To be Christian is to be apathetic about everything except personal salvation.

The Psychology of Christianity 1.1

Psychology and Religion
The Conscious and Subconscious
Types of Believers
The Role of Priests and Ministers

Abstract

Why do millions of people want to believe in gods, and what does it do to them? Those are the questions the psychology of religion has to answer. Apologists always overlook any facts that seem to discredit their religious belief, making apology the opposite of scientific enquiry, the art of excusing. Scientific study must be based on testing. Armchair theologizing is not scientific. Sociology and social psychology have to depend on observation, though this can be enhanced by using mass observation, questionnaires and statistics, and individual beliefs can be studied in depth through psychiatry and examination of subjective religious experiences, including the stimulation of religious feeling by drugs and by physical means. The psychology of Christianity in society, particularly in the USA.

Psychology and Religion

Why do millions of people want to believe in gods, and what does it do to them? Those are the questions the psychology of religion has to answer. Religious belief does not have a single source, and the various influences vary among religious people, but religion has three primary elements to it, emotion, beliefs and actions. It generates an emotional experience from its prescribed activites, and this experience is then rationalized by justifying a belief based on some myth. The outside observer can see the activities—the ritual—and enquiry will supply them with the purpose of it—the justification in belief. But the participants get a feeling, an emotion, and it is this that is the real motive for religion. It is not unlike an addiction. The emotion is often called the “religious experience”. It might involve a sense described as the presence of God, and a feeling of comfort and wellbeing.

Psychology is the study of behaviour. It uses the scientific method of observation, hypothesis and testing. Much has been learnt about how the mind responds to stimuli, and various hypotheses to explain it seem well founded. Studying the psychology of religion means trying to work out religious responses of the mind in terms of how the mind seems to work in general. If tests show that religious states of mind are like mental states found in everyday psychological research, then they are likely to be explained by the same psychological hypotheses. In other words, phenomena often attributed to supernatural intervention might be more parsimoniously explained by well known hypotheses about how the mind works. So, no special psychology of religion is needed, and hypotheses invented to preserve untestable religious ideas like the soul are unnecessary and contrary to Ockham’s Razor. The schools of special religious psychology explain…

…every new fact by the creation of some fresh mental faculty, which it christens with some such name as “transcendental consciousness”.
R H Thouless

Robert H Thouless

Robert Henry Thouless was educated at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he gained a PhD in 1922. That year he also wrote his book, An Introduction to the Psychology of Religion, based on lectures given during summer vacations to Cambridge ordination candidates. Robert Thouless went on to be a Lecturer in Psychology at Manchester and at Glasgow, and Reader in Educational Psychology at Cambridge.

It is a form of the scholasticism rejected by Ockham but magnified into a mania by the Moslem Sufis, whereby entities are freely created in the imagination though they explain nothing because they are no more than the observations they purport to explain. Thouless tried hard to remain objective despite his own Christian beliefs, but could not bring himself to accept that psychology is a sufficient explanation of religious behaviour with no need for the supernatural. In his book, he admits it is so, but repeatedly assures his audience that even so it does not eliminate supernatural explanations! Perhaps not, but Ockham and a rule of science demand that the natural explanation should be accepted, because hypotheses should be the simplest ones that work, and therefore must eschew the invention of unnecessary entities. Thouless actually states that the value of psychological explanations of religion is proportional to how well personal beliefs and judgements are eschewed:

An investigation which was only concerned with the facts that seemed to support religion, which hesitated to go any further when it appeared to be discovering natural explanations for what had previously been supposed to be supernatural processes, would obviously be of no value at all as evidence.
R H Thouless

Thouless must have met the Christian apologists of his day—the second edition of his book was published in 1924. Apologists always overlook any facts that seem to discredit their religious belief, making apology the opposite of scientific enquiry. It is the art of excusing, the art of religious collage—papering over the cracks in justification. Scientific study, on the other hand, must be empirical—it must be based on testing. Armchair theologizing is not scientific. But testing of religion in the sense of experimenting on religious groups in their activities is not practical. Sociology and social psychology have to depend on observation, though this can be enhanced by using mass observation, questionnaires and statistics, and individual beliefs can be studied in depth through psychiatry and examination of subjective religious experiences, including the stimulation of religious feeling by drugs and by physical means. Thouless depended largely on the literature of religious experience in writing his book.

