The Questioning Christian

Religious intolerance may stem from fear of death

Some of us have long suspected that the vitriol that issues from religious radicals might have a significant psychological component. Apparently there's research to support the notion that the psychological component is the fear of one's own death.

The latest issue of The New Republic (Aug. 27) has an intriguing piece, Death Grip, by John B. Judis. He reports on extensive research by experimental psychologists, suggesting pretty clearly that:

... the mere thought of one's mortality can trigger a range of emotions--from disdain for other races, religions, and nations, to a preference for charismatic over pragmatic leaders, to a heightened attraction to traditional mores.

Judis writes:

To test the hypothesis that recognition of mortality evokes "worldview defense"--their term for the range of emotions, from intolerance to religiosity to a preference for law and order, that they believe thoughts of death can trigger--they assembled 22 Tucson municipal court judges. They told the judges they wanted to test the relationship between personality traits and bail decisions, but, for one group, they inserted in the middle of the personality questionnaire two exercises meant to evoke awareness of their mortality.

One [exercise] asked the judges to "briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you"; the other required them to "jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you physically as you die and once you are physically dead."

They then asked the judges to set bail in the hypothetical case of a prostitute whom the prosecutor claimed was a flight risk. The judges who did the mortality exercises set an average bail of $455. The control group that did not do the exercises set it at an average of $50. The psychologists knew they were onto something.

Over the next decade, the three performed similar experiments to illustrate how awareness of death could provoke worldview defense. They showed that what they now called "mortality salience" affected people's view of other races, religions, and nations.

When they had students at a Christian college evaluate essays by what they were told were a Christian and a Jewish author, the group that did the mortality exercises expressed a far more negative view of the essay by the Jewish author than the control group did. (German psychologists would find a similar reaction among German subjects toward Turks.)

They also conducted numerous experiments to show that mortality exercises evoked patriotic responses. The subjects who did the exercises took a far more negative view of an essay critical of the United States than the control group did and also expressed greater veneration for cultural icons like the flag.

The three even devised an experiment to show that, after doing the mortality exercises, conservatives took a much harsher view of liberals, and vice versa.

In conducting these experiments, they took care not to tell the subjects what they were doing. They also devised experiments to answer obvious objections to their theory. For instance, they substituted other exercises designed to increase anxiety--by reminding subjects of an upcoming examination or a painful dental visit--to determine if these thoughts had the same effect as the mortality exercises, but they didn't. It wasn't anxiety per se that triggered worldview defense; it was anxiety specifically about one's own death.

(Emphasis and extra paragraphing added.)

As Kendall Harmon would say, read the whole thing.

I would add: Anxiety about death is natural, but it also suggests a lack of trust that everything will be OK — in other words, a lack of faith, the faith of Abraham and of Jesus, as lauded by Paul in his letter to the Romans.

Contrast mortality anxiety with the Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor's definition of faith as openness to truth, no matter what truth turns out to be — that would seem to be just the opposite of worldview defensiveness.

Free Will - Dennis Overbye in NY Times [reading notes]

Reading note to myself:

"A bevy of experiments in recent years suggest that the conscious mind is like a monkey riding a tiger of subconscious decisions and actions in progress, frantically making up stories about being in control.   As a result, physicists, neuroscientists and computer scientists have joined the heirs of Plato and Aristotle in arguing about what free will is, whether we have it, and if not, why we ever thought we did in the first place."

From Dennis Overbye, Free Will: Now You Have It, Now You Don’t, NY Times, Tues. Jan. 2, 2007

Wired for Altruism - NY Times article

One of my sisters calls my attention to a piece by Daniel Goleman, "The Roots of Compassion" (Dec. 19, 2005).  It's part of a Times year-end series on happiness and "our ties to friends, family and tradition."  Excerpt:

It’s a truism that the sight of one stranger helping another in the out-of-the-blue fashion of Secret Santa can move people to tears. Exactly why that might be so has been the subject of study by Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville. He uses the term “elevation” for the warm feeling people get when they hear about or witness unexpected acts of human goodness. Haidt studies how people feel while watching, for instance, a film of Mother Theresa helping the poor in Calcutta. His conclusion: We are wired to be inspired.

