme Puritanical attitude to Christianity, highlighting a supposed real Christianity as lived by Jesus and his disciples, before the gentile churches exalted Jesus into a universal king clad in riches and wealth like an eastern potentate. That, of course, is what people expected to worship, and why the transformation occurred to meet their expectations. However, these sects had no thoughts of trying to right a wrong in the world. God had ordained it, so it must be right until the world ended—soon! The believer had to wait for death or hope for the eschaton, which was always to be “soon”. So far death has always come first.

Underprivileged and oppressed minorities, such as Blacks and Hispanics, in the US are more religious than the average American, even though average Americans profess to be religious. Analysis of census returns suggest that people tend to join churches in times of economic stress. These support the deprivation hypothesis of religious behaviour. Black minorities are also fond of small ecstatic sects. Counter to the deprivation hypothesis is that middle class Americans also like to flaunt their religiosity. Investigation shows, though, that they are morivated differently from the poor. Religious people are politically conservative and prefer the social status quo.

Social and recreational considerations are world-wide factors in the psychology of religion. If the church and priest are not at hand, religion soon disappears. In modern religion, the church is a club. The minister caters to every interest, from dancing to matrimony, from vanity to sheer gregariousness and commercial interests. Among the middle classes and social aspirers, at least, it pays to go to church. Useful contacts are made in God’s club. It is no different from the Freemasons or the Young Conservatives. But God must know how sincere his worshippers are. The question is whether He will reward them for their insincerity or punish them.

S Carlos finds that the middle classes are satisfying their needs for social bonding in their suburban regime of regular church attendance. Often their churches are scarcely religious at all but a form of club, community association or charity for the relief of wealth guilt through donations of conscience money. It is hardly surprising that evangelists get rich. One out of every four adults donated more than $1,000 to charities, and churches in 1999, but the mean amount of money given per adult was $1,045. Nonreligious Americans are among the people least likely to give. Middle class church attendance is presented as a voluntary social response to social deprivation in others, when it is at least as much intended to magnify self-esteem. It is also a form of social grooming to bond suburban America in like interests and attitudes.

Though the USA has a large number of religions, particularly Christian sects, they function, according to W Herzberg, and R N Bellah, as a civil or secular religion which might be compared to the civil or secular religions of the Greeks and the Romans. In this respect, there is a remarkable degree of religious uniformity in the USA that has the effect of integrating society through their shared beliefs. Those who reject these shared beliefs are considered un-American and are black-balled by society. If social nonconformists want to keep their jobs, they have to keep tight-lipped at work. Pluralism in America means the extent of variation within the accepted secular religion, but often atheists, agnostics and Pagans are rejected as social deviants.

The main middle class sect is Christian Science whose members feel deprivation themselves through a neurotic or even hysterical concern for their health. 80% of male Christian Scientists and 96% of females in one study were concerned about their health, proving the irrationality of religious belief.

The economically deprived and oppressed minorities accept their lot in society all the more readily for being devout. B R Wilson in Religion in Secular Society, noted the frenzied emotionality of the sects preferred by Blacks and disadvantaged groups, adding that “emotional expression in the religious context might be seen as a deflection of concern from social inequalities”. The poor also prefer sects oriented towards other-worldliness. L Page showed, long ago, that churches openly co-operated with corporate management and aimed to deflect the concerns of industrial workers from this world to the next. The captains of industry have always made generous donations—out of religious concern, you understand—to the churches preferred by their workers. The sects keep the workers from wasting what they do earn through teaching frugality and clean living, so that even a deprived workforce remains optimally healthy and effective.

In general, both religion and radicalism address economic and social deprivation, but each excludes the other. The religious answer is pie in the sky not direct action in the real world. Christianity, particularly in the salvationist sects, serves as an alternative to political radicalism. Jews were most liberal, perhaps a result of their commitment to intellectualism and therefore to irreligiousness in practice. Judaism is more of a cultural identity in many ways rather than a religion in the Moslem and Christian sense.

IQ and Religion

Large volumes have been published on educational psychology and religious psychology in the last century. Intuitively, any correlation of religion with intelligence must be negative, and many surveys over a long time, of different speciality occupations and with different surveying methods have shown religious faith is inversely correlated with education, IQ, and liberal attitudes. A 2006 Gallup poll found 72% of Americans were certain there is a God and had no doubts. Only 3% were certain God does not exist. Men, those living towards the East and towards the West, those who are college graduates, and those with high incomes are less likely to believe in God than the others—women, those in the midwest, non-graduates and those on low incomes. Christians know it, and so keep references to the intelligence of religious believers dark.

Jung proposed four psychological personality types, each measured along a bipolar axis—introversion v extraversion, sensing v intuition, thinking v feeling and judging v perceiving. It is a game that can be extended as widely as you choose, but the introversion-extraversion axis caught on. However, it seems only the thinking v feeling axis was pertinent to a favourable view of Christianity. Those at the feeling pole had a more positive attitude to Christianity than those at the thinking pole who were more disdainful. No significant differences were found for the other bipolarities.

From Thomas Howells in 1927 until the plethora of modern studies, the more intelligent students were less interested in religion, indeed were more atheistic. Only a few studies were exceptional, finding no correlation, in one case the reason being realized—all of the students tested were of exceptional intelligence, and only among Mormons are the results anomalous, if they are valid. It might have something to do with the verse in the Book Of Mormon, “To be learned is good if they hearken unto the counsels of God”, encouraging Mormon graduates to demonstrate their religiousness.

L J Francis has done a vast number of studies of aspects of the psychology of religion mainly in children, and finds no correlation of religiosity with intelligence. He is a professional Christian, an Anglican priest and a professor of theology. Francis acknowledges that eminent psychologists like Michael Argyle had fairly consistently found that religiousness correlated with lower intelligence:

Although intelligent children grasp religious concepts earlier, they are also the first to doubt the truth of religion, and intelligent students are much less likely to accept orthodox beliefs, and rather less likely to have pro-religious attitudes.

Michael Argyle (1958)

But he has an explanation for it—Freud, who said:

Religious beliefs are magical and irrational and not conducive to the development of the rational intellect.

Here is the typical Christian attitude towards knowledge—that of authority. Francis thinks, like Christians generally who are used to accepting everything they believe on the authority of the bible, that others are the same, even scientists. The authority of Freud as the most eminent of the early psychologists must mean, to a Christian, that his word goes, and all psychologists must accept it and think the same. The worry is that he, a man supposedly doing objective research, does think like this, albeit not in favour of Freud’s irreligiousness but the opposite. Scientists are interested in authority to test it. They base their beliefs on the evidence, and the evidence—not their opinion but the evidence—for decades, and elsewhere still, showed that religious feeling was related negatively with intelligence. It is actual research, not just untested beliefs like Christian ones. Then Francis finds no relationship in a study that had some weight to it because of the numbers involved. Strange that he did not use carefully tested measures, but some devised himself to get rid of bias such as social class! It yielded a result more acceptable to Christians! Class relates with about half of the variance in achievement tests. Needless to say, he is often cited… by Christians.

Norman Poythress, in 1975, found these values for mean standardized achievement tests:

• 1148—strongly anti-religious
• 1119—moderately anti-religious
• 1108—slightly anti-religious
• 1022—religious

The more intelligent and original scientists are, the less religious they are.
From Prof Kaist’s website

In elite colleges like Harvard, UCLA and Stanford, surveys consistently show smaller percentages of their students judge religion important than all students—typical being 26% of elite students, compared with 44% of all students. Studies of high IQ groups like Mensa show that the proportion interested in religion is lower than the general population, and studies of eminent professionals like scientists regularly show they have less interest in religion than the general population. For example, Ann Roe, in 1953, interviewed 64 eminent scientists. Nearly all had religious parents and had attended Sunday school but only three were active in church. A few attended occasionally. Some were openly atheistic, but most were not interested in religion.

A 1998 survey by Larson and Witham of the 517 members of the United States National Academy of Sciences showed that 72% of the members did not believe in a personal God and another 20% were doubtful or agnostic. Only 7% of these eminent scientists believed, in contrast with 85% of the US population. An earlier (1997) study by Larson, reported in an absurdly misrepresentative way—Witham is a religious writer—is often cited by Christians as showing that professors were no different in their views from the general public, when it actually found almost precisely the same results as Leuba in 1916. In fact, they had less belief in an afterlife than Leuba found.

Terman’s 1959 Findings
From Prof Kaist’s website

A 2004 small scale undergraduate project mainly of women students, by Regan Clark, reported online, found “religious individuals are somewhat lower in quantitative ability, perhaps suggesting less rigor in certain kinds of reasoning.” The “somewhat” suggests only slight, but the small sample was of high IQ students so there was little range to test. Another finding was that “prayer fulfillment, feeling that joy and contentment have been achieved through prayer, was negatively related to both SAT scores and verbal IQ as assessed by the WAIS-III.”

Burnham P Beckwith did a review of the surveys he could find and concluded:

All but four of the forty-three polls I have reviewed support the conclusion that native intelligence varies inversely with degree of religious faith…

Among American students and adults, the amount of religious faith tends to vary inversely and appreciably with intelligence.

The Effect of Intelligence on Religious Faith
Free Inquiry, Spring 1986

Mean IQ for different countries against the percentage of people considering religion important. The negative correlation is remarkably high at -0.88.
Data from Professor Richard Lynn and the Pew Poll

Gallup has tested religious right wingers specifically in 1995 with these results:

Fall 1995 Gallup poll of the religious right showed that they were less religious when college educated

It is all embarrassing for Christians. They complain that Beckwith’s study was not scientific! Never mind that the 43 studies he was reviewing were. Christians use their usual diversionary tactics of outright denial, and protesting about details. The two techniques are complementary because they deny the findings by declaring them to be invalid through some fancied objection on detail, like this one not being scientific. Popular here is to object to the definition of religion or religiosity, and of IQ. They do not raise objections regarding these definitions when the results are favourable to them, thus proving they are merely carping because they do not like the outcome. If a survey finds religiosity positively correlated with health, then no problems are raised. Indeed, the immediate assumption even of some of the researchers, presumably the Christian ones, is that religion causes good health! When various measures of IQ are used for college grading then Christians raise no objections to IQ and religious colleges will use them.

Christians are happy to read that 96% of all Americans believe in God, and 88% affirm the importance of religion, according to a 1995 Gallup poll. But psychologists can break down religiosity and then they find the results are not so sweeping. If the definition of religiosity is measured not merely by the self assessment of whether religion is important to them but also tested by attendance at least once a week at a church, then only 35% of Americans are “religious”. Then Christians quibble about the definition being too tight or that church attendance is not a good proxy, and so on. Good psychologists know that the definitions are important and try to get ones that correlate well on several proxy criteria.