The Conscious and Subconscious

Consciousness is awareness. But the brain does not work entirely consciously. Though the brain is working on something, we are unaware it is. Things happen around us but we are not aware of them when we are doing something else though our senses must still be receiving the data. The clock is ticking all the time but you are only aware of it when you think about it specifically for some reason. We have lots, thousands or millions, perhaps, of memories that we do not think about but can recall when we want to. These include vast amounts of knowledge that we have learned but only use when it is needed. People sleepwalk while knowing nothing of it. Suggestion is the best example of all. An hypnotist can suggest to a subject that they should crow like a cockerel, say, at 8.00 o’clock. They are told to forget the suggestion and are brought out of the trance, only to do precisely what was suggested, to their embarrassment and confusion. The intention was in the brain quite unconsciously, but still had its effect, and even involved the body’s internal clock.

The part of the brain that is working but not consciously is called the subconscious. It is also said to be working subliminally. Parallels with computers seem apt. Sometimes memories cannot be recalled. Psychologists call it repression. A common reason for it is that the memory is horrible or hurtful. Shell shocked soldiers often cannot remember what happened to them, and the same is true of accident victims. The trouble is that the memory is only repressed not erased, and it can continue to cause behavioural problems subliminally—bad dreams, panic attacks, violence, irrational fears, and so on. Sometimes a memory is deliberately suppressed rather than unwittingly repressed. Another common effect is that a some repressed behaviour is sublimated—subconsciously transferred—into another quite distinct activity. Suppression and repression can cause problems including ultimately mental breakdown and madness, but sublimation is healthier, and psychologists will try to get people to sublimate undesirable behaviour into some other activity.

What this means in terms of religion is manifold. Religious people are often sublimating some impulse, but what it is is not always obvious. The subjects cannot say what it is themselves because they have suppressed or repressed the true reason. Conscious reasons can be had from them by questioning, but much of it might well be rationalization. So asking religious people is an unsatisfactory way to fully discover their motives. It is not invalid but has to be supplemented by objective study of religious behaviour. The meaning of religious symbols to people is also revealing and can sometimes be discovered by psychiatric methods. Symbolism is a powerful motivator. A demagogue using the US flag as symbolic of freedom can bring tough men to tears, and arouse such intense patriotism that they will send their sons and daughters to be killed in some foreign desert. Such chicanery ought to be well known, but apparently it is not, and some of the best exponents of it are Christian preachers!

Types of Believers

Studies in the USA showed that religious people were more neurotic, more racially prejudiced, more anti-semitic, more anti-black and more authoritarian. Those with no religion were more liberal and less authoritarian. The highest scores for ethnic prejudice were found in Mennonites, Lutherans and Catholics, then Fundamentalists, then Anglicans and United Church members, and last, at about half the scores for prejudice of the lowest of the religious denominations, came non-believers. Nor did religiosity deter cheating on exams. In some studies the more religious students were, the more they cheated. In “Good Samaritan” situations set up with someone in difficulties—say a woman struggling with shopping and a child, someone slumped and groaning in a doorway, a stranded motorist—religiosity showed no correlation with willingness to help. No evidence shows that religiosity improves anyones humanity, but rather the opposite, and religious belief is negatively correlated with intelligence while intelligence is positively correlated with liberal, radical and atheistic attitudes.

Christians had to find a way of minimizing the impact of these findings. G W Allport came up with an answer. He categorized believers into types—“extrinsic” and “intrinsic”. The problem was solved at a stroke!

For extrinsically religious people, religion is a membership of an in-group which provides protection, consolation and social status. Extrinsic believers use religion in the service of worldly goals in a utilitarian way. They have a what’s-in-it-for-me attitude. It is for their own benefit, a means to a social or emotional end. They pray for things or to get relief or protection, but with no higher spiritual feeling. The weekly habit of attendance at church is a social outlet, and having many other things in life, besides basic religious beliefs that are important. They select what they believe from the bible to justify their actions and opinions, while ignoring or reinterpreting whatever does not fit their outlook.

For intrinsically religious people, religion is a personal commitment independent of their wants. Intrinsic believers accept religion for its own sake. Allport considers that they live their religion—it is internalized, they base their life on it, and attempt to live by an interpretation of the myths and legends of the religion. Religion offers them their main motives and they try to express their religious beliefs in their other dealings in life, regardless of social pressures. They sincerely believe in their supernatural friend, and his personal diary, the bible, and pray to keep in touch with their chum. Intrinsics have a positive view of human nature, a greater sense of control over their lives and a sense of purpose in life.