Acts of compassion, courage or tolerance have a special psychological potency for most people, moving or even thrilling them, Haidt has found. Seeing someone help the sick or poor can trigger elevation, and so can simple thoughtfulness. The Japanese word for being moved in this way is kandou. In a study in Japan, someone reported feeling kandou on witnessing a tough-looking gangster offer his seat to an elderly man on a crowded train.

The fledgling field of social neuroscience is figuring out the brain mechanics that account for elevation – the circuitry that underlies the urge to help others in distress. An article in the journal Development and Psychopathology summarizing the results of years of brain research suggests that empathy – sensitivity to the emotional state of another person – arises through an interaction of the brain’s pain centers with mirror neurons, which match our internal state to that of another person.

Religion, Mysticism, and Brain Chemistry

From the We-Know-So-Little-About-the-Brain-and-Mind department:   A particular hallucinogen has been shown to induce mystical experiences and positive life changes in many volunteers — but also to induce fearfulness and even paranoia in others. 

(This has been sitting in my stack of things to write about for several weeks.)

In a double-blind study at Johns Hopkins University, 36 volunteers took psilocybin (an active ingredient in "magic mushrooms"), while a control group took Ritalin as an active control.   Scientific American reports that 22 of the volunteers in the test group described the psilocybin experience as a mystical one, with 24 ranking it "as among the most meaningful of their lives, comparing it with the birth of a first child or the death of a parent."  

The Scientific American article quotes the study's principal investigator, Roland Griffiths, as saying that in follow-up work, those test subjects who had a positive experience with psilocybin "continue to report positive changes in attitude and behavior" and that "the experience continues to be personally and spiritually meaningful to them."

(Griffiths also warned against recreational use of psilocybin, however, because of its severe negative effects in some test subjects.)

In a Q&A paper posted on the Johns Hopkins Web site, Griffiths said:

Q 2: Do you have any sign that the same brain "machinery" affected by psilocybin is identical to what people experience in spiritual epiphanies that occur without drugs?

That work hasn’t been done yet, though there is good reason to believe that similar mechanisms are at work during profound religious experiences, however they might be occasioned (for example, by fasting, meditation, controlled breathing, sleep deprivation, near death experiences, infectious disease states, or psychoactive substances such as psilocybin).

The neurology of religious experience, newly termed neurotheology, is drawing interest as a new frontier of study.  [Emphasis and paragraphing edited.]

Perhaps hoping to head off attacks from religious people, Griffiths also commented to the effect that his investigation wasn't trying to reduce God to a matter of brain chemistry:

We are attempting neither to validate nor to invalidate the truth of claims that some people have made about metaphysical realities as a consequence of their psilocybin experiences (or as a consequence of their meditation, fasting, or prayer experiences) - that’s beyond our purview as scientists.

It is within the purview of science to study the changes in mood, values, view of self, and behaviors that may follow such experiences.  [Paragraphing edited.]

Griffiths quotes religion scholar Huston Smith as approving of the study as part of an on-going investigation into how to help people to live good lives as part of their communities:

[Quoting Huston Smith]  In most cases, even the most extraordinary experiences provide lasting benefits to those who undergo them and people around them only if they become the basis of ongoing work.

That’s the next research question, it seems to me: What conditions of community and practice best help people to hold on to what comes to them in those moments of revelation, converting it into abiding light in their own lives? [Paragraphing edited.]

---

Sources: 

• David Biello, Not Imagining It, Scientific American, Nov. 2006, p. 33. 
• Roxanne Khamsi, Magic mushrooms really cause 'spiritual' experiences, NewScientist.com, Jul. 11, 2006.
• Johns Hopkins University press releases.

What Caused the Amish Shootings?