In 1968, R Stark and G Glock found that 86 percent of Catholics and 79 percent of Protestants could not name a single prophet from the Jewish scriptures, otherwise known as the Christian Old Testament. It suggests that the much vaunted high percentages given for the proportion of Christians in the USA, would not be so impressive if a few simple questions were added to verify that these people actually know anything about the religion they profess. Of the supposed 90 percent or so of Americans who claim to be Christian, it seems from Stark and Glock that only around seventeen percent would know enough about their faith to justify their claim to be Christians.

Forty years on, it has been confirmed and is even worse for Christians. The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life in 2010 asked more than 3,400 Americans 32 mainly basic questions about the Bible, Christianity and other world religions, religious history and geography. On average, people answered half the questions incorrectly, and many could not answer basic trivia about their own faith. Atheists, agnostics, Jews and Mormons knew more about religion, even the Christian religion, than Christians. The response from Christians, especially the fundamentalist and evangelical types was to blame anything except Christianity. Naturally the government, and the educational system were mainly responsible. It was the Great Conspiracy against the church that was holding them back! Alternatively they claimed that knowing anything about Christianity did not matter at all. Only faith mattered! So faith equates with ignorance, even of Christ’s teaching!

You can be sure that Christians, when they carp, do so because the results are not to their liking, and are not scholarly questions of technical method. They also like to cite inferior studies simply because they suit them. While they ignore or disparage Beckwith’s review of 43 surveys, the above mentioned study by Clark, admitted by its author as limited, is fondly cited by Christians as showing no strong correlations!

Someone on Yahoo Answers replied that it is not surprising that scientists are more atheistic because science is rational, and everyone must choose logic or faith on our journey through life (presumably from having no choice but faith)—it is scary for most people. Well, then “most people” should be assured that it is not a bit scary. Sticking with childish beliefs, with faith, is scary because it is utterly arbitrary and immature, unlike logic. Most people are whatever faith they are for no other reason than the faith of their parents. That is arbitrary, and by sticking with it when they can choose is immature. Of course, only the intelligent can throw off the shackles their parents bound them with. And the consequences of immaturity can be very serious indeed. Dr Gregory Paul, in a study in The Journal of Religion and Society online finds:

Correlations between popular acceptance of human evolution and belief in and worship of a creator and Bible literalism are negative. The least religious nation, Japan, exhibits the highest agreement with the scientific theory, the lowest level of acceptance is found in the most religious developed democracy, the US… Within the US, strong disparities in religious belief versus acceptance of evolution are correlated with similarly varying rates of societal dysfunction, the strongly theistic, anti-evolution south and mid-west having markedly worse homicide, mortality, STD, youth pregnancy, marital and related problems than the northeast where societal conditions, secularization, and acceptance of evolution approach European norms.

Intelligence must have something to do with this, must it not? Very, very few intelligent people reject evolution. The anti-evolutionary dogma of Christian churches must make intelligent people leave them even if they still want to believe in God. Acceptance of evolution must be a good proxy for intelligence. Simpler people cannot see through the myth, fancy, irrationality and plain lies of religion. Intelligent people can.

Christians and Measuring Religiosity

Psychology of religion has become a game played by Christian psychologists to obscure and muddy what real psychologists seek to find. Measuring religiosity is an example. It does not need an Einstein to think of a measure of religiosity, now, does it? An obvious one for Christians is attendance at church. Christian psychologists do not care for it much, though, because church attendances have been declining everywhere, except perhaps in the US and some countries like northern Ireland, over the last hundred years or so. People, on this measure, are getting less religious. So, Christians have to have something better, more all encompassing, and then anyone who can be considered marginally Christian will not be omitted. Professor Francis, a psychometrist who is so Christian that he is also a professor of theology, thought up a list of 24 questions to make sure that everyone would be caught, but it is a bit cumbersome to apply, especially to the children that Francis was particularly interested in, so it was often cut down in practice to seven easy-to-understand questions. The Francis short scale of attitude toward Christianity (Francis & Stubbs, 1987) requires the subject to read seven sentences carefully and decide, “Do I agree with it?”

1. I know that Jesus helps me
2. I think that going to church is a waste of time
3. God helps me to lead a better life
4. God means a lot to me
5. Prayer helps me a lot
6. I know that Jesus is very close to me
7. I think the bible is out of date

Items 2 and 7 are judged inversely—those who agree most are least religious. The scale is scored from (5) “agree strongly”, (4) “agree”, (3) “uncertain”, (2) “disagree”, (1) “disagree strongly”. The simple item on attendance at church is made negative and given a somewhat pejorative tone to ensure that people marginally inclined to Christianity will respond favourably. The same is true of item seven, though the useful contribution of seven to the overall results measured by factor loading seems so low that it could be dropped with little consequence.

Another measure is the ten item Santa Clara Strength of Religious Faith Questionnaire, the factor loadings of which are listed here:

• My religious faith is extremely important to me—0.91
• I pray daily—0.82
• I look to my faith as a source of inspiration—0.91
• I look to my faith as providing meaning and purpose in my life—0.89
• I consider myself active in my faith or church—0.78
• My faith is an important part of who I am as a person—0.91
• My relationship with God is extremely important to me—0.86
• I enjoy being around others who share my faith—0.72
• I look to my faith as a source of comfort—0.87
• My faith impacts many of my decisions—0.79

Any of the questions with the highest factor loading would probably suffice by itself. But this is just scratching the surface. Here are some others scales and measures grouped and listed:

1. Religious Belief and Practice (21)
2. Religious Attitudes (13)
3. Religious Orientation (11)
4. Religious Development (8)
5. Religious Commitment and Involvement (4)
6. Religious Experience (3)
7. Religious / Moral Values (6)
8. Multidimensional Religiousness (15)
9. Religious Coping and Problem-Solving (3)
10. Spirituality and Mysticism (6)
11. Religious Fundamentalism (5)
12. Views of Death / Afterlife (5)
13. Divine Intervention / Religious Attribution (3)
14. the God Concept (7)
15. Forgiveness (2)
16. Institutional Religion (5)
17. Religious Constructs (9).

Here are over a hundred scales of religiosity, many of which are questionnaires with multiple questions, though one of them will capture most of the target subjects. Of course, some of these scales are directed at some aspect of religiosity such as belief in the afterlife, quite legitimately asked about. Since only one item will probably do the trick, the sensible questionnaire could get all the responses needed in a list of say twenty items, carefully worded to get an objective response, not the one that the Christian examiner subjectively hopes for. Thus Gallup used to ask:

Have you ever had a religious experience—that is, a particularly powerful, sudden religious insight or awakening?

36% of Americans would answer, “Yes”. Gallup instructed those who answered “Yes” to indicate the importance of religion to them by ticking different responses to the statement “Religion is important to me”. It was either extremely important (50%) to the respondents that had had a religious experience or it was very important to them (40%), and for most of the rest it was important. A small proportion only of those who had had such an experience considered religion not really important. There are doubtless as many other people as the 36% who answered this question affirmatively who are religious, but certainly almost everyone who has had a religious experience is. This then is a good proxy for finding in a sample of people those who are especially pre-occupied with religion. Some others might be missed but these are definitely the religious kooks.

Religious people forever say the outsider can never comprehend or empathise with them as insiders. It might be true, but why does it matter? It only matters to the religious insider because they want everyone to subscribe to their delusion. On the other hand, the religious insider unquestionably does not have the objectivity for scholarly investigation, and that does matter. Religion and anything connected with it like biblical archaeology and history should never be studied by insiders because they simply cannot look at their own beliefs and practices dispassionately. Recent psychological studies have consistently found a relationship between religion and happiness measured by an Oxford happiness test, but curiously the testers were always Christians. Others have found no such relationship measured as satisfaction with or purpose in life, or on a depression-happiness spectrum. Since many religious people argue that religion is important for giving them a sense of purpose, a positive correlation with purpose in life might be expected but not found. Christians should stick to what the religious insider does best, and which does not matter a hoot to the rest of us on the outside—theology.

The Baylor Religion Survey 2006

The Baylor Institute of Religion (ISR) states its aim as “to combine the highest standards of scholarship with a serious commitment to faith”, a grand sounding aim, to be sure, but one that is doomed to failure in one or other of its aspects. Which is to yield when scholarship contradicts faith? Past experience suggests it is scholarship, so the organization is simply another grandiose apology for Christianity. In the Templeton-funded Baylor religion survey (available to download in pdf format) reported in September 2006 and conducted in 2005 by Gallup, 1721 respondents answered nearly 400 questions mailed to them, and covering aspects of American religion, spirituality, politics and spending. Since the Templeton foundation is an organization for disbursing money to anyone who can offer novel or substantial defences of some aspect of religion, the combination of the pair of them fills you with suspicion, unless you are a Christian when anything that upholds belief is acceptable, true or not. Still, this work was done by Gallup, so let us look at it. Errors in the data are 4%.

Baylor admits that many Americans do not know what denomination they are in. They just attend a church! The Saddleback Church of Southern California is cited as an example. It is Southern Baptist, but apparently a lot of the congregation there do not know it, and so cannot say in answer to a survey what denomination they are! That sounds pretty ignorant, and suggests a shallow appreciation of their own beliefs. It also makes Americans more religious! Four percent of those who in previous surveys had entered “unaffiliated” were actually members of a denomination, so came back into the Christian fold. It amounts to 10 million people!

• A third of Americans (34%), roughly 100 million people, are Evangelical Protestants
• The majority (63%) of Americans not affiliated with a religious tradition believe in God or some higher power
• More than a quarter have read Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, but likelihood of reading the book decreases with church attendance.

Though a third of US citizens are Evangelical Protestants, their capacity for self-delusion seems to be indicated by the finding that only 2% think it is the best description of them! Indeed, only a third of Evangelical Protestants think that is what they are. More “Mainline” Protestants call themselves “Evangelical” than the Evangelicals. The Evangelicals prefer to think of themselves as “Born Again”, though “Born Yesterday” would be more appropriate. Only 8% thought they were Fundamentalists, and only one percent thought that was the best description of them.

Evangelical Protestants are uniform in being conservative in politics, disagreeing with liberalism. Mainline Protestants and Catholics are diverse in their views. Those who describe themselves as Biblical Literalists, whatever their tradition, are markedly anti-liberal and pro-conservative policies.

An innovation and central to the new survey was to invite answers on believer’s impression of the nature of God—how believers envisioned Him.

Americans may agree that God exists. They do not agree about what God is like, what God wants for the world, or how God feels about politics.

Baylor Religion Survey, 2006

Four possibilities were offered by asking how much believers thought God involved Himself in the world, and how judgemental He was thought to be. God could be high in anger (judgemental), low in anger (benevolent), high in engagement (active), low in engagement (distant).

1. Authoritarian God—God is involved in their life and world affairs. God helps in decision-making and causes global events such as economic upturns or tsunamis. God is angry and will punish the unfaithful or ungodly.
2. Benevolent God—God is active in their life but not angry. God is a positive influence and less willing to condemn or punish.
3. Critical God—God does not interact with the world, but observes it and sees it unfavorably. God’s displeasure will be felt in another life and divine justice is not of this world.
4. Distant God—God is not active in the world and not angry. God is a cosmic force which set the laws of nature in motion. God does not “do” things in the world and does not hold opinions about our activities or world events.

Americans by the type of God they believe in

These four possible gods correlated well with political outlooks. The data showed:

• 31% believe in an Authoritarian God—judgemental and engaged
• 25% believe in a Benevolent God—not judgemental but engaged
• 16% believe in a Critical God—judgemental but not engaged
• 23% believe in a Distant God—not judgemental, not engaged
• 5% are atheists

In slightly more detail, a summary of the results is:

• Men preferred the disengaged God (48%), and 8% were atheists, but women went for the active one (64%) and only 3% were atheists
• Graduates preferred the disengaged God (47%), and 7% were atheists but uneducated people liked the active one (64%), and 2% were atheists
• Poor people preferred the active God (62%), and 5% were atheists, but the rich preferred the disengaged variety (50%), and 6% were atheists
• The more regular church attenders preferred the active God (82%), and none were atheists, but those who never ettended church went for the disengaged God (58%), and 20% were atheists
• Those who pray several times a day liked the Authoritarian God (55%) while those who never prayed liked the Distant God or were atheists.
• Jews prefer the Distant God (42%)
• Catholics were even among the four, preferring slightly the Distant God (29%) and the Benevolent one (28%), and Mainline Protestants were also evenly divided with a slight preference (29%) for the Distant God
• A majority of black Protestants (68%) believe in an Authoritarian God and so do Evangelical Christians (52%)
• Biblical literalists strongly favoured the Authoritarian God (60%) who was masculine (56%)
• Many young people under 30 believe God is Authoritarian (40%)
• Of those who believed God is Authoritarian, 23% think abortion is always wrong, compared with an average of 12% and 2% of those who believe in a distant God
• Those who believed God is Authoritarian were most against gay marriage (81%), pre-marital sex (59%), adultery (93%) and cohabitation (50%), but all Christians approved of divorce, the least approving being the authoritarians again at 8%
• Easterners have an even mix of beliefs in the four Gods, and 8% are atheists
• Southerners tend towards an Authoritarian God (44%), and three percent are atheists
• Midwesterners are divided between an Authoritarian (33%) and a Benevolent (29%) God
• The West Coast is divided between a Benevolent (27%) and a Distant God (30%)

On a lot of political issues and what is needed to be good, Americans are fairly agreed irrespective of their religious beliefs. Here are the averages for the population. On the equal distribution of wealth (58%), the closer regulation of businesses (65%), protection of the environment (83%), affirmative action programs (45%), seeking social and economic justice (37%), helping the needy (63%), consuming less (17%), and serving in the armed services (17%), differences are small.

• Believers in the Distant God are twice as likely (27%) to want the death penalty abolished as believers in the Authoritarian God (12%)
• Believers in the Authoritarian God are twice as likely (63%) to want military spending increased and to increase repression to fight terror (76%) as believers in the Distant God (34% and 40% respectively)
• Believers in the Authoritarian God are three times as likely (47%) to want funding for faith-based organizations as those who believe in the Distant God (13%)
• Believers in the Authoritarian God are twice as likely (91%) to want the constitution changing to allow prayer in schools as those who believe in the Distant God (47%)
• Believers in the Authoritarian God are twice as likely (22%) to want to convert others as the average citizen (10%), and believers in the Distant God have almost no interest in converting others (<1%)
• Believers in the Authoritarian God are three times as likely (37%) to want to teach others their morals as those who believe in the Distant God (11%)

Beliefs about God are strongly related to views on the war on terror and trust of Bush’s leadership. The relationship between religion and opinions about the war on terror are “powerful and universal”.

• Those who attend church more are likely to support the Iraq war, support the Patriot Act, think Saddam was behind the 9/11 attacks, and trust Bush
• Evangelical Protestants (60%) are most likely to approve of the Iraq War, followed by Catholics (47%) and Mainstream Protestants (45%) about equally
• Believers in the Authoritarian God support the Iraq war, support the Patriot Act, think Saddam was behind the 9/11 attacks, and trust Bush two to three times more than believers in the Distant God, with Gods B and C falling between in sequence
• A fifth (19%) of Americans thought God favoured the US, but a good majority (69%) did not, and this extended even to the most authoritarian believers. For those who believed in the Authoritarian God, those who voted Republican, and those who supported Bush, the proportions who respectively agreed, were undecided and disagreed with this proposition were 30%, 13% and 55%, give or take a point or so, the same for the three categories, suggesting that conceptions of God relate to party political beliefs
• Whites (48%) are nearly four times more likely to believe the war is justified than blacks

The authors of the report on the Baylor Religion Survey were surprised by the level of paranormal belief and experience in the United States. It seems odd to be surprised by this when religion depends on it. To believe in God, angels, demons, saints and the rest of the supernatural fauna of religion must require a predisposition to accept such fancies, but the survey seemed to find paranormal beliefs and experiences were more likely among people outside traditional religion. It suggests that those who think they are substitutes for religion or even incipient religions might be right. Paranormal beliefs were most prevalent in eastern states and less prevalent in southern states, though the range of variation was not great.

• 41% of Americans believe in Atlantis
• 75% of Americans believe in alternative medicine
• 28% of Americans believe the mind alone can move objects
• 12% of Americans believe fortune tellers can tell the future and astrology effects us
• 20% of Americans believe they can communicate with the dead
• 37% of Americans believe in ghosts
• 52% of Americans believe dreams can foretell the future
• 25% of Americans believe UFOs are aliens from other worlds
• 18% of Americans believe in monsters like Bigfoot and lake monsters

Women are twice as likely as men to believe psychics foresee the future, astrology affects us, and we can communicate with the dead. Women have the higher degree of belief on all of these beliefs except UFOs. Men and women are about equal on alternative medicine.

Christianity and Woman

A census of religiosity was taken in London in 1902-1903. 372,264 worshippers were adult males and 607,257 were adult females, the rest being children and Jews. About two thirds more women attended church than men in those days. In educated districts, the Catholic Church had two to four times as many female worshippers as male. Taking four Catholic or Anglo-Catholic churches in the wealthier part of London, the figures were:

• Brompton Oratory: 267 men and 1,105 women.
• Carmelite Church: 276 men and 807 women.
• Holy Trinity: 160 men and 880 women.
• Christ’s Church: 249 men and 1,034 women.

The first of these was at the time the most ornate and wealthy Catholic church in England, the third was a ritualist Protestant church in the same wealthy district. In poorer, working class districts where the churches were shabby, the music and art poor and the men not educated, men and women were more evenly represented in church, though women were always in the majority.

• East Ham: 4,996 men and 7,048 women.
• West Ham: 11,130 men and 16,230 women.
• Ilford: 4,585 men and 6,309 women.

These figures supported what Susan B Anthony wrote when she said that women form “from two-thirds to three-fourths of the membership of the Churches of America”. At the same date, in Paris, there were four women in church to one man.

Giving equal education and environment to the sexes might be expected to have reduced the disproportion of the sexes in church, but modern information does not confirm this. Now women get the same education. She sports, smokes, drinks, swears, tells dirty stories, plays golf, works in an office, jives, and is more able to gratify her sexual needs. Women are still about 30% more likely to be religious than men, but in some churches the ratio is much bigger. The Christian Scientists have three times as many women as men, Pentacostalists twice as many and a lot of Protestant sects have about 50% more. Among American Catholics, the balance is quite even but women Catholics are much more likely to attend for voluntary acts like confession than men are. Part of the reason is the offer of salvation and women’s greater tendency to feel that they need it though guilt. So old religious habits in women must die hard.

The man’s business does not promote the frame of mind which church-going requires, while the monotony of housework and part-time “women’s work” disposes them towards church-going. Men still often have a more practical and realistic education, in school and in trade. The husband is busy, he has lived in a skeptical atmosphere, he has no particular urge toward a priest of his own sex, and even distrusts him for visiting in the afternoon, and he is conscious of wanting to leave his money to his family for material security rather than give it to the church for spiritual security—the priest’s material security. Nevertheless, many men think the church is an insurance of the integrity of his property, the faithfulness of his wife and the chastity of his daughter, and he urges them to attend, while he goes to the pub or plays golf. The woman is the opposite in every respect. The woman has traditionally had much less occasion to develop the critical side of judgment.

The clergy make far greater efforts to secure female worshippers in wealthier than in poorer districts. The women are more attractive, better company, have ample leisure and more luxurious homes. Visiting rich women is a delight to priests and grasping ministers. Visiting poor women is a drudgery.

Quite apart from wealth and education, sex counts. The priest prefers women to men. Women are drawn to priests far more than men are. Even the more pious women have their sense of his high sacerdotal character enhanced by their consciousness of sexuality. The aim of churches is to gratify the emotions of women particularly. Priests do not merely influence her more than they influence man. They concentrate on her far more than on men. The visiting priest sees the woman four times as often as he sees the man of the house. She is exposed far more than the man is to priestly pressure and to the minister’s suggestions.

The minister of religion depends more on the woman for propagating the religion than on the man. From the fourth century onward it has been a tradition in the Christian Church that, if you have a mother or grown-up daughter zealous in a home, you have the best chance of securing the others. Girls are still often sent to be taught by nuns in convent schools. Priests will subtly urge wives to use their sex—by refusing or grudging it—in inducing a husband to go to church, and hers is the chief influence on the children. As Ignatius Loyola said, they want the children!

Curiously, Jesus had no regard to speak of for his mother, so why women should love him as they do is particularly hard to understand. Every word of Christ to or about his mother is harsh, and she joined his brothers in wanting to have him put under restraint. He had the Essene aversion to women. The Jews of the time had a profound veneration for their fathers and little regard for their mothers. The Essenes took this to extremes.

Christianity and Class

In the UK in 1957, 70% of the upper classes attended church at least occasionally, but only 50% of the middle classes and 40% of the workers. The same trend occurs in the US. The lower classes who attend church in the US are likely to be fundamentalists. N J Demarath III found that the upper class attenders were more liberal, and thought the church should be involved in social issues, but working class believers were conservative and disapproved of the church being involved in “politics”. It is the poor who have mystical experiences because they are emotionally rather than intellectually involved in the church. In the UK, less than a half of working class people believed in the after-life compared with two thirds of the upper class.

Traditional churches meet the needs of the middle class in the USA but W R Goldschmidt found in rural California that evangelical sects offered working class people a fantasy world as relief from poverty, drudgery and frustration. Poor Whites and Blacks, contrary to Marx, thought they gained status in church, being more readily accepted by the community of churchgoers. They were also led to believe they were a spiritual elite, and could enjoy a fantasy superiority. Sect members frequently consider that members of their own sect are the only righteous people. Everyone else in society are sinners. The differences between Europe and the US are that the working people of Europe were politically organized to obtain gains in real life, but that was less often the case in the US. Many of the poorest workers in the US did not organize politically, and took to the fantasy world of the church instead.

In the US, the churches themselves have a perceived social ranking. G Winter wrote:

The church is a reflection of the economic ladder.

The ladder is ascended along with economic progress, and acceptance of the believer by higher ranking congregations measures their social progress. Church membership is a success symbol like a car and a house. B Lazerwitz put the order as Episcopalians, Jews and Presbyterians at the top, Methodists, Lutherans and Catholics in the middle, and White and Negro Baptists at the bottom. Others add Mormons to the bottom group and Congregationalists and Christian Scientists to the top.

In a study in Detroit, the average years of school attendance of the sample was 12, but Congregationalists and Jews averaged 16 and these denominations had respectively 70% and 50% higher incomes than the average. Fundamentalists and Baptists spent 11 years at school and their incomes were ten percent less than the average.

Religious feeling falls off with the size of the community, so that people in rural communities and small towns are more religious than people in cities. Farmers often have traditional or even Fundamentalist beliefs, even when they do not normally attend a church.

Is Opinion Genetic?

Psychology is the study of behaviour and that includes choice of politics and religion. It seems a reasonable hypothesis that ideological differences between the political left and the right can be assessed psychologically. In a seminal 1950 study, Adorno, et al, examined the inclination to fascism and authoritarianism in personality. The literature grew over the succeeding years focusing on the motives, needs and ways of thinking of conservatives in comparison with liberals and left wingers. J Jost and co-workers reviewed the literature in 2003.

What is conservatism? Most people understand it generally as resistance to change and prefering traditional values to innovations, and politically as favouring free enterprise and private ownership. The distinguishing mark of conservatism is the fear of change, which in the political arena is fear of radicalism. Psychologists have divised several widely used questionnaires to scale people according to definitions like this, and the psychological preferences they entail. Naturally, the assumptions of what conservatism means in behaviour had to be tested. The interest for psychologists is what is it that can be used to predict people’s choices, and the choice of political party is not, from the definitions here, obviously linked to conservatism in general, though at first scales had to be drawn up based on the assumption that they are, so to speak, as a working hypothesis.

It has broadly proved a good one. Conventional preferences in such as art and music as well as explicitly political measures, often correlated with political conservatism not just conservative tastes. Ideally the factors that pertain to general conservatism and political conservatism needed to be teased out separately. Various scales emphasizing different psychological motives did prove valid for discriminating conservative voters or supporters. It all took a long time, but after over half a century of detailed studies, many of them excellently designed, some conclusions can be drawn and directions for further studies determined.

Tests on twins brought up in the same home environment showed that opinions have a genetic component. The science is that identical twins have exactly the same genes, but non-identical ones only share half their genes. Now the opinions of identical twins, in surveys of many thousands of identical and non-identical twins, are more often alike than the non-identical twins depite their upbringing not being a factor. What differs is the genes, so opinions have a genetic component. Plainly, opinions on party politics or nuclear weaponry cannot have evolved in only a few decades or even centuries. What it must be is the pattern of thinking that has evolved differently, and so is genetically determined.

In some of the extensive studies surveyed below, psychologists have distinguished five different categories of personality— extraversion, openness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and agreeableness, and have found no correlations of the latter two with any political index. Extraversion correlates but not too strongly. It is openness and conscientiousness that correlate reasonably strongly with political scales. People high on the openness scale are twice as likely to be liberal than conservative. Traits like openness and conscientiousness are genetic, and all five of the traits are heritable. Conservatives are four times more likely to be scared of dying than liberals and lefties. These same people are more likely to be religious, presumably because they think religion offers them safety from the death they fear so much. Conservatives also more generally dislike foreigners, and like things to be simple even though objectively they are not.

The factors linking genes and personality are neurotranmitters in the brain like dopamine and serotonin. Thus, excess secretions of dopamine cause obsessive-compulsive disorder, a mental illness that makes people obsessively tidy up or wash themselves. One could reasonably hypothesize that dopamine is generally related to orderliness, and in this case, it has gone out of order, but it implies that dopamine controls a spectrum of behaviour related to tidiness, from compulsively tidy to compulsively untidy. As psychological tests show conservatives are more compelled to seek order, here is a political trait that might be set in the genes.

Personal Theories of the Right

People are not necessarily or even mainly rational in their choices. They often believe what they want to believe to satisfy a psychological need, not from a rational choice. They adopt ideological belief systems, such as conservatism, Right Wing Authoritarianism (RWA), and a social dominance orientation (SDO), that satisfy their psychology. Moreover, political choice is not merely a personal choice but is also a group choice, and group or social threats and other motives can also alter political choice. The prevalence of conservatism among upper class elites is the reason for the widespread belief that people adopt conservative ideologies out of self interest. Those in such privileged positions naturally have a motive not to want change. They have something to conserve. Why though are poor whites, poor blacks and poor hispanics conservative? The answer is fear, consciousness of threats, and uncertainty. Members of disadvantaged and low status groups embrace right wing ideologies to reduce their fears, anxiety, dissonance, and uncertainty, thus ensuring they remain where they are. Overall, people choose to be politically conservative because for them it helps to:

• reduce fear, anxiety, and uncertainty
• avoid change, disruption, and ambiguity
• explain, order, and justify inequality.

One major criterion continually reappears in distinguishing left from right—attitudes toward equality. The left favours greater equality, while the right sees society as inevitably hierarchical.

Several scales are based on this inequality criterion. The FScale (disposition to Fascism scale), measures the need to be superior to some out groups. People tested on the FScale were also tested for IQ in several studies. The correlation between IQ and FScale scores was negative, showing that those who felt they had to demonstrate their superiority to some disadvantaged group in society were predominantly of a low IQ. But the primary scale distinguishing liberals and conservatives is the spectrum of resistance to change, embodied in C-Scale and the RWA Scale.

Yet fascist leaders like Hitler, Mussolini and Pinochet actually courted change. They did too, but change to greater inequality. The notion of resistance to change being the conservative characteristic, the reason why they are called conservatives, pertains when they are already in a satisfactory situation of inequality. Conservatives like inequality as long as they are the ones who have the privilege. When they feel their privileges fading, or when they are conservatives in poor out groups, they back change via a Hitler or a Mussolini. Still, the two main scales of conservatism are generally related because conventional social arrangements have been hierarchical rather than egalitarian, so that resisting change meant resisting greater egalitarianism, while preserving the status quo meant retaining traditional social structure and authority. So, common scales of political conservatism include measures of both resistance to change and endorsement of inequality.

Still, left wing revolutionaries like Stalin show no great inclination to yield power, and the privileges it carries with it, once they have it. The desire of the poor conservative for stability inclines them to support the strong man who seems to offer it, and they suffer as a consequence. To judge from people like Stalin, left wing strong men seem no different from right wing ones. It has led to speculation that the curve of left to right is not monotonic but is two tailed. The evidence for this hypothesis is negligible, depending entirely on the anecdotal evidence of left wing strong men, and receiving no support from careful studies of population samples. Stalin, in his psychological make up—according to writers like Birt, Bullock, Robins and Post—had much in common with right wing extremists. He was to the right of political rivals like Trotsky, and allegedly admired Hitler, and trained as a priest before he turned to revolution. He looks more like a right wing opportunist than a sincere lefty. That is what the Trotskyites always said, and they should know now that they run the USA as the neocons.

Right wing authoritarianism (RWA) combines anxious veneration of authority and convention with vindictiveness toward subordinates and deviants. Fear and aggressiveness, largely from punitive parents, motivate people to seek predictability and control. Altemeyer’s (1981) RWA is characterized by exaggerated:

• submission to authorities considered legitimate
• aggressiveness against others considered approved by established authorities
• adherence to social conventions endorsed by society.

The RWA Scale is a reliable measure of the left to right dimension in politics. Higher scores on the RWA Scale predict attitudes like political party affiliation, reactions to Watergate, capitalist attitudes, severity of jury sentencing decisions, punishment of deviants, racial prejudice, homophobia, religious orthodoxy, victim blaming, and acceptance of covert governmental activities such as illegal bugging, political harassment, denial of the right to assemble, illegal drug raids, and opposition to environmentalism, to abortion rights, to diversity on university campuses, to services for AIDS patients and to services for homeless people. Law makers high on the RWA scale score higher in prejudice, and want to pass laws limiting freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right of assembly, and freedoms guaranteed in the Bill of Rights. They want to impose limitations on abortion, favour capital punishment, and oppose tougher gun control laws. Exaggerated conservatism leads to hostility towards scapegoats and out groups considered as inferior, and to deference to authorities, thus laying the groundwork for the right wing strong man. Conservatism conditions the population to a social polarization between the dominant class and the submissive one.

Some people see ambiguous situations as threatening. Frenkel-Brunswik (1948) showed they are intolerant of ambiguity, disliking qualified statements, visual ambiguity, and probabilities. They are mentally fixated, stick to a decision even when circumstances change, have a rigid view of life, are not permissive, cannot see bad traits in someone they think is good and vice versa, and see things in black and white terms of power or weakness, cleanliness or dirtiness, morality or immorality, and conformity or deviance. Intolerance of ambiguity increases an inclination to seek certainty, lead people to cling to the familiar, to arrive at premature conclusions, and to impose simplistic stereotypes.

Belief systems offer a cognitive framework to know and to understand, and to ward off fears. When the need to know is predominant and fear is absent, people are open-minded. As fear becomes stronger, the need to know weakens, yielding more closed belief systems. Rokeach (1960) argued that dogmatism equates with closed-mindedness.

Ideological preferences permeate nearly all of a person’s life, including the arts, music, science, philosophy, so that, according to S Tomkins, “if one knows what an individual believes about the nature of literature, one would also know what he would believe about the nature of mathematics”. The left wing orientation toward the world is one of liberty and humanism, and that of the right is one of rule following and concern with norms. The left wing orientation views people as basically good, and the purpose of society is to facilitate human growth and experience. The right wing orientation views people as essentially bad, and the function of society is to set rules and limits to prevent irresponsible behavior. The preferences for one or the other is developed in early childhood, through “personal scripts” or emotional memories. Childhood experiences arousing emotions mainly of excitement, joy, surprise, distress, from predominantly empathetic parenting lead to the humanistic orientation, while emotions mainly of anger and contempt, which reflect their normative perspective or right wing orientation, come more often from more structured, punitive, strict father parenting.

The Polarity Scale has predicted reactions to presidential assassinations, preferences for individualistic versus sociotropic values, attitudes toward war and peace, assumptions concerning human nature, religiosity, and political orientation. The theory identifies the emotional bases of conservatism related to anger, contempt, and the desire for punitiveness. Conservatives want to obey rules. Doubtless, the conclusion is true, but the implication must be that liberals do not want to obey rules. If that is so, the basis of conservative antagonism to liberals is clear, but something is amiss here. Liberals would prefer society to work without laws, but it requires that children know what society regards as right and wrong, and so they have to be taught it as society’s moral code. Liberals do not believe in bullying children, but rather in empathy with them, but not leaving them without proper guidance.

Other items used in the scale seem bizarre, being based apparently on the notion that a liberal is against law and rules entirely, thus:

Children should be taught to obey what is right even though they may not always feel like it.

It is hard to accept that even any liberal would want to bring up children in their care to let them do as they like because they do not like doing as their parents tell them. This seems to pander to an interpretation of liberalism as absurdly permissive libertarianism. Similarly:

If I break the law I should be punished for the good of society,

is another item meant to tap right wing attitudes, apparently assuming that any lefty or liberal does not accept the rule of law. The liberal might think the law was wrong, or too strict, but liberals in democracies do not advocate breaking the laws in preference to changing them by legal processes. Again, if a country is not democratic, so that there is no such legal procedure, then the liberal will break the law, but under such circumstances, depending on the nature of the regime, so too would a conservative.

The testers stick to their tests because they say they work statistically, despite obvious flaws like these, and no doubt in toto they do work adequately in discriminating left from right, but it is like school examiners who persist in running a multiple choice examination with an obviously wrong or ambiguous selection in a question, because its statistics fit! Maybe they do, but the question is still wrong, and probably wrongly categorizes candidates who realize it. Erroneous tests are not good science or good pedagogics, whether they work by chance or not. If they are present for a scientific reason or balanced by other questions that distinguish those who make an ambiguous selection for opposite reasons, then they are not wrong. The administration notes should make it clear. These scales faulty at the item level often work because there is immense leaway in judging whether someone is oriented to the left or the right, so items with absurd implications must yield the expected results. Individual questions need to be carefully researched by in-depth interviews with the people answering them, and preferably, the items would have open-ended results by offering a scale of answers. In fairness, a thoroughly sound psychologist, H J Eysenck, in the middle of the last century explained that psychological scales often have bizarre questions in them for a number of legitimate reasons, and if they are legitimate no one need complain, but he also had this to say about many psychologists even then:

Unwilling to subject their intuitive certainties and their admirable intentions to the unimpassioned appraisal of scientific verification, they have to all intents and purposes left the field of science, while still claiming the prestige which attaches to that term.

H J Eysenck, Uses and Abuses of Psychology, (1954)

Now many are claiming to be Christian Psychologists, Jewish ones, and doubtless astrological and Raelian ones, and they are even in university departments. Eysenck had no reputation as a lefty, but he was a good scientist. A university or college that employs one of these quacks is operating under false pretences, and does not deserve to be called a university.

Reduction of uncertainty and threat are motives for political conservatism. It is a response to partially unconscious fears and anxieties caused by uncertainty. Some were genetic such as anxiety proneness, stimulus aversion, low intelligence, and physical unattractiveness. Others were environmental factors such as parental coldness, punitiveness, rigidity, inconsistency, low social class, and low self esteem. Fears included death, anarchy, foreigners, dissent, complexity, novelty, ambiguity, and social change, to which conservatives responded with superstition, religious dogmatism, ethnocentrism, militarism, authoritarianism, punitiveness, conventionality, and rigid morality.

Uncertainty is also a factor in a theory which suggests that conservatives need “cognitive closure”, a desire to come to a conclusion in the form of a firm belief, rather than the persistance of confusion. It has five factors:

1. preference for order and structure
2. emotional discomfort associated with ambiguity
3. impatience and impulsivity with regard to decision making
4. desire for security and predictability
5. closed mindedness.

Such people will typically boast that they do not seek many opinions before forming their own view, or that they consider having clear rules and order at work is essential for success. The need for cognitive closure makes people seize on any information that allows it, and to hang on to it once it has been grasped. It produces social stereotyping, jumping to conclusions, resistance to persuasion, and impatience with anyone disagreeing. People can be open and exploratory or closed and immutable. The need for closure suggests a perpetuation of the reigning ideology, whatever it is, so ideological rigidity can extend across different ideologies and not be restricted to conservatism. It is the promise of a stable system that matters.

People try to settle on a regulatory focus such as promotion or prevention. The goal of the promotion system is accomplishment. It reflects peoples’ self regulation in relation to their hopes and aspirations (ideals), and fulfils the need for nurturance. The prevention system reflects self regulation in relation to one’s duties and obligations (oughts), and the goal of this system is safety. Emphasising prevention rather than promotion induces a need for cognitive closure from a desire for comprehension. The promotion goals of accomplishment and advancement should favour a preference for change over stability, insofar as advancement requires change. The prevention goals of safety and security should favour stability over change, for stability entails predictability and control. A protective parenting focusing on the avoidance of the negative combined with punishment as a disciplinary tool produces a prevention focus. A parenting style of encouraging accomplishments by focusing on achieving the positive and withdrawing love as a form of discipline produces a promotion focus. To the extent that political conservatism is motivated by the desire for security and stability and the avoidance of threat and change, situations inducing a prevention oriented regulatory focus might also induce a conservative shift in the general population.

Fear of death is one of the threatening factors thought linked with political conservatism. The denial of death is so prevalent that cultural institutions evolve as a way of coping with existential anxiety and human mortality. Terror management theory posits that cultures and their attendant worldviews serve to buffer anxiety and prevent terror arising from the thoughts humans invariably have about their own mortality. It holds that cultural worldviews, like religions, allow people the comfort of symbolically transcending death, their main fear, and so they have a strong inclination to defend their worldview or religion. Reminding people of the danger to their lives, causes them to buttress their worldview to minimize the resulting anxiety. Their determination to defend their ideology or religion increases and their tolerance of opposing views decreases. Reminded of their own mortality, people behave more conservatively by shunning and even punishing outsiders and those who threaten their outlook.

Social Theories of the Right

Traditional personality theories about conservative ideology— anxiety reduction, authoritarianism, and dogmatism—stress ego defensive or ego justifying aspects of conservatism, the need for security, obedience, and projection. Group justifying and system justifying motives are also satisfied by right wing ideologies. Sociopolitical theories focus on the social system, rather than the person, and the ideological as well as psychological functions that political conservatism might fulfil. Theories of social dominance and system justification clarify the connection between political conservatism and racism, sexism, and ethnocentric intolerance. According to social dominance theory, evolutionary and social factors determine social hierarchies. Societies minimize group conflict by justifying, through belief systems, the hegemony of some groups over others. Social dominance theory stresses conservative “legitimizing myths” to rationalize the interests of high status group members:

• paternalistic myths—dominant groups are needed to lead and take care of subordinate groups, who cannot look after themselves
• reciprocal myths—a symbiotic relationship exists between dominant and subordinate groups which must help each other
• sacred myths—positions of dominance and subordination are determined by God or divine right.

Social devices like these are conservative in that they seek to preserve the status quo. The SDO Scale measures differences in how people regard the dominance of some groups such as men, whites, and upper class elites. Scores on the scale correlate reliably with Republican party supporters, nationalism, cultural elitism, anti-black racism, sexism, RWA, and the belief in “justice”, those who support law and order, military spending, and capital punishment, and those who do not support women’s rights, racial equality, affirmative action, gay and lesbian rights, and environmental action. The upper classes favour even steeper hierarchies. RWAs and SDOs seem motivated by different concerns. The RWA scale seems to indicate passive deference or submission to Fascist inclined leaders—including those who “trust unworthy people who tell them what they want to hear”, whereas SDO indicates those more inclined to punish or humiliate derogated out group members to show their superiority. Together, they predict more than half of the statistical variance in prejudice and ethnocentrism. The most inexorable right wingers are those motivated simultaneously by fear and aggression.

The theory of system justification addresses puzzling cases of conservatism and right wing allegiance among members of low status groups, such as women and members of the working class. It investigates why people justify and work for the social system, when it preserves inequality by perpetuating the status quo, and thereby conflicts with their self esteem and their group standing. Under some circumstances, members of disadvantaged groups are even more likely than members of advantaged groups to support the status quo. One way to minimize dissonance when the social system is seemingly threatened is to support it, as early work last century suggested. Situations of crisis in society will generally shift political opinion to the right, providing that the crisis is not terminal.

The expression of political conservatism can be expressed by:

1. motives of understanding (epistemic) like dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity, cognitive complexity, closed mindedness, uncertainty avoidance, need for order, structure, and closure,
2. motives of personal emotion (existential) like self esteem, terror management, fear, threat, anger, and pessimism
3. motives of ideology (ideological) like self interest, group dominance and system justification.

They originate in personal management of uncertainty and fear, and these are related to resistance to change and the endorsement of inequality. Change can upset present norms causing insecurity and so uncertainty can be reduced by resisting change. People embrace ideological belief systems because they inspire conviction and purpose, help to reduce uncertainty, and mitigate feelings of threat and worthlessness. Fear and uncertainty are linked to the core convictions of political conservatives to resist change and justify inequality, especially to the extent that the status quo breeds inequality. Fear may be a cause and a consequence of inequality. It breeds and justifies competition, dominance struggles, and sometimes violent strife. Fear may be allayed by admitting the reality of threat and preparing to address it by single mindedly confronting one’s foes, real or imaginary, and hence embracing inequality as a social necessity. For the right, immigration is frightening, confusing, and potentially threatening to the status quo. Epistemic commitments help to resolve existential conflicts, and existential motives affect the search for knowledge and meaning. The terror of fearing death may induce resistance to change.

A Survey of Factors

Jost, et al, surveyed 88 different studies from 1958 to 2002. Correlations ranging from +0.18 to +0.27 were obtained for conservatism and variables of uncertainty avoidance, integrative complexity, need for order, structure, and closure, and fear of threat in general. Though not large correlations, they are significant because of the extent of the samples. To understand conservative attitudes in relation to others, dogmatism, intolerance of ambiguity, uncertainty avoidance, and social dominance orientation (SDO) were relevant. Stronger correlations were observed for conservatism and dogmatism, intolerance of ambiguity, openness to experience, fear of death, and system instability (+0.32 to +0.50). Priming thoughts of death increases intolerance, out group derogation, punitive aggression, veneration of authority figures, and system justification, all traits dominant in people inclined towards the right. It explains the absurd attitude of the neocon governments of the world to the so-called War on Terror. It is a deliberate socio-psychological ploy to pressurize the voter to the right, as if they were not already right wing enough. Social and economic threats also increase authoritarian and right wing responses. In summary, political conservatism is predictable on these hypotheses:

1. mental rigidity and closedmindedness
   • dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity
   • reducing cognitive complexity
   • reducing openness to experience
   • avoiding uncertainty
   • a need for order and structure
   • a need for cognitive closure
2. lowered self esteem
3. fear, anger, and aggression
4. pessimism, disgust and contempt
5. loss prevention
6. fear of death
7. threat arising from social and economic deprivation
8. threat to the stability of the social system.

Dogmatism and Intolerance of Ambiguity. Even when dogmatism is measured in an ideologically neutral way, it correlates consistently with authoritarianism, political-economic conservatism, and the holding of right wing opinions. Ideologically neutral statements that are typically picked by the right, but not the left are like these:

A man who does not believe in some great cause has not really lived.

Of all the different philosophies which exist in this world there is probably only one which is correct.

To compromise with our political opponents is dangerous because it usually leads to the betrayal of our own side.

The evidence is that both dogmatism and authoritarianism are of negligible use in identifying liberals and lefties.

Intolerance of ambiguity correlates positively with ethnocentrism, authoritarianism and with political conservatism. President George W Bush told a British reporter: “Look, my job isn’t to try to nuance… My job is to tell people what I think”. At an international conference of world leaders in Italy, Bush said: “I know what I believe and I believe what I believe is right”. Intolerance of complexity of thought and intolerance of ambiguity amounts to simplistic thinking, and Bush is a prime example of how it is typical of the right.

Reducing Cognitive Complexity. In the UK, MPs were negatively correlated between integrative complexity and conservatism (-0.30). Some findings suggested that a relationship holds between cognitive complexity and conservatism, and some even suggested that extreme leftists show less cognitive complexity than moderate leftists. But the most integratively complex politicians were moderate socialists, who scored significantly higher on complexity than conservatives and extreme socialists. Overall, liberals in the studies have the highest levels of integrative complexity and flexibility.

Conservatives score lower on measures of extraversion than other groups. Scores on the CScale showed a negative correlation with scores on a scale of openness to experience (-0.38). Other research, from widely different sources, shows conservatives are less likely than others to value broad mindedness, imagination, and “having an exciting life”. Conservatives valued job security over task variety at work. Separate studies show conservatives have a preference for simple over complex paintings, simple poems over complex poems, familiar over unfamiliar music, and unambiguous over ambiguous literary texts. Is it any wonder that conservative politicians always seem to want to cut public funding for the arts. Generally, conservatives eschew ambiguity, novelty, and uncertainty.

Need for Order and Cognitive Closure. Conservatives correlate positively with the need for order and structure. Other work shows authoritarians long for order and structure, explaining their fondness for strict father parental discipline.

Positive correlations were obtained between need for closure (NFC) and conservatism (+0.26). In the strongest cases, NFC was correlated with scales of social conservatism (+0.70), economic conservatism (+0.72), and religious and nationalist conservatism (+0.82). NFC scores correlate positively with authoritarianism, and increase monotonically from left wing to right wing party membership. Increased need for cognitive closure were associated with membership in right wing organizations. A positive correlation was obtained between need for closure and endorsement of capital punishment (+0.47). Advocates of the death penalty, who tend to be politically conservative in general, frequently argue that state executions are beneficial because they allow victims and observers to finally “experience closure”. Thus, personal needs for order, structure, and closure appear to be especially well satisfied by right wing political contents.

Threats to self Esteem. Authoritarianism relates to lack of self esteem in the sense of personal success, but the studies show nothing particularly significant (-0.09).

Conservatives know the world is a dark and forbidding place where most new knowledge is false, most improvements are for the worse.

George F Will, Bunts, 1998, cited by J Jost

Fear, Anger, and Aggression. High RWA’s are scared. They see the world as a dangerous place, as society, they think, teeters on the brink of self destruction from evil and violence. This fear appears to instigate aggression in them. RWAs are self righteous. They think themselves much more moral and upstanding than others—a self perception assisted by self deception, their religious training, and some very efficient guilt evaporators (such as church attendance and confession). This self righteousness disinhibits their aggressive impulses and releases them to act out their fear induced hostilities. A study of the dream lives of politicos in the US (Bulkeley, 2001) found Republicans reporting three times as many nightmares as Democrats, suggesting that fear, danger, threat, and aggression may figure more prominently in the unconscious motivations of conservatives than liberals. If conservatives are more susceptible to fear, it perhaps explains why military defense and national security spending are backed by conservative leaders. Fear and threat are related to political conservatism (+0.30).

Pessimism, Disgust, and Contempt. Conservatives expressed greater disgust and less sympathy than did liberals in their emotional reactions to welfare recipients. Psychologists think the likely link explaining correlations of conservatism with fear and anger, is parenting. Correlations between parents’ RWA scores and those of their children are around +0.40, with neither parent being more influential than the other. Differences in parenting styles may help to explain why right wing parents are less close to their children in comparison with more egalitarian parents.

Fear and Prevention of Loss. Authoritarians respond more to threatening or negative persuasive messages than to positive ones, whereas low authoritarians respond slightly more to reward messages than to threats. A prevention orientation focusing on potential threats and losses inclines people to conservatism.

Fear of Death. Theories of uncertainty avoidance and theories of terror management suggest that anything reminding people of their mortality increases conservatism. The present emphasis on terrorism simultaneously increases awareness of mortality and the appeal of the right. Conservatism measured on the CScale correlates positively (+0.54) with scores on a Fear of Death Scale. Consciousness of mortality leads people to defend culturally valued norms more strongly, and to distance themselves from, and run down, out group members more. Conservatives’ preferences for tradition, law and order, and strict parental and legal punishment, including the death penalty, are related to feelings of fear and threat including fear of death. Fear of death made conservatives more intolerant, but made liberals more tolerant presumably because of the centrality of tolerance to them.

Threat to the Stability of the Social System. A threat to the stability of the social system, such as that felt in the aftermath of 11 September, 2001, increases conservatism. During times of social crisis, people are more likely to turn to authoritarian leaders and institutions for security, stability, and structure.

When the foundations of society are threatened, the conservative ideology reminds men of the necessity of some institutions and desirability of the existing ones.

S Huntington, APSR 51, 1957

During the depression years of 1930-1939, plainly a period of economic threat, people more readily joined authoritarian churches, such as Southern Baptist and Seventh Day Adventist ones, whereas in the Jazz Age, relatively prosperous years of 1920-1930 they were more likely to join nonauthoritarian churches, such as Northern Baptist and Episcopalian. This phenomenon has been noted widely. After the attacks of 11 September, 2001, right wing populism increased in Belgium, Holland, France, Switzerland, Norway, Denmark, and Portugal. Literary and popular culture themes during the 1930s were significantly more conservative and authoritarian than during the 1920s. So, threats to the stability of the social system do increase conservative inclinations (+0.47).

Criticisms

The psychological study of conservatism is openly disliked by conservatives. Their reaction to it is to complain it shows conservatives as pathological, as false, irrational and unprincipled. Psychologists must therefore be wrong, and the reason is their liberal bias. The psychologists who have done these tests must all be themselves lefties or liberals who are simply confirming their own prejudices. Yet, not all of the scientists doing the studies were left wing. Some studies were done by right wing scientists precisely to confirm, or, they hoped otherwise, the findings. Whoever does the work does not materially alter the outcome. These studies are not opinion, but are necessarily comparative and empirical.

Anyone’s conservatism is legitimately held in their own circumstances as they judge by their observations, values, beliefs, and premises. In short, it is how they are, but they object because it is not how they think they are. They end up being the ones making the accusations of falsehood. Believing they hold a principled position, they hate the empirical demonstration that they hold their views for psychological not rational reasons. These underlying causes are not consciously accessible to them and so they cannot comprehend or refuse to comprehend the science. The right wing response becomes additional evidence of the findings, of their fear, dogmatism and intolerance.

Another criticism is that the correlations are circular, because some of the items used to judge a trait are political items. Attitude to foreigners is used as a measure of openness, but it is also a measure of conservatism, so the two scales are not independent—the correlation is built in. It is circular. The psychologists accept the protest, but argue in their defence that they have checked the findings with questionnaires that omit controversial items but the results did not change enough to matter.

Some psychologists have argued that the work is unbalanced, and dogmatism, intolerance, closedmindedness, and cognitive simplicity are not restricted to the right but are left characteristics too, though quite how they could have successfully picked out conservatives from the crowd in real world samples if this were true is hard to understand. W F Stone (1980) concluded that there was little evidence for left wing authoritarianism. Rigidity and closed mindedness truly were conservative thinking styles, and more recent work has confirmed it. Professed lefties can obviously be dogmatic, but the studies are not looking for what people can be, but for what they typically are, and whereas conservatives are typically dogmatic, liberals and socialists are not.

Finally, if political opinion is genetic, then politics must be a sham. Well, the basic stance of people might be determined, but the stance is most often a relative one. Europeans are amazed by how off center US politics is. The right in the US consider liberals as dangerous radicals, whereas liberals are considered undecided centrists in many European countries. The US is heavily biased to the right because of the policies of fear that US right wing politicians have engendered over the years. They have supported gun laws which make everyday life in the US mortally dangerous, and over the last sixty years they have built up successive external monsters as dangerous threats to the existence of the US, first communists, and now Moslem terrorists. The dangers were never as bad as the right wing made out, and most people elsewhere slept soundly enough.

Security, threats, openness and so on are relative, and the fears people have are relative to the social norm. As the US moved rightwards over the last sixty years, the norm moved right too. Those who were once moderate centrists are now dangerous lefties, or even demons! The voters need to be aware when neocon politicians, whose averred policy it is, deliberately manufacture scares to move or keep people in fear and on the right. The right in the US are virtually fascist. The liberals are moderate centrists if not conservatives themselves by European standards. Socialists and communists in the US are extinct. The UK under Blair and Brown have dashed headlong after Bush, and the UK is now almost as bad. It has no left wing party. The so-called Labour party has been hijacked by neocons led by Blair and now is itself crypto-fascist, bringing in more and more unused repressive laws that eventually will find an unwanted use. Meanwhile the Tory party is obsessed with trivia and takes the Blair route, and the liberal party hasn’t a liberal principle among all ists members, being a conglomeration of independents. We are heading into anti-democratic holes, and no one seems to notice as long as we have faith schools!

Christianity and the Religious Right

Religiosity is consistently correlated with political conservatism. A simple example is that two measures of religiosity showed Goldwater supporters more religious than Johnson supporters in the 1964 Presidential election. At the same time in the UK, two thirds of Tory voters confessed to attending church sometimes while only a third of Labour voters did. A variety of studies show that Christian religious observance correlated with anti-Communism. Jews are consistently found to be liberal thinkers, making it all the more surprising that they remained silent about the Butcher of Jenin, but perhaps this shows that even liberals become fascistic in fear of group censure. Oddly enough, P M Blau in a 1954 study of college students found that Jews favoured co-operation rather than power in international relations. Times have changed!

Conservatives in religion are also more militaristic. One wonders what conception these conservative Christians have of “gentle Jesus, meek and mild”. They obviously reject it in favour of a Rambo Jesus, but it is hard to know how they can say in one breath that the bible is God’s own holy word, and in the next talk about nuking Arabs, Argies or Commies, as the case might be, if Jesus is God incarnated. It does not do to expect anything at all rational in Christian belief.

Students from non-religious colleges are more opposed to warfare than students from Catholic colleges. Catholic students demonstrated for military involvement in Vietnam while non-religious students and Quakers demonstrated against. The really devout believers admittedly do seem to align themselves against war, but the bulk of religious people favour it. In fact studies in the Korean and the Vietnamese wars show that Protestant believers were most in favour, and Jews the least supportive.

Religious people are less likely to be militant over civil rights issues. Even church attenders who favoured integration did not think it was anything to do with their church or religion. Religious people, and particularly Catholics, are less tolerant of homosexuals, communists, single mothers, and conscientious objectors. Church attenders were more likely to say that poverty was the fault of the poor themselves, and were less likely to favour government action to help them.

Religious activity is consistently higher among US Blacks than among US Whites, and they tend to belong to all-Black congregations. In a 1970 survey, one in four Whites never attended church but only one in twelve Blacks. Similarly, one in three Whites considered religion not very important to them but only one in six Blacks. The Baylor survey confirms it today. The most religious people are blacks and poor white trash.

Christianity for US Black minorities serves to keep them in their place. The frustrations suffered by the oppressed minority are sublimated in religious devotion, and keep the minority from direct or political action to relieve their oppression. The Black Christian is conservative and passive, which is why many Blacks turned to Islam since the 60s. Praying for social change is as militant as the Black Christian will get, and, needless to say, no one among right wing Christian groups is concerned that the prayers will be answered. The acceptance of God’s will for Christian Blacks is the acceptance of White supremacy.

Studies in the US widely confirm that church members are more racially prejudiced than non-members, and prejudice against Blacks varies with denomination whereas prejudice against Jews is fairly consistent across denominations. Working class churchgoers are most prejudiced, but again, for the few people who attend church most frequently, prejudice falls off. It seems that deeply religious Christians are less prejudiced than the majority who profess Christianity but practice it opportunistically.

This has been explained by classifying Christians as extrinsic types and intrinsic types. G W Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (1954), observed:

The role of religion is paradoxical. It makes prejudice and it unmakes prejudice. While the creeds of the great religions are universalistic, all stressing brotherhood, the practice of these creeds is frequently divisive and brutal. The sublimity of religious ideals is offset by the horrors of persecution in the name of these same ideals… Churchgoers are more prejudiced than the average; they are also less prejudiced than the average.

The intrinsic Christian believes as a principle of life or morality, whereas extrinsic Christians believe for some real or apparent benefit such as social standing or a perceived insurance against misfortune. Much research suggests that extrinsic religiousness is positively correlated with racism, but intrinsic religiousness is not correlated with racism (M J Donahue 1985).

Extrinsic Christians, needless to say, are the large majority of Christians and are the prejudiced ones. The minority are intrinsic Christians who are more inclined to worship and pray privately, feel their lives are meaningful, are sure of their beliefs and tend to trust people. These are not often racist. Christians are fond of talking about “real” Christians, and this minority of intrinsic Christians might be the basis of the distinction. Real or not, they do not tell the extrinsic ones that they are not “real” Christians for holding racist views, nor do they censure them for holding any of the other disgusting views that Christians do hold. In practice therefore, there seems to be little to choose between them, and some social psychologists think the distinction is an artifact.

B Altemeyer and B Hunsberger (1992) say there is a consistent positive relationship between religious fundamentalism (RF), characterized by an aggressive belief system, a sense of one absolute truth, and a sense of a special relationship with God, and both racism and homosexual prejudice. An explanation offered is that it is a result of right wing authoritarianism (RWA)—authoritarian aggression, authoritarian submission, and conventionalism (B Altemeyer, Enemies of freedom: Understanding Right Wing Authoritarianism, 1988). right wing authoritarianism is strongly associated with prejudice, and fundamentalism and authoritarianism are strongly correlated with each other (L Wylie and J Forest, 1992).

In a study of over 300 college students by B Laythe, D C Finkel, R G Bringle and L A Kirkpatrick, authoritarianism, orthodoxy, and fundamentalism were all strongly intercorrelated with one another (+0.51 to +0.72) and the correlation between fundamentalism and RWA was high in all samples (+0.72). Altemeyer and Hunsberger (1992) found that statistically controlling for RWA using partial correlation techniques reduced fundamentalism-prejudice correlations to nonsignificant levels, but not vice-versa.

These findings (Fundamentalism regressed on RWA, beta = 0.571, on Christian orthodoxy, beta = 0.296, R² 0.581) suggest that RWA is responsible for the positive association between fundamentalism and ethnic prejudice, and explain Allport’s paradox. Religious fundamentalism specifically appears to both “make and un-make” prejudice—right wing authoritarianism, “makes” prejudice, but the influence of orthodox Christian teaching simultaneously “unmakes” prejudice. RWA is effectively the extrinsic factor and basic Christian morality the intrinsic one.

B Hunsberger, in Journal of Social Issues 51(2) (1995), concluded that religious fundamentalism, in connection with the more general trait of right wing authoritarianism, is a much more useful construct than intrinsic-extrinsic religious orientation for understanding religion’s relationship to prejudice. Hunsberger seems correct in his conclusion that “fundamentalism might be viewed as a religious manifestation of right wing authoritarianism”

Kirkpatrick, et al, say Allport was closer to the answer to the religion-prejudice riddle in 1954, before his formalization of intrinsic versus extrinsic dimensions of religious orientation. In The Nature of Prejudice, he wrote:

Belonging to a church because it is a safe, powerful, in-group is likely to be the mark of an authoritarian character and to be linked to prejudice. Belonging to a church because its basic creed of brotherhood expresses the ideals one sincerely believes in, is associated with tolerance. Thus, the “institutionalized” religious outlook and the “interiorized” religious outlook have opposite effects in the personality.

One reason for prejudice is that religion is exclusive and promotes hostility to those not in the group. Sigmund Freud wrote:

A religion, even if it calls itself the religion of love, must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it… Cruelty and intolerance towards those who do not belong to it are natural to every religion.

Another reason specific to Christianity is that it is anti-Jewish at its core. C Y Glock and R Shank found that 86% of Southern Baptists agreed with the statement: “Jews can never be forgiven for crucifying Christ”. 60% of other Protestants and 46% of Catholics agreed too. Anti-Jewishness is therefore basic in the teaching of Christian religion. The Mormon Church is openly prejudiced against Afro-Americans holding office. Religions are also expressions of conservatism and conformity, as we have seen, in the US, with the secular Christian religion that US Christianity amounts to. When the society is prejudiced such a church is necessarily prejudiced too, and serves to uphold the nation’s social prejudices.

The clergy of the larger sects are generally more liberal than their flocks probably because they are better educated, but they do not seem to help to relieve their sheep of their prejuduces. “Love thy neighbour” does not extend for the average US Christian to humanity at large. The teaching of Christianity is largely supernatural, and does not emphasize in any serious way how people should behave in the world, and particularly to other humans. In the end, even liberal clergy end up associating with the prejudices of their parishioners so as not to lose them to rival sects.

Another aspect is that Christians have difficulty coping with ambiguity. They like things to be clear-cut, which they rarely are in practice. There are no shades of grey in the Christian view of the world, so there can only be Black and White. This is only slightly facetious. Christians categorize things as Evil, with evil things seen as black or dark, and Good, with good things seen as white or light. This dualism in Christianity lends itself to the racist categorization of Blacks as evil. The Reagan-Bush simpleton’s categorization of foreign cultures as “evil empires” is based on the same outlook. Conversely, non-Christians are consistently found to be less racially prejudiced than Christians, so how is Christianity spreading the idea of the fellowship of man?

IQ and Political, Religious and Sexual Behavior

Satoshi Kanazawa at the the London School of Economics and Political Science says that as biology is the study of living organisms, their behaviour and social systems, social sciences—the study of human behaviour and social systems—are branches of biology. If so, all social scientific theories must be consistent with known biological principles. Evolutionary psychology is the application of evolutionary biology to humans, and provides the most general explanations of human behaviour, cognitions, emotions and human social systems. Evolutionary psychology’s recognition that humans are animals can explain some otherwise perplexing empirical puzzles in social sciences.

In one study, Kanazawa correlated data on IQ with political, religious and sexual behaviors—from a large national US sample, the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, which began with adolescents in grades 7-12 in the United States during the 1994-95 school year. The participants were interviewed as 18 to 28 year olds from 2001 to 2002. The study also used the General Social Survey.

People who identified as liberal and atheist had higher IQs, though mean IQ differences, while statistically significant, are not large—6 to 11 points. Participants who said they were atheists had an average IQ of 103 in adolescence, while adults who said they were religious averaged 97, a mean difference of 6. Young adults who said they were “very conservative” had an average adolescent IQ of 95, whereas those who said they were “very liberal” averaged 106, a mean difference of 11. The study takes the American view of liberal and conservative, but such categories are too imprecise to give full enough separation of associated traits, whence the small IQ differences. Liberals are concerned for other humans generally, not only people who are close kin or neighbors, and consider that society ought to provide for the disadvantaged. Conservatives are more concerned with people they associate with, kin and close friends. It boils down to liberals being more Christian than conservatives in Christ’s socially practical terms like “Love your enemy”. Though conservatives profess greater religiosity, they have less interest in Christ’s practical social teaching, preferring rituality and the supernatural rather than trying to bless the poor.

Given that human ancestors had a keen interest in the survival of their offspring and nearest kin, Kanazawa said the conservative approach—looking out for the people around you first—fitted with the evolutionary picture more than liberalism.

It’s unnatural for humans to be concerned about total strangers.

He should say, to be correct, that it was unnatural for humans to be concerned with total strangers. The human groups in which concern for others evolved were small, only up to about 150 people. There were no strangers within the group. The strangers lived in other groups possibly in competition with your own. So evolution perfectly explains conservative thought. They want to preserve the local group of which they are members. Conservatism means keeping things as they were, the same, stable. Conservatism works when the world of human society is static, as it effectively was for a million years. They oppose change, but sometimes change is inevitable, and the rapid evolution of human capabilities in the last 10,000 years has forced human social change, and has meant that conservatives were not by nature better suited to it. Humans began to live in larger tribes, then cities, nations and large empires. We are now in a global age—the age of the global tribe! For 10,000 years the conservative has been trying to prevent inevitable change, whereas the liberal has been trying to adjust to it.

Religion has mixed effects. Morality evolved from empathy and co-operation to help us join together into societies that would benefit us all. A group of us helping each other by caring and sharing was better able to survive and reproduce than solitary apes looking out only for themselves and their children. Morality is therefore instinctive because humans evolved to be social.

Religion was devised by conservatives to help preserve the status quo. It did not help people survive or reproduce necessarily, but inclined people to paranoia, according to Kanazawa. Fear was a protective mechanism. A sudden and particularly unexpected noise might signal a threat and alerted people to danger. The emotion manifested as fear, tensing people to be ready for flight or to fight. The danger religions emphasized was the stranger from elsewhere, someone with a different culture and religion, and promoted unity against them:

It helps life to be paranoid, and because humans are paranoid, they become more religious, and they see the hands of God everywhere.

S Kanazawa

Religious people, certainly of the patriarchal type, are invited to “Fear God”. God was the symbol of their own culture. “Fear of God” was fear of not conforming to cultural norms, including religion. Religion incorporated fear of strangers, fear of tribal retribution for nonconformity and praise for conformity or loyalty to the tribal authority, and finally a fear of impurity, of contamination, and the concomitant that things that were known not to be contaminated and so impure, were to be reverenced—they were sacred or holy. This latter seems related to the fear of strangers, because strangers were maximally impure, and had to be purified when they wished to join the group, but it built also on the respect people had for the objects, areas, structures and dates that were set aside for communal use. These became the sacred objects, sanctified ground, temples, shrines and churches, and holy days of the religious calendar. The introduction of religion was to enforce tribal customs and tribal culture, at a time when the old fashioned human group or small tribe of a few hundred people were disappearing as they merged into tribes and confederations of tribes to form cities and nations.

Atheism “allows someone to move forward and speculate on life without any concern for the dogmatic structure of a religion. Historically, anything that’s new and different can be seen as a threat in terms of the religious beliefs. Almost all religious systems are about permanence”, said George Washington University leadership professor James Bailey, who was not involved in the study. More intelligent people are the ones likely to adopt evolutionarily novel ideas that will move the species forward, according to Bailey. Conservatives by nature held back any cultural advance because they had no incentive to change anything. They preferred things just as they were.

Kanazawa did not find that higher intelligence predicted sexual exclusivity in women, only to sexual exclusivity in men. Having one partner has always been advantageous to women. Since women had to spend nine months being pregnant, and additional years caring for young children, it made sense for them to want a steady mate to provide them resources. Ensuring that their few children were brought to maturity was their preferred evolutionary strategy. For men, on the other hand, sexual exclusivity goes against the grain evolutionarily. Their natural strategy was to have multiple mates and many children, and, if some were cuckoos in another man’s nest, so much the better. It seems that intelligent men agree to pair bonding and loyalty to their mates to try to ensure their women only bring up children with their genes—it was a way of ensuring they were not feeding cuckoos in the nest.

Sexual exclusivity in men, liberalism and atheism all go against what would be expected, given humans’ evolutionary past. None of these traits would have benefited our ancestors, but higher intelligence may be associated with them because it allows us to change. In a rapidly changing, mass population society the more intelligent are better fitted, and ought to be selected given a reasonable timescale. The more intelligent male is judging how they would be better off in the future society and judge that loyalty to the mother of their children, compassion for everyone in the global tribe, and eschewing religion are the better ways forward for the species.

Vegetarianism, while not strongly associated with IQ in this study, has also been shown to be related to intelligence in previous work.

The findings are in the March 2010 issue of Social Psychology Quarterly.

Why So Many Conservative Protestants are Poor and Republican Pastors are Rich

Which political party has the best values, and how does religion affect these values? Kennon Sheldon, a professor of psychology in the University of Missouri College of Arts and Science, compared extrinsic values (financial success, status, appearance) with intrinsic values (growth, intimacy, helping) of admitted Democrats and Republicans.

Republicans scored consistently higher on the extrinsic value of financial success and lower on the intrinsic value of helping others in need. Only non-religious Republicans did not value helping those in need, but even religious Republicans were more interested than Democrats in financial success. Democrats had essentially the same values whether religious or non-religious.

What of necessary challenges that require intrinsic values because connection and cooperation are central to them rather than wealth and consumption? Examples are changing to sustainable energy in the face of climate change, and keeping people united in the face of increasing racial diversity. Can wealthy Republicans deal with such policies. They do but the evidence is they use simple, humble conservative Christians’ willingness to care for the less fortunate as a cover for their own utterly unChristian greed. The poorer Christians do the caring while the richer ones avoid it while adding to their wealth.

Conservative Protestants are indeed dramatically over represented at the bottom of the US wealth distribution. Lisa A Keister, Duke professor of sociology, found that Conservative Protestants tend to save less and accumulate fewer assets than other Americans and their religious beliefs contribute to their low wealth:

We know that wealth ownership is extremely unequal in the US, and large numbers of families have little or no savings. However, sociologists and economists have just begun to explore why that is. While there is evidence that religion and wealth are related, what has been missing is a clear account of the process by which religion affects the wealth of believers.

Prof Keister

Keister used data on more than 6,000 people in her survey, which includes detailed information about family background, religious affiliation data and financial information. She concluded that conservative Protestant beliefs influence wealth ownership directly and indirectly. The direct influence stems from conservative Protestants’ approach to finance—in particular the belief that people are managers of God’s money and excess accumulation of wealth should be avoided. This is perfectly sound Christianity. After all, Christ said, “Blessed are the poor”. In addition, conservative Protestants have tended to be less educated and have large families beginning at younger ages, and fewer conservative Protestant women work.

Keister’s study examined the wealth of members of conservative Protestant churches, defined as members of churches with relatively traditional religious beliefs who accept the Bible as the inerrant word of God, value personal conversion experiences and emphasize the importance of the Christian faith to social issues—Assemblies of God, Baptists, Churches of Christ, Church of God in Christ, Nazarene and Pentecostal.

Wealth was defined as net worth, or total assets minus total liabilities. Wealth is among the most fundamental indicators of well-being. Unlike income, which disappears with the loss of a job or the death of the earner, wealth endures. Wealth as a measure of economic standing has important advantages over income. It doesn’t go away if you lose your job, or if you have a medical problem. You can also pass it to your kids. It can do all kinds of things for you. Conservative Protestants have very low overall wealth. In 2000, median net worth for conservative Protestants was $26,000 compared to $66,200 for the entire National Longitudinal Study of Youth.

The Bible contains a large number of lessons about money and finances. The study found that conservative Protestants tend to hold the following beliefs:

• Divine advice, advice from clergy and other religious advice about money and work have merit. For example, more conservative Protestants than other people are likely to pray about financial decisions
• Excess accumulation of wealth is undesirable. More conservative Protestants than other people said money prevents one from knowing God.

Keister notes that conservative Protestants are among the most generous contributors to churches and related organizations. There is a curious irony in this finding, in that these poor conservative Christians send money to spouting pastors and TV evangelicals who are vastly rich, helping them to get richer, yet they take their minister’s advice on giving up their last mites, like the famous widow.

The reason has to go farther than religious sincerity and devotion. It must reflect the generally low education and IQ of these poor people. In other words, the cleverer pastors are taking advantage of the low intelligence and gullibility of their flocks! Thus the study found that religious belief can influence net worth indirectly through low educational attainment. Education is one of the strongest predictors of wealth, and conservative Protestants have significantly less education than members of other faiths. Contributing to their poor education is that conservative Protestants have children early and have large families, making saving difficult. Also, conservative Protestant women stay at home, cutting family income.

The study examined three groups:

1. People who were conservative Protestants in both childhood and adulthood
2. People who were raised conservative Protestants but left
3. People who joined conservative Protestant churches as adults.

All three groups have low wealth, but the lifelong conservative Protestants had the least wealth, and those who joined the denominations as adults had the highest. It suggests that values learned in childhood have a strong influence on saving and assets later in life. Religion had a significant effect after controlling for class background, adult class and other indicators such as parents’ education and income. Race is another factor. The effect was stronger among black conservative Protestants, though it was significant among whites as well.

There is no mistaking that these Christians who are poor in wealth, education, culture and intellect are trying to do as Christ taught them, but they are unable to see that they are being conned by the latter day Sadducees, the greedy, spouting Protestant pastors and ministers whose main ambition is to take the last dollars from these gullible people to line their own pockets and send their own kids to posh schools. It is time that some of the clergy practised Christianity themselves. Christ spoke out against the smug Pharisees. If there are any honest Christians out there, they ought to be condemning as agents of Satan, the selfish accumulators calling themselves ministers and evangelists. Christ said: “Give all ye have to the poor and follow me”. If that is being Christian, it follows that what Protestant pastors are doing is following the Antichrist.

Further Reading

• Altemeyer has put The Authoritarians on line as a pdf file for anyone to download, read and inwardly digest