With this distinction, Christians are able to blame the horrible characteristics found in surveys of religiousness on to extrinsic believers who are not true Christians. Since, intrinsic believers are regular church-goers and are less prejudiced, less anti-Semitic, less anti-black, less neurotic and less authoritarian, they are altogether nicer!

Neither of Allport’s types actually followed the teachings of Christ in the bible—are there any Christians that do? Rather they use the bible as a source of selected divine citations that justify attitudes and beliefs already formed, reassuring them they are right. Each broadly correlated with the root of their faith—community tradition for extrinsics and fear for intrinsics. Sometimes intrinsic behaviour is the result of mental illness, such as paranoid schizophrenia.

In a 1988 age-related study of 205 people from 11 to 83, Watson found the intrinsic outlook increased with age. It also identified another religious outlook, called “quest”, found most commonly in late adolescence and early adulthood, in which people struggled with religious doubts and questions about the meaning of their life. They questioned and revised religious beliefs, questioning how their religious precepts coped in a world of difficulties and tensions. For them, truth is more important than any given religious belief, and they value uncertainty and doubt in religious matters as elements in a quest for it. In this quest, they are more likely to change religion. Quest is associated with lower prejudice and more liberal political attitudes and acceptance of shades of grey, but is also associated with obvious uncertainty and some anxiety, there being no simplistic answers to fall back on for comfort, even though difficulties and injustice are not readily ameliorated in fact by any simple belief. Progressive psychologists warn that faith combines false comfort in simplistic beliefs with a lifetime bondage to them, and often the terrible social consequences that no one today can deny.

Another study of more than 2,500 Stanford University students, done over five years, found students identified as having strong faith had emotional advantages, such as being able to resist temptations like cheating. This finding leaves open two important questions. Did the supposed advantage make them more honest? Did the resistance to temptation have any cost such as guilt or fear of divine punishment. Other studies do not find religiousness correlates well with honesty, and religion often has a terrible downside of depression and guilt from a burden of imagined sin.

Right Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) is not just a measure of religion but relates closely with some religious attitudes. Thus they carry childhood beliefs into adulthood, go to church more often, pray and read scriptures more, and acknowledge no doubt about their religious convictions. They are submissive to authority, aggressive to outsiders and sinners, and are socially conventional. They are anti-democratic because democracy gives people too much freedom. They object to homosexuals, communists and cult members, believe in physical punishment and long prison sentences, and show least copmpassion and most obedience to an authority figure in tests like Milgram’s. RWAs use religion for a non religious agenda.

High Authoritarians tend to be religious—and vice versa—to have tightly wound ideologies, to be under pressure to believe, keeping doubts tucked away. Complicated biblical material is lined up to support authoritarianism and contradictory material is disconnected (many Authoritarians agree with Jesus’ admonition not to judge but it has no apparent effect on their behavior). Their belief system appears to be self-confirming, enduring and closed. Really, the beliefs could be anything, and hostilities based on them appear highly resistant to change.
Altemeyer, Enemies of Freedom

Most believers are extrinsic. They believe primarily because it is useful to do so. They are members of a club. Without the professionals, peer pressure and the community behind them, many would lapse because their belief is opportunistic. Because extrinsics do not really believe, they are not really religious and lack the psychological coping mechanism of the intrinsics—autosuggestion. They accept authority to avoid having to think. Instead they can justify their opinions with well rehearsed biblical citations, or quotations from authorities, giving them the self-delusion that they too are authorities. Their arguments are quotations from God’s bible, and that means they are right. That is sufficient. Several studies have found poorer mental health, more dogmatic attitudes and prejudice, and higher levels of anxiety among extrinsic believers. Their personal characteristics—prejudice, immaturity, authoritarianism, dependency and poor mental health—are not recognizable as Christian if the teachings of Christ are the criteria, but they hide them under a self-deluded and unwarranted righteousness.

While extrinsic religiosity is associated with negative pathology, intrinsic religiosity is associated with more social behavior and wellbeing or happiness, but still with conservative, judgemental, and prohibitive attitudes, and a higher level of conformity even than extrinsics. Intrinsics often are not explicitly racist but are intolerant of those who contradict their beliefs. Social desirability is important—they want to be seen as “good people” not bigots, so they suppress their intolerance unless they find an acceptable outlet for it. The sincere belief of the intrinsics has benefits for mental and physical health through the placebo effect of autosuggestion. They were more empathetic and less narcissistic and depressive than extrinsics. So, religion does have some benefits, though they can had without it too, and the disadvantages are not worth the benefits.

