Why Bush needs to talk to God more

formerly

Would the world be more peaceful without God?

Ian Hansen

Collaborators

• Ara Norenzayan• Jeremy Ginges• Ilan Dar-Nimrod

Is Religion pure tolerance, pure intolerance, or a wild card?

• Our investigations on this question are inspired by research findings that religious affiliation is a very strange moderator in mortality salience experiments (e.g. Norenzayan & Hansen, 2006)

• Generally, people who are reminded of their inevitable death tend to become more hateful and dismissing of the worldview of The Other (billions of studies, Greenberg, Solomon, Pycsynski & colleagues)

Shouldn’t this effect be found primarily among religious people?

• Religions are supposedly motivated in part by a need to deny death

• Religious people tend to be more right wing than secular people

• Being devoted to one religion and being intolerant towards other religions should go hand in glove

In fact…

Support for a Godly-Islam-will-overthrow-the-

faithless-West essay

…religious people often open up more (or close off less)to the Religious Other under mortality salience

Laughably extreme religion argument I

– Religion is a cause of all war and prejudice: all religions teach nothing but conquest and intolerance

The Inquisition burning some Jezebel-Delilah-Salome-Frida Unibrow

Laughably extreme religion argument II

– Religion is a solution to all war and prejudice: all religions teach nothing but love and universal brotherhood.

Buddy Christ not burning anyone at all

An intermediate position

• Gordon Allport (1950): “Religion 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 ”

• This sounds about right, but the empirical legacy on this is muddy

Allport’s Error• A “two types of people”

theory: “intrinsic” type people vs. “extrinsic” type people

• Neither type seems all that good at unmaking prejudice

• Our explanation: the tolerant face of religion may co-arise with its intolerant face, a la yin and yang…or Jekyll and Hyde

Devotional Religiosity: The Dr. Jekyll of Religion?

• Faith, devotion to the divine, prayer

=Dr. JekyllDevotional Bush

?

Coalitional religiosity: The Mr. Hyde of Religion?

• Exclusivity, authoritarianism, dogmatism, fundamentalism

=Mr. HydeCoalitional Bush

?

Typical correlations between devotional and coalitional religiosity

Participant Variable 1 2 3 4 5 6 1. Devotion to Divine (.96) .81 .41 .61 .35 .33 2. Devotion to one’s religion (.91) .61 .74 .49 .45 3. Exclusivity (.94) .82 .57 .56 4. Fundamentalism (.93) .63 .67 5. Dogmatism (.87) .57 6. Authoritarianism (.89)

Would Dr. Jekyll be relatively pleasant company if it weren’t for

Mr. Hyde?

• The baseness so commonly charged to religion’s account are thus, almost all of them, not chargeable to religion proper, but rather to religion’s wicked practical partner, the spirit of corporate dominion. And the bigotries are most of them in their turn chargeable to religion’s wicked intellectual partner, the spirit of dogmatic dominion.

• -- William James (1982/1902, p. 337), The Varieties of Religious Experience

“Wicked” = “fit for natural selection”?

Jekyll and Hyde as two complementary processes of adaptive ingroup favoritism

• Devotional religiosity: aids the imaginative expansion of the boundary of moral inclusion

• Coalitional religiosity: aids the pragmatic hardening of the boundary of moral exclusion

• Both processes complementary, but very different—and when isolated from each other may predict very different things.

22.5

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55.5

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not devoted

devoted

Coalitional attitude not controlled:(more devoted also more coalitional)

Why the religion and prejudice literature is an inconclusive mess

Split sample of 194 Canadian students into the most devoted half and the least devoted half, 97 “devoted” and 97 “not devoted”

No difference in intolerance or violence

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So is the empirical psychology of religion doomed to be null result-ridden contradictory useless garbage?

Disentangling Jekyll from Hyde

22.5

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Coalitional attitude controlled

Split the sample in half a different way. This time divide it by their scores on this formula: devotional – coalitional [mean(divine devotion+intrinsic religiosity)-mean(authoritarianism+dogmatism+fundamentalism+exclusivity)]

Split this way, the more devoted are less intolerant and less violent

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What about the Middle East?

Baruch Goldstein Mahmud Muhamad Shaldan

Similar pattern among Palestinians

Odds of supporting “martyrdom operations”

Pray 5 times a day vs. never pray

1.38 : 1 equal odds

Attend mosque 5 times a day vs. only religious festivals

2.11 : 1 double odds

Similar pattern among Israeli settlers

PRAY NO PRIME SYNAGOGUE

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Percentage of settlers who believed that Baruch Goldstein’s 1994 massacre of Palestinians was “extremely heroic” as a function of prime.

Similar pattern across the globe

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Predicting religious scapegoating

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Pray regularly

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Not exclusivist

Exclusivist

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Effect of prayer Effect of exclusivity

Effect of organized attendance

Independent relationship of religion variables to war and oppression

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Prayer (devotion) and exclusivity (coalition) make opposite predictions

Independent relationship of religion variables to war and oppression

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Caveat! Religious attendance (coalitional) predicts peace and freedom as well or better than prayer (devotional)!

Does religious attendance have sociologically redeeming features? Can it be considered a kind of constructive collective action?

So…devotional and coalitional religiosity are intertwined

Coalitional religiosity

Devotional religiosity

But they make opposite predictions about religious intolerance and

support for violence

Devotional religiosity

Coalitional religiosity

Predicts intolerance

Predicts tolerance

So pray that Bush listens to God more…

…and listens to Dick and Rummy less