The unspeakable* Amish-shootings tragedy furnishes still more evidence of how little we know about why people make the choices they do.  Apparently the shooter "remembered" molesting two young relatives when he was a youth, but now there's some doubt whether that ever happened:

In Georgetown, not far from the shooting, no one knew what to say about the man whose inconceivable actions were made only more confusing by his last words. 

Mr. Roberts, who ended his siege by killing himself, wrote in a suicide note that he was tormented by memories of molesting two young relatives 20 years ago.

The police later interviewed the two women they suspected had been his victims, and both said they had never been sexually assaulted.

An Old World Close to a New World Horror - New York Times (extra paragraphing added).

It brings to mind the 1966 shootings from the University of Texas tower:  Charles Whitman left a suicide note saying he did not understand why he had been having "unusual and irrational thoughts" and asking that an autopsy be performed on him.  The autopsy revealed that he had a brain tumor that neurologists speculated might have contributed to his actions.

*Correction:  Nothing is unspeakable; our calling is to face the facts and to do what we can to improve them.

Ghostly Experiences: Neurological Hiccups?

Many people, including your correspondent, have wondered whether apparitions and out-of-body experiences might be evidence of a world beyond the grave.  Skeptics respond that such experiences are likely to be merely neurological hiccups (which is not necessarily inconsistent with the world-beyond-the-grave hypothesis).  Today's New York Times reports on recent work by neuroscientists showing that such experiences can sometimes be artificially induced by electrical stimulation:

They are eerie sensations, more common than one might think: A man describes feeling a shadowy figure standing behind him, then turning around to find no one there. A woman feels herself leaving her body and floating in space, looking down on her corporeal self.

Such experiences are often attributed by those who have them to paranormal forces.

But according to recent work by neuroscientists, they can be induced by delivering mild electric current to specific spots in the brain. In one woman, for example, a zap to a brain region called the angular gyrus resulted in a sensation that she was hanging from the ceiling, looking down at her body. In another woman, electrical current delivered to the angular gyrus produced an uncanny feeling that someone was behind her, intent on interfering with her actions.

Sandra Blakeslee, Out-of-Body Experience? Your Brain Is To Blame, New York Times, Oct. 3, 2006 (emphasis added).  I'd previously read that the anesthetic ketamine can cause similar effects.  For example, here's an excerpt from a first-person report by a man who had an out-of-body experience when he almost died in an apartment fire, then soon afterwards had a similar experience after taking ketamine:

David Brooks: Evolving Views of Human Behavior

One of my favorite political observers, David Brooks, notes how views of human behavior have changed significantly in recent decades.  These changes raise questions about traditional religious doctrines of sin.  Excerpt:

[...] Over the ages, thinkers have argued that humans are divided between passion and reason, or between the angelic and the demonic.

But now the prevailing view is that brain patterns were established during the millenniums when humans were hunters and gatherers, and we live with the consequences.

Now, it is generally believed, our behavior is powerfully influenced by genes and hormones. Our temperaments are shaped by whether we happened to be born with the right mix of chemicals.

Consciousness has come to be seen as this relatively weak driver, riding atop an organ, the brain, it scarcely understands. When we read that male voles with longer vasopressin genes are more likely to remain monogamous, it seems plausible that so fundamental a quality could be tied to some discrete bit of biology.

This shift in how we see human behavior is bound to have huge effects. [...]

Is Chemistry Destiny? - New York Times.

Indirect Genetic Influences on Bad Experiences?

Genes may play a role in problems previously attributed to bad life experiences, according to some recent research:

When the link between smoking and lung cancer was emerging, smoking apologists asked whether some unknown biological factor (call it X) might have two effects, causing people to smoke and causing them to develop cancer.  In that case, although the higher rate of illness among smokers might seem to implicate smoking, in fact X would be the cause of both smoking and cancer. Smoking would be an innocent bystander.

That turned out to be hogwash, of course.  But the premise isn't crazy. Indeed, it has returned to center stage in studies of how life experiences increase a child's risk for depression, behavior problems and other bad outcomes.