Atheists and agnostics have better mental health than extrinsics, and often better than intrinsics. They see through the social conformity and the supersitious rituals of organized religion, and substitute for it their own impulses for truth and meaning.

Evangelicals, fundamentalists or “true believers” seem to combine the worst characteristics of the main two types. Protestants, they emphasize the authority of the Bible, salvation through a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, personal piety, and evangelizing or sharing the “Good News”. Afraid to face reality, they avoid it by accepting the bible literally as the word of God, but they do not read it literally. Instead they have a school of pastors or ministers who tell them how to interpret it in the correct way. Lo! They find that God thinks just like them—their beliefs are divinely correct and unquestionable, they are the only true believers, and the only true Christians. They are too uncritical and often too unintelligent to realize they are being led by the nose by their pastors. They bring up their children in an authoritarian way, and their children have a conversion experience in their teens when—after slipping towards the quest type and doubting like most teenagers—their independence of will is broken, they take up their parents’ lunacy, ending up with immense psychological relief from finally conforming.

A characteristic of fundamentalism of any kind is that it self-servingly mixes belief in one God with loyalty to national, ethnic or other symbols. They convince themselves they have a special personal relationship with God and that their doctrines are unchanging—a dogma. Many of them are Right Wing Authoritarians. Fundamentalism correlates strongly with dogmatism, racism, authoritarianism, sexism, homophobic bias and most other forms of intolerance. They define themselves in relation to this brew of God and bias so exclusively as to be ready to kill others who do not share it—Christians and Moslems will kill each other, Islamic Sunni fundamentalists will kill other Moslems but of the Shi’ite variety as well as Christians, and the Shi’ites will kill Sunnis, yet all have astonishingly similar authoritarian beliefs. All of them claim ultimate truth—an ever-present battle between good and evil, the others being the bad guys, and science being their ally. Whenever religion and science clash, science must be wrong. Fundamentalists reject rational, pragmatic and scientific thought for mythological belief systems, justified by tradition.

What seems sacred and positive in one camp appears demonic and deranged in another.
Karen Armstrong

Though they call themselves Christian, these people are not really Christians at all—their god is not a god of love—but are “Jarvayites”. They believe in the Hebrew God of retribution. Christian fundamantalists see their God at his best in the Old Testament where violence is an acceptable way to solve problems. The Old Testament glorifies such behaviour, and God approves of killing His enemies—anyone who is not a Christian fundamentalist! Those who consciously reject the present, difficult as it may be, and retreat into the past, especially a mythologized past, often end up paranoid. Moslem fundamentalists are precisely the same.

For these people, compassion is for “righteous” people only. “Good Samaritanism” is only for other Samaritans, destroying the whole point of the parable—they help only those with the same beliefs. So, those most anxious to get into heaven as disciples of Christ are themselves the blind the dumb and the maimed. Because their standards are at variance with the biblical teaching of Christ, they can fairly be described as “soulless”. They have no souls worth saving in Christ’s own terms. They lack every attribute recommended by their own God, and cannot even see the dichotomy. They are the truly blind in the very way that Christ meant it. The truly blind cannot be saved.

The metaphors so popular in Christianity of sheep, shepherds, pastors, flocks, seem approriate because most behave psychologically as sheep, an animal which is allegedly easily led. They are more open to suggestion than others, are less assertive, less creative, less inner-directed, more submissive, more dependent, and inclined to be gregarious! The members of revivalist and evangelical groups are particularly suggestible.

The Role of Priests and Ministers

What comes first, the chicken or the egg? Does the emotional experience precede belief in religion or the reverse? Christians do not like questions like this, and try to find excuses why it can no more be answered in psychology than it can in biology. They evolve together. Not so! Belief must be first, even if unconscious. Without it, no emotional response can be expected. Who would attribute any such emotion to supernatural beings without a predisposing belief?

Thouless classed the psychological factors of the religious attitude as:

the influence of tradition
personal experience—consciousness of moral conflict and emotional life
processes of reasoning.

One of the most uniformly described religious experiences is adolescent conversion in those communities that expect it. Contrasted with their predominant absence when there is no such expectation, the psychiatrist concludes that they are socially induced. From a sociological viewpoint, religion is just an aspect of culture passed on from generation to generation. No devout Christian parent would expect their children to become Moslems or Buddhists. Children take the religion of their parents.

Parents, priests, and the herd make each new citizen according to the religion of the region in which they are born. In ignorant parts of the world, where churchgoing is strong, peasants react at the suggestion of skepticism with a dumb, pained, stupefaction. Such people—and they are at least four-fifths of the religious believers of the world—inherit their religion as automatically as they inherit their language. The authority of tradition explains the fact that they believe. The emotional religious life then follows of itself.

People are born into a community, and are brought up in it. Inevitably they are taught the practices of that community, its culture, and the main aspect of it for thousands of years has been religion. Indeed, religion and culture were originally synonymous. Children are unable to criticize. They accept what they are told by their “betters” so, it is rare for anyone to do something different than whatever they have been taught. In the case of religion, communities have always had a class of professional religionists called priests or clergymen, and these days, pastors and ministers, and their function is to perpetuate and, if necessary and possible, to spread the base of their religion. These professionals get paid by their congregations, so they have a strong vested interest in doing a good job of maintaining and increasing their flock. Without religious professionals, it is unlikely that religion would survive. Cases like the mass migrations from Catholicism in the nineteenth century by US immigrants unattended by priests are proof enough of it.

Christian clergy recognize the importance of priming children for conversion as adults. Thus they direct their efforts at women. They are the ones who raise the children, and can pressurize their husbands into going to church. Women are themselves easier to persuade and convert because they are often more emotional than men, and so easier to scare. Evidence of all this is that most believers are women, there being many more women than men in the churches. It is seen too in the Moslem community where too many women accept their clerics’ arguments that they are to blame for masculine bad behaviour, and so have to suffer by wearing veils and shawls so as not to provoke it!

Many priests might enter their profession with good intentions, but many do so simply because it is an easy job, with clean hands and good pay. Whatever their intentions at first, they cannot avoid the reality that they benefit from spreading their religion, and keeping it active. The American population is made up of religious immigrants from nations of the old world who had suffered persecution. The main streams of immigration (Irish, Italian, Polish, Jewish) were religious and often fervent because they came from the poorest, least educated, and most overcrowded countries, which means the most religious. When the expansion of the American people toward the Pacific took place in the nineteenth century, not enough priests could be found to service chapels wherever a few hundred Roman Catholics settled. American Catholic priests were not inclined to leave Boston and Philadelphia to rough it with the western pioneers.

In a few decades, millions of Catholic immigrant pioneers lost interest in religion. In 1836, Bishop England, the Catholic bishop of Charlestown, estimated for the Pope that between 1815 and 1836 the Church lost 3,750,000 people. In 1891, American Catholics addressed the Lucerne Memorial to the Pope bewailing that 16,000,000 had apostatized. The Vérité of Quebec made the same estimate, independently, in 1898. The New York Freeman’s Journal in the same year put the loss at twenty millions. From immigration analysis, Joseoh McCabe confirmed that the loss was at least fourteen or fifteen millions.

The most fanatical of all religious adherents fell away in masses when there were no priests to bother them, and, although priests came along as soon as there was money enough in any town to give a middle-class income to an ordained peasant, they never recovered the apostates or their children. Money grubbing is always an important part of the job, and some realize that it is so unregulated that they can get rich remarkably quickly out of it.

Stepping back in time, religion began, at least partly, as explanations of unexplained things by the class of priests who were the scientists of their day. For ages humans believed that the summer’s crop, the rain supply, the fertility of the cattle, depended upon the gods who informed the priests of when to sow their crops. The belief in propitiating them inclined people toward religion. But the belief was the primary thing. Ultimately belief is primary and is what has to be explained. At first, it satisfied a need to know, and for some people it still does, albeit in an irrational way.

Behind tradition and its enforcement are always the priests. Works on the psychology of religion ignore this essential element—the priests and ministers. They want people to appreciate their wares, and if they did not push them in the way they do, the psychology of religion would not be a puzzle. How much interest in religion would there be if Christian ministers did not make it their business to keep that interest alive?

Page Tags: Social Science, Psychology, Conscious, Subconscious, Fear of Death, Guilt, Mystical Experience, Belief, Beliefs, Believers, Christian, Christians, Death, Feeling Good, God, Life, Religion, Religious, Thouless

Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.