The approach is called genetically informed research.  The idea is to not be fooled into believing that a certain experience leads to a certain outcome but to probe whether a genetic predisposition (the X factor in the smoking analogy) leads to the experience and the outcome.

Take the conventional wisdom that their parents' divorce increases the risk that children will develop depression. "It turns out that the increased risk of depression in these children reflects a common genetic liability in the parents and kids," says Brian D'Onofrio of Indiana University, Bloomington. Since depressed people have more trouble getting and staying married, this genetic risk of depression raises their risk of divorce, he finds in a study submitted for publication. Parents pass that risk of depression to kids through DNA, not failed marriage.

"The same genetic risk that makes the parents more likely to divorce also makes the kids more likely to develop depression," he says.

Sharon Begley, Genes, Not Experience Explains Why The Lives Of Some Take Bad Turn, WSJ.com - Science Journal, June 16, 2006, p. B1 (emphasis added).

The Sin Model's Weakness

The classic "sin" model doesn't do a particularly good job of explaining and predicting human behavior.  It's roughly analogous to the ancient four-humours model of medicine.  The sin model's traditional prescriptions of prayer, study, church attendance, and willpower (for example) can definitely be useful, but not consistently so; they're essentially folk remedies that seem to work — sometimes — but we don't particularly know why.

The sin model's basic weakness is that our understanding of human behavior is pretty primitive.  When people act (or don't act), they're moved by a combination of factors such as biochemistry; physiology; learning; and the phenomenon we call "free will."  We know very, very little about how these various factors interact, about how they combine to produce specific behaviors in specific circumstances.  The apostle Paul alluded to this problem in Romans 7.15, where he mourned that "I do not understand what I do.  For what I want to do, I do not do; but what I hate, I do."

In today's New York Times, Amy Harmon surveys recent research about possible genetic bases for behavior, and notes some important questions that arise as a result:  If someone seems genetically predisposed toward certain "bad" behavior, what should we do about it?   Should the fact of the predisposition let them off the hook if they do engage in the bad behavior?  Harmon's piece is a must-read for any thoughtful person of faith.  Excerpt (with emphasis added):

Christianity's Elephant in the Room

Some conservative Episcopalians like to trumpet the fact that some traditionalist parishes have high Sunday attendance.  They claim that orthodox preaching and leadership pack 'em in, whereas (they claim) "revisionist" parishes often have trouble even getting people in the door.  Well, here's an interesting data point:  Despite the Roman Catholic church's overwhelmingly-orthodox leadership,[1] and even before the clergy sex-abuse scandals, an Associated Press article reports that the church's major U.S. dioceses have been seeing only about 20% Sunday attendance, at best.  And Europe is probably worse by far.   The attendance percentage at my own, very-orthodox parish hasn't been much better that that of the RCs in the past dozen years.  When I eyeballed the charts published by the national church, it appears the best attendance percentage we had between 1994 and 2004 was right around 28%.  I checked a few other parishes in town, both orthodox and liberal; their numbers tell similar stories.

People go to church for lots of different reasons, but these attendance data remind us that there's an elephant in the room:  Educated people have plenty of reason to be skeptical of the claims that traditionalists insist on making; from a purely-marketing perspective, this damages the church's credibility as a bringer of truth.   Over the centuries, Jesus's good news has become covered with doctrinal mold that needs to be stripped away so that people can be attracted again by the basics that he taught.

There's Ample Reason Not to Take Traditionalist Doctrines Seriously — and That Damages the Church's Credibility

I'm convinced that as the years go by, more and more people just don't take seriously what traditionalists claim are the key doctrines of orthodox Christianity, and that this damages the church's credibility in other areas.  If these folks don't have some other reason to want to go to church, they see little or no point in going there on Sunday morning, so they feel free to attend the Little Church of St. Starbucks (or St. Mattress) instead.

These folks may pay lip service to the doctrines of orthodoxy.  When they think about these doctrines at all, they may hope they're true. But deep down, I suspect, an awful lot of them metaphorically raise their eyebrows when traditionalist Christians say some of the things that they do, such as: