D E V O T I O N A L U N I T Y A N D C O A L I T I O N A L D I V I S I O N : H O W R E L I G I O N P L A Y S B O T H J E K Y L L A N D H Y D E T O R E L I G I O U S T O L E R A N C E by I A N H A N S E N B . A . , Swarthmore College, 1996 M . A . , University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign, 2002 A THESIS S U B M I T T E D LN P A R T I A L F U L F I L L M E N T O F T H E R E Q U I R E M E N T S F O R T H E D E G R E E O F D O C T O R O F P H I L O S O P H Y in T H E F A C U L T Y O F G R A D U A T E S T U D I E S (Psychology) T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F B R I T I S H C O L U M B I A June 2007 © Ian Hansen, 2007 A b s t r a c t The psychological construct of religiousness or religiosity (e.g. intrinsic religiosity, belief in God, devotion to the Divine) is empirically very closely related to rigidity-related psychological constructs (e.g. authoritarianism, fundamentalism, dogmatism). Both religious and rigidity-related constructs are also related to devotional religious behavior like regular prayer, as well as to participation in the organized structure of religion (e.g. attendance at organized religious services). This empirical confluence of attitudes and behaviors suggests a coherent unitary "religious package". However, the co-occurring attitudes and behaviors in the religious package may be distinguished into two broad classes by what they independently predict about religious intolerance. The general finding across both cross-cultural and experimental studies is that religiosity itself—composed of 'devotional' religiosity variables—is an independent positive predictor of religious tolerance and the rejection of religious violence, while religious attendance and rigidity variables—both categorized as 'coalitional r igidity '— are independent negative predictors. This analysis presents religion as a Janus-faced phenomenon, whereby a unitary assemblage of constructs can nevertheless have the potential to predict two opposite outcomes. I propose an evolutionary explanation for the apparent Janus-faced nature of religion. Coalitional rigidity may be related to adaptive boundary-setting processes between self and not-self. The devotional processes of religion, though less likely to be adaptive, may be related to pro-social cooperation and moral inclusion that is adaptive when tempered by coalitional limits. i i i T a b l e o f C o n t e n t s Abstract i i Table of Contents i i i List of Tables vi List of Figures .' : v i i Acknowledgements v i i i Dedication . ix Co-Authorship Statement x Chapter 1. Religion as One Thing 1 1.1. Introduction 1 1.2. The One Thing Perspective on Religion 9 1.3. Evolutionary Explanations of Religion ; 10 1.4. Terror Management Explanations of Religion ; 13 1.5. Religion and Rigidity 15 1.6. Differences Between Logical and Empirical "Sameness" 18 1.7. Cracks in the "One Thing" View 20 1.8. Lines, Trianges, Hexagons and Color Wheels 25 1.9. Conclusion .27 Chapter 2. Religion as Two Things '. 29 2.1. Introduction , 29 2.2. Spirit vs. Letter, Dao vs. Ritual : 30 2.3. Ambiguities in the "Two Thing" View 32 2.4. Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Religiosity 33 2.5. 'Religion Itself vs. Intellectual and Dogmatic Dominion 35 2.6. Religious Devotion and Coalitional Rigidity: Religion as Janus-Faced ....37 2.7. Conclusion .- .. 41 Chapter 3. Empirical Test: Scapegoating, War and Oppression in 10 Nations 44 3.1. Introduction 44 3.2. Overview of Study and Specific Hypotheses 44 3.3. Method , 45 3.4. Results '. :.49 3.5. Discussion , ; 55 Chapter 4. Empirical Test: Religious Intolerance in Multi-Religious Malaysia 57 •4.1. Introduction ; 57 4.2. Overview of Study and Specific Hypotheses ..58 4.3. Method : 59 4.4. Results 63 iv 4.5. Discussion 1497 Chapter 5. Empirical Test: Religious Intolerance and Support for Violence in Mul t i -Religious Canada •. 68 5.1. Introduction 68 5.2. Overview of Study and Specific Hypotheses 68 5.3. Method.. . , .' 69 5.4. Results :70 5.5. Discussion 74 Chapter 6. Analysis: How Y o u Believe or What Y o u Believe? The Case of Christians and Buddhists 76 6.1. Introduction ._...76 6.2. Overview of Study and Specific Hypotheses 78 6.3. Method : 79 6.4. Results 81 6.5. Discussion 83 6.6. Supplementary Analysis—Religious Idenification 84 6.7. General Discussion 86 Chapter 7. Empirical Test: Religious Devotion, Coalitional Rigidity aand Religious Intolerance Among Mormons , 88 7.1. Introduction 88 7.2. Overview of Study and Specific Hypotheses 89 7.3. Method 90 7.4. Results .' .'. 92 7.5. Discussion . 94 Chapter 8. Experiment: Priming God-esteem vs. Self-esteem and Group-esteem 96 8.1. Introduction 96 8.2. Overview of Study and Specific Hypotheses 100 8.3. Method : 101 8.4. Results .104 8.5. Discussion 108 Chapter 9. Summary and Proposed Evolutionary Theoretical Framework I l l 9.1. Summary of the Findings < I l l 9.2. A n Evolutionary Paradigm for Religious Intolerance 112 9.3. Distinguishing Modes of Prejudice and Intolerance: General, Cultural and Religious 116 V 9.4. Explaining the Negative Relationship Between Religious Devotion and Religious Intolerance 120 9.5. Conclusion: What Do We Do Now?. . . . 126 References 130 Appendix A . Sample Items from Religious Devotion and Coalitional Rigidity Scales . 145 Appendix B . Descriptive Summary of the Passage Adapted from Martel (2002) 147 Appendix C. Intolerance Scales 148 Appendix D . Pacifist Essay 151 V I L i s t o f T a b l e s Table 3 . 1 . Rankings and means of theism, exclusivity and scapegoating in each religious group 5 3 Table 3 . 2 . Rankings and means of theism, exclusivity and scapegoating i n each nation. 5 4 Table 4 . 1 . Rankings and means of religious devotion, coalitional rigidity and religious intolerance in each religious group 66 Table 5 . 1 . Rankings and means of religious devotion, coalitional rigidity and religious intolerance in each religious group 7 3 Table 7 . 1 . Rankings and means of religious devotion, fundamentalism and religious intolerance ("Int.") in Mormons (at B Y U ) and Christians, Buddhists and the Nonreligious (at U B C ) : : 9 5 L i s t o f F i g u r e s Figure 3.1. Separate binary logistic regressions with theism and rigid exclusivity independently predicting the odds (OR) of endorsing religious scapegoating, by religion : 50 Figure 3.2. Prediction of regular prayer and rigid exclusivity, by demographics suggestive of war and oppression 52 Figure 4.1. Separate multiple regressions with religious devotion and coalitional rigidity independently predicting religious intolerance, by religion 65 Figure 5.1. Separate multiple regressions with religious devotion and coalitional rigidity independently predicting religious intolerance, by religion 72 Figure 8.1. Estimated marginal means of preference for anti-war essay, controlling for esteem, by condition : 106 Figure 8.2 Estimated marginal means on authoritarianism and political intolerance when controlling for esteem, by condition 107 V l l l A c k n o w l e d g e m e n t s This research has been supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada grant (410-2004-0197), and a Ki l l am Pre-doctoral Fellowship. Many thanks to my advisor, Ara Norenzayan, who has been a constant source of support, encouragement and good advice. I also thank Mark Schaller, Jonathan Schooler, Peter Suedfeld, Del Paulhus, Kevin Will iams and the culture and cognition lab for comments on earlier versions of studies that make up this thesis. I thank Ivy Leung for compiling the references on very short notice. I also wish to thank the following people who helped to conduct these studies or otherwise made them possible: Abdul-Lateef Abdullah, Rohani Abdullah, Juhaidi Yean Abdullah, Tessa Amundson, Su'ad Awab, Eleanor Chow, Courtney Edgar, Cuiping Gan, Benjamin Gibbons, L in Gu , Sophia Khan, Neewern Khoo, K i m Koh , Albert Lee, Susan L i n , Michael Mackay, Trish Mullen, Norzaliana Mat Nuri , John Rector, Tee Ridhuan, Sheldon Solomon, Suellen Teh, Claudia Vexelman, Sophie Vauthier, Stephanie Young, and all participants. Address correspondence to Ian Hansen, Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, 2136 West M a l l , Vancouver, B C , Canada V 6 T 1Z4, email: ix D e d i c a t i o n To everyone in the acknowledgements and to all my friends and family of course, but also... To Martin Buber (1878 - 1965), Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (1922-2007), and everyone they had compassion for (which was everyone). Buber was one. of the finest atheist-loving theists to inhabit this frequently kind and generous planet. Vonnegut was one of the finest theist-loving atheists to inhabit this frequently vicious and horrific planet. Buber wrote one of the truest things I've ever read about God: [God] is the most heavy-laden of all human words. None has become so soiled, so mutilated. Just for this reason I may not abandon it. Generations of men have laid the burden of their anxious lives upon this word and weighed it to the ground; it lies in the dust and bears their whole burden. The races of man with their religious factions have torn the word to pieces; they have killed for it and died for it, and it bears their finger-marks and their blood. Where might I find a word like it to describe the highest! If I took the purest, most sparkling concept from the inner treasure-chamber of the philosophers, I could only capture thereby an unbinding product of thought. I could not capture the presence of H i m whom the generations of men have honored and degraded with their awesome living and dying. I do indeed mean H i m whom the hell-tormented and heaven-storming generations of men mean. Certainly, they draw caricatures and write 'God ' underneath; they murder one another and say ' in God's name.' But when all madness and delusion fall to dust, when they stand over against H i m in the loneliest darkness and no longer say "He, He ' but rather sigh 'Thou, ' shout 'Thou' , all of them the one word, and when they then add 'God ' , is it not the real God whom they all implore, the One Liv ing God, the God of the children of man? Vonnegut wrote one of the truest things I've ever read about life generally: "So it goes." Neither of them owned stock in Halliburton. X C o - a u t h o r s h i p S t a t e m e n t I am the primary author on all the work presented in this thesis. The research was conducted in collaboration with my research supervisor Ara Norenzayan (with the study in Chapter 7 conducted in collaboration with Sheldon Solomon and John Rector). I played the primary role in designing the research, conducting the research, and analyzing the data. I played the primary role in writing the material of this thesis. 1 C h a p t e r 1 : R e l i g i o n A s O n e T h i n g 1 .1 . I n t r o d u c t i o n "Religious tolerance" is a relatively uncontroversial positive value in the contemporary world, a value that many i f not most people would claim to support. Certainly it should be possible to convince people of the virtues of religious tolerance i f one makes vivid enough to them the potential horrors of its absence. Most people do not want to suffer death, torture, imprisonment, oppression, discrimination or harassment for their beliefs. The widespread adoption of claims to tolerance in the contemporary world may reflect a relatively recent global progression towards what Kohlberg (1976) called the postconventional stage of moral reasoning. More circumspectly, one may say that the values that postconventional reasoners tend to manifest have won out ideologically over the values that conventional.reasoners tend to manifest. Postconventional moral reasoning depends on abstract principles like those that guide concepts like "human rights" rather than on blind conformist obedience to the moral conventions of one's religion or culture. Kohlberg, himself raised in Western culture, found what he called postconventional reasoning to be most evident in Western cultures (Shweder, 1991). If this "moral progress" view of contemporary tolerance-endorsement is correct, the implications are not trivial. Since the world has grown smaller largely on Western terms, the widespread approval of religious tolerance as a virtue (if not as a reliable cultural practice) may be due primarily to Western political, economic and military hegemony. 2 While I w i l l discuss Kohlberg specifically in Chapter 8, this thesis is in part an argument against the general idea that an inclination to religious tolerance is the privileged domain of those who identify with or adopt the reasoning style celebrated by Western liberalism. I wi l l argue rather that religious tolerance and intolerance are potentially universal psychological inclinations, and are empirically related to fundamental features of both what-is-called liberalism and what-is-called conservatism. I w i l l further argue that religious tolerance and intolerance are not respecters of religion. A l l religions are composed, interpreted and enacted by large groups of human beings with the normal distribution of psychological features that large groups of human beings have. Thus all religions have the potential to be religiously tolerant and intolerant. While claims to religious tolerance may be more prevalent in the contemporary world, religious intolerance—manifest not only as discrimination but as war, occupation, and genocide—are still relatively commonplace in the human community. Many human beings and human institutions endorse and manifest religious intolerance, and support religiously intolerant laws, policies and social arrangements. Those of us who hold that religious intolerance is harmful generally discuss this social psychological phenomenon . as an unfortunate problem to be solved. We are less likely to treat religious intolerance as a fact of human social psychology that can shed light on the processes that shape human cognition and behavior generally. Yet in fact there is good reason to treat religious intolerance as a phenomenon with as much power to illuminate as to wreak havoc. 3 "Prejudice", particularly racial prejudice, is now widely understood to be more than just an egregious blight on multi-ethnic societies, but also a matter of some curiosity, especially as psychology increasingly adopts an interest in evolutionary paradigms. Taking an evolutionary perspective often involves bracketing inclinations to assign positive or negative valence to phenomena like rape (Thornhill & Palmer, 2000) murder (Daly and Wilson, 1999) and adultery (Haselton & Gangestad, 2006), and instead inquire dispassionately, "what is it about this common phenomenon that allowed it to survive the ruthless grist of natural selection?" A number of evolution-minded researchers have begun to investigate prejudice, ingroup favoritism, and coalitional processes with such questions in mind (Park, Faulkner & Schaller, 2003; Naverette & Fessler, 2006). Religious intolerance, as a special form of prejudice that is likely related yet potentially independent of other kinds of prejudice, is also ripe for this kind of inquiry. Judging from semantic cues at least, religious intolerance ought to be in some way related to religion, which necessarily raises the question of what "religion" is. One major purpose of this thesis is to use the phenomenon of religious intolerance to better illustrate what religion is and how religion works. The phenomenon of what-is-called-"religion" arguably consists of very different things. Many would include magical thinking, belief in UFOs , belief in ESP , anthropomorphism, conspiratorial paranoia, ritual, community-spiritedness, fatalism, sense of oneness with the universe, artistic imagination, desire for immortality, quests for enlightenment, etc. as religion. Yet it is unlikely that effective measurements of all these constructs would all load on the same factor in a factor analysis. 4 Since the subject of this thesis is religious intolerance, I focus my attention on a feature of religion that should be highly relevant to intolerance, something I call "coalitional rigidity". Coalitional rigidity refers to rigid, commitment-oriented understandings of religion, morals, politics, and epistemics. These rigid understandings make salient the distinction between collective self and collective other, ingroup and outgroup. In addition to being potentially highly relevant to intolerance, coalitional rigidity is also highly correlated with what is, perhaps, the most distinctive feature of religion: belief in and devotion to the supernatural divine 1 . I call this central feature of ' religion "religious devotion." I measure religious devotion using not only face valid measures like belief in God and regular prayer, but also psychometrically more rigorous psychology of religion scales that are arguably influenced by the liberal Protestant individualist tradition in Western theology (including, inter alia, the writings of James, 1982/1902; Otto, 1917; Schliermacher, 1958; and Ti l l ich , 1957). In this tradition, true religious experience involves the subjective experience of the Divine, the Holy or the numinous (Otto, 1917), an experience that is best described in relatively abstract mystical terms but constituting something of a self-transcending experience. Moreover, true religion is experienced in individualist solitude, unmediated by the religious tradition or community in which one was raised. James (1982/1902), for instance, described religion as "the feelings, acts, and 1 To appreciate why someone might consider religious devotion the most distinctive feature of religion, consider those who define themselves in opposition to religion—atheists. Atheists generally emphasize that they do not believe in or worship God or other supernatural agents rather than emphasizing (1) that they have no firm beliefs to which they rigidly adhere, or emphasizing (2) that they reject ingroup-outgroup distinctions on religious, political, moral or epistemic matters. Atheists may be statistically more likely to reject these aspects of coalitional rigidity also, but their identity as atheists is primarily based on a rejection of belief in and devotion to the supernatural divine. , 5 experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine" (p. 31). This individualistic understanding of religion potentially contrasts with the Durkheimian tradition (e.g. Durkheim, 1915/1965), which treats religion as a thoroughgoing reorganization of agency and selfhood into an organism-like coordinated social entity. In this social entity the individual self is largely surrendered. The liberal Protestant individualist understanding also implies a universalism of spiritual experience that contrasts with the views of religious scholars like Katz (1983) who argues that the "ontological structure of each major mystical tradition is different" and thus that to talk about some kind of general or universal religious experience or devotional orientation is deeply misguided (p. 40). On empirical grounds, however, I consider these diverse conceptions of religion to be more psychologically compatible than might be imagined. Although the "religious devotion" scales in this thesis might have been written with the intention of capturing individualist theological liberalism, they are strongly positively correlated with coalitional rigidity measures, most notably authoritarianism—an oft-used measure of conservatism, and religious exclusivity—a measure of anti-universalism. Moreover, Protestants are not the most likely to score high on these scales (in fact, Muslims are as Chapter 4 wi l l show). investigating the inter-relationship of these psychological features—religious intolerance, coalitional rigidity, and religious devotion—is the main focus of this thesis. As I have described it, coalitional rigidity may not appear very religious—rather, it may 6 sound like a synonym of intolerance. B y "religious intolerance", however, I mean something more specific: expressed scapegoating, moral stigmatization, support for c ivi l rights violations, and even support for violence targeted against moral or religious outgroups and outgroup individuals, e.g. Muslims, Jews, Christians, Hindus, atheists, religious pluralists, and "the wicked". Coalitional rigidity can include hostility directed against rival religious ideas, but religious intolerance directs hostility, oppression and violence against rival religious people. Every study in this thesis measuring devotion, rigidity and intolerance wi l l show that while the empirical relationship between rigidity and intolerance might vary from orthogonal to substantial, the relationship of rigidity to devotion is always stronger. Rigidity is thus more of a religious variable (empirically speaking) than an intolerance variable. Yet rigidity does appear to be an intolerance variable of a sort: this thesis w i l l show that even when orthogonal to intolerance zero-order2, coalitional rigidity is always . an independent positive predictor of intolerance when religious devotion is held constant. As a religious variable, however, coalitional rigidity appears to be a very different inclination from religious devotion. Religious devotion is an independent negative predictor of religious intolerance when coalitional rigidity is held constant. This odd pattern of independent relationship between religious devotion, coalitional rigidity, and religious intolerance is evident in all studies in this thesis. Specifically, this thesis wi l l show (1) that across religions, cultures and contexts, devotional religiosity and coalitional rigidity are highly likely to co-occur, but (2) that 2 "Zero-order" means not controlling for any other variables when investigating the relationship, i.e. a simple correlation. 7 their co-occurrence does not mean they predict the same thing: rather they co-occur as complementary inclinations, making opposing predictions about religious intolerance and support for religious violence. The theoretical framework guiding this thesis is thus a two-things-in-one perspective on religion—religion as both Jekyll and Hyde to religious intolerance, religion as one discernible form with two discernible ways of being. The "Jekyl l" and "Hyde" of religion are not divided into different religious groups, different individuals, or different psychological "types", but rather appear to be two sides of the same inclination in all religious groups and individuals. The main goal of this thesis is to illuminate that this peculiar relationship between devotion, rigidity and intolerance exists, is meaningful, and is robust and reliable across religions, cultures, nations and methods of measurement. Secondarily the goal is to show, how these relationships may reflect an evolution-influenced origin of both religious intolerance and of the dual nature of religion with regard to intolerance. Chapters 1 and 2 wi l l review literature on religion that treats it primarily as one thing and primarily as two things, especially with regard to predicting prejudice and intolerance. Chapter 3 w i l l illustrate how, in 1 0 nations sampling all major world religions, simple belief in God and exclusivist belief that one's "God or belief is the only true God or b e l i e f are highly correlated but opposite predictors of religious scapegoating. Chapter 4 w i l l illustrate how, in multi-religious Malaysia, multi-item psychometrically sound measures of religious devotion and coalitional rigidity make opposite predictions of intolerance for a fictional religious pluralist. Chapter 5 w i l l illustrate how, in multi-religious Canada, religious devotion and coalitional rigidity measures make opposite predictions of several varieties of religious intolerance and support for religious violence. Chapter 6 w i l l illustrate how - . • 8 one's actual religious affiliation matters little for predicting intolerance relative to one's general inclinations to religious devotion and coalitional rigidity. Chapter 7 w i l l illustrate that the predictive tension between religious devotion and coalitional rigidity holds even in a sample of conservative Mormons (not multi-religious or multi-cultural). Chapter 8 wi l l illustrate how participants primed with God salience (vs. self salience or religious group salience) have a stronger preference for a pacifist essay over a stop-apologizing-get-tough essay. Those primed with God. salience are also less authoritarian and less inclined to abridge the c iv i l rights of religious others. Chapter 9 w i l l put forward an evolutionary theory of religious intolerance to explain why coalitional rigidity and religious devotion are so highly correlated and yet make opposite predictions of religious intolerance and support for religious violence. The present thesis should, metaphorically at least, vindicate Jesus' statement (Matthew 13:37-40) about the world that can be understood also as a statement about the aspects of the religious self. In this passage, Jesus says the "wheat" or "sons of the Kingdom" and the "weeds" or "sons of the evil one" are both sown together (by the Devi l according to Jesus). When "harvested by angels" however, the wheat and the weeds wi l l manifest very different natures (and meet very different fates). In this thesis, the "sown together" are not simply devotional and coalitional religious groups or devotional and coalitional individuals, but devotional and coalitional sides of any religious group or religious individual. This thesis wi l l demonstrate a cross-cultural cross-religious universality of this sown together relationship, suggesting that it is at least possible that "the Dev i l " responsible for sowing them together is natural selection. A rigidly literal reading of Jesus' words is that Jesus is making a typical religious promise-threat: a promise to save in heaven the good individuals and groups who follow the true religion and a threat to torture the evil and false individuals and groups in hell forever. Those frightened by this promise-threat might scurry to one religion or another, clinging rigidly to its apparent doctrines and authorities and railing in controlling terror against all those attempting to live decently in accordance with another religion or irreligion. Yet the upshot of Jesus' insight as reflected in this thesis is rather that all the religions and irreligions that think they are better—truer, more enlightened, more tolerant, more rational, more loving, more peaceful—than the others are in fact similar in one respect. In each of them, wheat and weeds, Jekyll and Hyde, Yang and Y i n , tolerance and intolerance, peace and war, are sown together. The angels in this thesis that harvest the wheat and. the weeds to reveal their different natures wi l l be the angels of inquiry and understanding. A n d perhaps even these angels have Jekyll and Hyde in their natures. 1.2. T h e " O n e T h i n g " V i e w o f R e l i g i o n Religion is frequently discussed as i f it were one thing. We think we mean something coherent i f we ask another person, "are you religious?" or i f we talk about the impact of "religion" on society. There are a number of expectations we tend to have about people i f we know they are "religious", and we are not accustomed to thinking much about what those expectations are based on. Our expectations are based largely on implicit statistical observance rather than knowledge of what "being religious" necessarily dictates, either for a specific religion or generally. 10 If a religious man tells us about a one-night stand he enjoyed last night, we are likely to react with shock, "What? Aren't you religious?" We may be less likely to react that way, however, i f the same religious man tells us that he got into a fist fight with someone who insulted his one night stand. This difference in shock may have absolutely no basis in knowledge of what the man's religion actually teaches—for all we know, there are more exhortations against anger-driven violence in that person's revered religious text than there are against casual sex. Many people have a relatively rich portrait of what it means to be "religious" or "irreligious" based on broad behavioral and discursive differences observed to emerge at more opposite ends of this spectrum. This common intuitive assemblage of certain phenomena as "religious" suggests that it is not preposterous to talk about religion as one thing, and indeed a number of researchers into religion are inclined to do exactly that. This chapter wi l l discuss several of these "one thing" approaches to religion. 1.3 E v o l u t i o n a r y e x p l a n a t i o n s o f r e l i g i o n One approach to religious phenomena that often treats these phenomena as broadly continuous and constitutive of one thing is the evolutionary approach. A n evolutionary approach to religion attempts to explain most religious phenomena as arising from adaptive multilevel selection (Wilson, 2002), adaptive individual selection (e.g., Sosis & Alcorta, 2003; Landau, Greenberg, & Solomon, 2004), or some invocation of individual selection that at best sees religion as an exaptation, spandrel or "byproduct" of other adaptive psychological tendencies (Atran & Norenzayan, 2004; Boyer, 2003; Guthrie, 1993). Multilevel selection explanations of religion depend on the idea that the 11 group itself can be a unit of selection, not just the individual. Individual selection explanations posit that there is some benefit to the individual in being religious—perhaps ingroup rewards from sincerely demonstrating a willingness to make altruistic sacrifices (Sosis & Alcorta, 2003), or in terms of the existential serenity that can result from religious understandings of death (Landau et al, 2004). A spandrel is a naturally selected feature of an organism that is not necessarily adaptive, but is a byproduct of some other adaptive process (Gould & Lewontin, 1979). A n exaptation is an originally nonadaptive byproduct of another adaptive feature that itself comes to serve an adaptive purpose. Whether invoking notions of mulitlevel selection or individual selection, adaptation, exaptation or spandrel, however, scientific researchers into religion increasingly consider religion "natural", in the sense that religion is rooted in ordinary human cognition and transmitted via social interactions among individuals (see Atran, 2002; Barrett, 2000; Boyer, 2001; Lawson & McCauley, 1990; Pyysiainen & Anttonen, 2002). This emphasis on the natural or organic bases of religion as being paramount is itself a departure from the previously reigning paradigm in the social sciences treating religions and cultures as primarily superorganic, i.e. brought about, maintained and developed through processes that are irreducible to individual mind/brain mechanisms. The most radical examples of such a seemingly superorganic process is Durkheim's (1915/1965) view of religion as an organizer of social life that supersedes individual psychology, and also Dawkins' (1989) famously hypothesized "meme"—a faithfully self-replicating unit of information, analogous to yet fully independent from the gene. Indeed, religious and cultural changes (perhaps including the apparent genesis of culture and religion itself) appear to have some degree of independence from genetic changes, yet the .12 afore-mentioned research into the natural origins of religion is accumulating evidence that religious thought and behavior are shaped by psychological inclinations rooted in natural selection. Even explanations of religious belief that highlight cultural transmission of religious information often make reference to natural memory biases. These biases make some patterns (e.g. a small set of minimally counterintuitive items combined with a larger set of intuitive items) more likely to be transferred from mind to mind than others (Norenzayan, Atran, Faulkner & Schaller, 2006). Such cultural explanations of religion are still primarily natural, however, in that they recognize natural limits which define the contours of the epidemiological spread of religious ideas. This difference between a primarily natural vs. a primarily superorganic understanding of religion has some consequences for whether religious phenomena are considered "one thing" or not. To the extent religion as we know it is mostly natural, it is more likely to be manifest as a coherent package, since the co-occurrence of religious phenomena should be far from arbitrary or contingent i f they emerge—even as spandrels—from the developmental embodiment of what is coded in the genes. To the extent religion is primarily superorganic, however, then whether "believes in supernatural deities" is paired with "doesn't approve of casual sex" should be somewhat arbitrary and easily revised. One should, in principle, be able to use mass media and others tools of cultural indoctrination to propagate a culture in which supernatural belief and casual sex go together on the one hand, while atheism and sexual conservatism go together on the other. 13 The range of anthropological variation in religiosity, while broad, is defined enough to speak against considering either atheist phenomena or religious phenomena cultural accidents that consciously-directed cultural manipulation can re-arrange very easily. Anthropologically-speaking, there is a near universality of 1) belief in supernatural agents who 2) relieve existential anxieties such as death and deception, but 3) demand passionate and self-sacrificing social commitments, which are 4) validated through emotional ritual (Atran & Norenzayan, 2004). There are salient similarities to be found between even the most radically divergent cultures and religions (Norenzayan & Heine, 2005). There are even traces of ritual, cooperative and self-sacrificing behavior in the animal kingdom (Burkert, 1996). A l l this suggests that religion, for all its variation, may contain a common scaffolding ultimately rooted in the slow processes of evolution by natural selection. Considered from this perspective, religion appears to be, i f not one thing, at least a collection of things with a one thing-like gestalt. 1.4 T e r r o r M a n a g e m e n t E x p l a n a t i o n s o f R e l i g i o n Another view of religion that treats it primarily as one thing is Terror Management Theory (TMT) (Solomon, Greenberg, Schimel, Arndt, & Pyszczynski, 2004). While loosely evolutionary, Terror Management explanations of religion are primarily drawn from a combination of psychoanalytic and existentialist theoretical models, especially those of Ernest Becker (1973). Becker himself wrote that, "Culture means that which is supernatural" (Becker, 1975, p. 64). Thus T M T treats religion and coalitional culture as being largely the same thing—a system of meaning by which we make sense of and feel embedded in the world we live in. The theory claims that 14 religion-culture arises as a defense against the threat to our self-esteem that we experience due to our subconscious terror at the fact of our inevitable deaths. A s humans, we all have the "tragedy of cognition", the understanding that one day we wi l l die and the life that we now consider significant and meaningful w i l l no longer be significant or meaningful because it has expired. According to T M T , this awareness presents a psychological problem to be solved, and we solve it by bolstering our cultural-religious worldview. Experimentally, T M T has demonstrated repeatedly that people manifest a number of often unsavory defensive reactions when salience of death is activated in the subconscious. This includes giving excessive hot sauce to worldview-threatening others (McGregor, Lieberman, Greenberg, Solomon, Arndt, Simon & Pyszczynski, 1998), increased sympathy for white racists among white people (Greenberg et al, 2001), increased support for George Bush more as a "charismatic" presidential candidate among American college students (Landau et al, 2004), and increased willingness to become a shahid (martyr) or suicide attacker among Iranian students (Pyszczynski et al, 2006). T M T treats religious belief, cultural belief, self-esteem assertion, and prejudice as all being largely the same at least insofar as they are all derived from the same source: fear of the terrifying meaningless of our inevitable demise. A perhaps unfair parody of the T M T view is "everything is all about death", with "religion" being just another one of the many aspects of "everything". It is true, however, that when so many diverse proclivities are thought to be explained by a single, motivational phenomenon, there is little reason to look for the nuances or internal tensions in any of these proclivities, 15 including in religion. Yet perhaps, at least as far as religion is concerned, the nuances or internal tensions are also difficult to empirically detect. There may be aspects of religion that are so empirically bound together that one can be excused for considering them the same thing. 1.5 Religion and Rigidity One example of conceptually different phenomena that are difficult to untangle empirically are religious devotion and religious rigidity. There is an abundance of evidence to suggest that measures of religious devotion like intrinsic religiosity (inward, personally felt and sincere religious belief, Allport & Ross, 1967) and Christian Orthodoxy (acceptance of most of the propositions of the Nicene Creed, Fullerton & Hunsberger, 1982) are strongly related to variables indicative of rigidity on moral, political and psychological dimensions, a rigidity known more charitably as "conservatism." (Jost et al, 2003). Rigidity encompasses constructs such as dogmatism, authoritarianism, and fundamentalism, all of which are found more among the religiously affiliated than the unaffiliated, and more among those religiously devoted than those who are not (Altemeyer, 1981, 1988, 1996; Duck & Hunsberger, 1999; Kahoe, 1975; Kahoe & Meadow, 1977; Watson, Sawyers, Morris, Carpenter, Jimenez, Jonas & Washington, 2003). Moreover, there is a strong heritability aspect both to conservative rigidity and to religiosity (Koenig & Bouchard, 2006), though it is unclear whether the correlation between conservative rigidity and religiosity is itself genetic. The relationship between psychometrically coherent religion measures and rigidity measures is so strong that it is 1 6 perhaps no wonder that some people treat these aspects of religion as being the same thing. This identification of religiosity and rigidity is especially evident in the contemporary writings of "The New Atheists" (Wolf, 2007). The New Atheist movement is fuelled primarily by the writings of philosopher Daniel Dennett, biologist Richard Dawkins, neuroscience student Sam Harris, and, more recently, polemicist Christopher Hitchens. In New Atheist writings, dogmatic rigidity and supernatural belief are discussed interchangeably. New Atheists are thus generally inclined to dismiss the claim that some of the more body count-heavy events of the 20 t h Century—Stalin's purges; Pol Pot's kil l ing fields, etc—were carried out by people either without a clear religious affiliation, or with an explicitly anti-religious stance. Since supernatural belief and rigid dogmatism are both religion, then even when dogmatism is more evident in a mass ki l l ing movement than supernatural belief, "religion" is still to blame. In fact, precisely by blaming religion for the wars in the world, especially blame of specific religions like Islam, New Atheist writings can often manifest both religious intolerance •and support, implicit or explicit, for religious violence. Harris (2004) writes, for instance, What w i l l we do i f an Islamist regime, which grows dewy-eyed at the mere mention of paradise, ever acquires long-range nuclear weaponry? If history is any guide, we wi l l not be sure about where the offending warheads are or what their state of readiness is, and so we wi l l be unable to rely on targeted, conventional weapons to destroy them. In such a situation, the only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own. Needless to say, this would be 17 an unthinkable crime - as it would k i l l tens of millions of innocent civilians in a single day - but it may be the only course of action available to us, given what Islamists believe (p. 123). . Harris also notes pointedlythat "the very ideal of religious tolerance-born of the notion that every human being should be free to believe whatever he wants about God-is one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss" (Harris, 2004, p. 15). • B y his own admission, Harris is opposed to religious tolerance and sees potential necessity in deploying pre-emptive nuclear strikes that would k i l l tens of millions of Mus l im civilians. In spite of this admission, and in spite of the fact that communism and fascism built many more gulags and concentration camps than places of worship, Sam Harris suggests that support for Nazi and Stalinist-style religious intolerance and mass kil l ing was inherently religious: One of the most conspicuous problems with communism and fascism is that they are so similar to religions. These political ideologies are systems of brittle, divisive, and dehumanizing dogmatism. And they regularly give rise to personality cults which evince all the perverse features of religious hero-worship. (Harris, 2007)" There is something that rings true about this characterization of fascism especially, and communism in its most totalitarian manifestations, but there is also something bludgeoningly obtuse about calling everything that is dogmatic and rigid "religious." Should open-minded pacifist social reformers who have claimed religious allegiance— 18 Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, Martin Luther K ing Jr. and Aung Sun Suu Kyi—thus be considered non-religious? To clarify whether or not it is appropriate to consider religious devotion and rigidity the same thing, the notion of "the same thing" itself needs further examination. 1.6 D i f f e r e n c e s b e t w e e n l o g i c a l a n d e m p i r i c a l " s a m e n e s s " To have a "one thing" view of religion, you must treat all of the co-occuring manifestations of religion as "the same thing." The notion of "the same thing"4s an important notion to be precise about. To say that A is the same thing as B logically implies that A = B . In empirical social science, however, "the same thing" means something considerably looser, and is based not on absolute identity but on correlation. In empirical social science the items of a scale are considered to measure "the same thing" i f they are sufficiently intercorrelated with each other, even i f they are logically or phenomenologically different. Likewise, two summary scales are considered to be "the same thing" i f they are correlated highly enough, say around .7 or .8. Often, correlations even lower than this are tolerated as "same thing" correlations i f there is enough theoretical connection between the items or scales being correlated. Phenomena that social scientists consider "the same thing" wi l l have different rules of equality than wi l l phenomena that logicians consider "the same thing". B y the "same thing" rules of a logician, i f A = B , and B = C then A = C. This is guaranteed by the pure logic principle of transitivity. B y the "same thing" rules of an empirical social scientist, however, i f A = B and B = C then it is quite possible that through a process of correlational imprecision, A might fail to equal C. In fact, A may even equal ~ C . 19 Paradoxes in transitivity can indicate more than just measurement error and statistical shenanigans. They can illustrate rather that two phenomena tend to occur together and yet employ opposing processes that facilitate opposing outcomes. If A positively independently predicts B and B positively independently predicts C, but A negatively independently predicts C , then it is possible that A and B are co-occuring phenomena that have opposing relationships to C. It is not preposterous or impossible to imagine such phenomena. Two clapping hands tend to occur together, and yet one hand speeds left and the other hand speeds right. It is physically possible to have one hand moving in the clapping motion in just one direction by itself, and the consequences of left movement vs. right movement can be quite contrastable, especially i f there is an angry pirate to your right and a mere pifiata to your left. However, generally when people move their left hand toward the right in a clapping motion, they tend to move their right hand to the left also in an opposing motion in order to make the clap. This is a very banal example of co-occurring opposing processes, but to the extent more interesting social science phenomena exist according to these principles, it is better to illuminate and understand them than to ignore them and dismiss them. One important example of correlated but opposing processes from the literature of personality and social psychology is the complex relationship between self-esteem, narcissism, and aggression. A l l aspects of self esteem are positively correlated with narcissism (Bushman & Baumeister, 1998; Kirkpatrick, Waugh, Valencia & Weber, 2002), but self esteem and narcissism make potentially opposite predictions regarding aggression. The aspect of self-esteem related to perceived social support is an independent negative predictor of aggression when narcissism is controlled, while 20 narcissism itself positively predicts such aggression (Kirkpatrick et al., 2002). This example illustrates how a pair of distinct constructs like narcissism and self esteem might be considered one thing because of the strong correlations between them. And yet the view of narcissism and self esteem as one thing can be challenged by certain anomalies in their relationship like their divergent prediction of aggression. 1.7 C r a c k s i n t h e " o n e t h i n g " v i e w o f r e l i g i o n There are also interesting anomalies in evolution of religion research, terror management research, and research into religiosity and rigidity as they relate to prejudice. A l l of these anomalies illuminate cracks in a "one thing" view of religion. In evolution of religion, there are very different explanations offered for the supernatural belief aspect of religion and the more coalitional aspect of religion that is presumably related to religious rigidity. Belief in supernatural agents is largely.attributed to "spandrel"-like variations on otherwise adaptive mechanisms unique to humans. One hypothesis is that humans have an overactive agency detection mechanism that w i l l attribute agency to non-agentic events (false positives) in order to preventthe more hazardous potentiality of false negatives (Atran & Norenzayan, 2004; Boyer, 2003; Guthrie, 1993; Sperber, 1996). That is we have a general cognitive bias towards mistakenly attributing purposeful agency than towards mistakenly not attributing agency. This is because the consequences of not attributing agency (say to a lion rustling the leaves) can be quite grave. This bias, combined with our general cognitive fluidity (Mithen, 1999), which allows us to entertain counterfactual worlds in elaborate detail and to be aware of our inevitable mortality, might lead us to spinning emotionally compelling supernatural narratives out of 21 existentially relevant "efficient cause" events that activate our easily-activated agency detection mechanisms. There is also evidence that humans remember, and communicate more reliably, minimally counterintuitive ideas (or ideas inconsistent with folk epistemological systems) provided they are contained in larger narratives that are largely folk knowledge consistent (Atran & Norenzayan, 2004; Boyer, 2003). This is an explanation driven more by theories of how ideas spread (Sperber, 1996) rather than to claims about the adaptive value of those ideas. The more coalitional aspects of human religious behavior are often discussed in non-supernatural, non-perceptive, more broadly social terms. Coalitions may be the social result of more specialized psycho-behavioral adaptations that allow humans to live and cooperate in groups. (Kurzban & Neuberg, 2005; Navarette & Fessler, 2005). Kirkpatrick (1999, 2005, 2006) and Wilson (2002) discuss an evolutionary theory of coalitions in a more explicitly religious context, and Kirkpatrick (1999) specifically mentions authoritarianism and fundamentalism as psychological proclivities that may enable coalition-building. Kirkpatrick and Wilson differ over whether they consider coalitional religion an adaptation, with Wilson positing religions as an example of multi-level selection—i.e. as ways of enhancing group fitness, and Kirkpatrick (2006) treating coalitional psychology as simply one aspect of what gets called "religion", and not a central enough aspect to singlehandedly resolve the question of whether religion in general is adaptive. Other evolutionary theorists of religion speak not only about coalitions per se but about hard-to-fake ingroup commitments and altruistic self-sacrifice generally. They explain the coalitional aspect of religious psychology in terms of the group benefits that accrue to those who make costly signals to the group of their 22 willingness to sacrifice (Sosis & Alcorta, 2003) as well as in terms of the genetically adaptive benefits of sacrificing oneself to protect genetically related kin (Atran, 2002; Atran & Norenzayan, 2004). In none of these explanations is it clear, however, why exactly the inclination to overdetect agency or remember ideas that run minimally counter to folk epistemology should be so likely to co-occur with coalitional psychological mechanisms. Atran & Norenzayan (2004) speak of the whole complex phenomenon of religion as a canalization of mechanisms that can range from the relatively adaptive to the relatively spandrelish. Yet it is not clear what has driven this canalization: both the likely spandrelish mechanisms (belief in and devotion to supernatural agency) and the more potentially adaptive mechanisms (inclination to coalitional psychology) vary tremendously in most human populations—especially prosperous well-educated populations. Also , to the extent they vary the presence (or absence) of one is highly likely to occur with the presence (or absence) of the other3. A n evolutionary explanation of religion—even one that concluded that the complex phenomenon of religion was not an adaptation in all or any respects—would still have to account for two things (1) how both very religious and non-religious people ( can be genetically successful, and (2) why religious inclinations of such different character—supernatural belief and coalitional rigidity—are so likely to co-occur 3 Kirkpatrick (2006) notes that variation in religiosity calls into question whether religiosity is adaptive, or irreligiosity is adaptive or both under different circumstances. The most important question may not be "is X (vs. - X ) adaptive for everyone under all circumstances" but rather, "for what individuals under what circumstances is X adaptive; and for what individuals under what circumstances is - X adaptive?" It is notable, for instance, that first borns are considerably more religious and rigid than last borns (Sulloway, 1996). It is not entirely implausible that the chances of successful genetic reproduction are increased for first-borns if they are religious and rigid, and increased for last-borns if they are not. This is, at least, a testable hypothesis. 23 individual by individual (assuming they co-occur in most i f not all religio-cultural milieus). In any case, the fact that certain aspects of religion are more likely to be explained as spandrels and others as adaptations represents a serious crack in the "one thing" view of religion, even i f these aspects co-occur empirically. Cracks in the "one thing" view of religion are also evident in recent investigations using the terror management paradigm. It is notable for one thing that the terror management notion of "cultural worldview" is bound up in "self-esteem", which implies a more individual-based notion of identification. Yet it is also bound up in ingroup-outgroup dynamics, which imply a more extendedly social kind of identification. More recently, mortality salience has also been found to induce a greater inclination to religious and supernatural belief, including culturally alien beliefs like belief in Buddha and in Shamanic Spirits by predominantly Christian religious samples (Norenzayan & Hansen, 2006). Others found that worldview defensiveness under mortality salience was eliminated either i f participants were promised literal immortality (Dechesne et al, 2003), or i f they scored high on religious devotion (measured as intrinsic religiosity) (Jonas & Fischer, 2007). Together these findings suggest that mortality salience can both induce and be moderated by a more unlimited kind of identification with the supernatural, identification that actually pushes at the limits of bounded identification itself. These three levels of identification—with the individual self, with the group, and with the unbounded supernatural divine—are probably in tension with each other. The altruistic-seeming self-sacrifice that can characterize a more coalitional identity is not easily reconciled with the individual concerns that motivate self-esteem striving, 24 consumer greed, and other self-serving biases found either to be increased by mortality salience or to moderate the usual effects of mortality salience (e.g. Pyszczynski et al, 2004). Moreover, the bounded and potentially Other-hostile nature of both threatened individual identity and threatened social identity are in tension with the more transcendent kind of identification potentially implied by belief in the supernatural divine. Yet these three distinctive identification effects can be stimulated by the same efficient cause: mortality salience. It is possible that what level of self one identifies with more strongly under mortality salience may be largely related to what level of self is made saliently available at that time. If we are to call all three levels of self "religion" or "cultural worldview" because of the potential of mortality salience to stimulate all of them, then this introduces rather gaping cracks into the idea of religion or worldview as one coherent thing. Religion and worldview in this understanding may be manifested either as self-assertion, group-assertion or God-assertion, but these are arguably three rather distinct assertions, and the assertion of each level of self may have distinct consequences for intolerance (as I w i l l explore in Chapter 8). v Finally, in research on religion, rigidity and prejudice, cracks have also appeared such that while religiosity and rigidity independently predict each other, and rigidity and prejudice independently predict each other, religiosity and prejudice tend to have a tremendously variable zero-order relationship, and indeed this relationship appears to be negative when rigidity is held constant (Laythe et al, 2001; Kirpatrick, 1993). If this negative independent relationship between religious devotion and prejudice is not a 25 statistical artifact, it has potentially profound implications'^ It makes religion, rigidity and prejudice look something like a game of rock-paper-scissors. 1.8 L i n e s , t r i a n g l e s , h e x a g o n s a n d c o l o r w h e e l s The game of rock paper scissors—where rock beats scissors, scissors beats paper, and paper beats rock—is a simple but counterintuitive game that we usually have to suspend some disbelief while playing. We are generally inclined to believe that chains of decreasing potency should not circle around on themselves. The rock paper scissors game may be considered one kind of incomprehensible triangle—an incomprehensible triangle of conquest, since the chain of conquest does not work in a linear way. With regard to chains of conquest, simply having a triangular—or generally polygonal— relationship of conquest rather than a linear one makes the triangle incomprehensible. With regard to religiosity-rigidity-prejudice, the triangle in question is a triangle of cause, or at least of inter-relationship. These relational triangles can be either "comprehensible": i.e. self-reinforcing or self-stabilizing triangles, or they can be "incomprehensible", where following a chain of inter-relationships between nodes wi l l lead you eventually to a node that is directly opposed to one that relationally preceded it. If we compare, say, conservative Texas and liberal Sweden, we can imagine that there are two comprehensible triangles of attitudes and behavioral inclinations at opposite poles of an ideological-religious divide. Conservative Texans have a reputation for being (1) religious, (2) rigid and (3) violent, intolerant and prejudiced. Liberal Swedes have a reputation for being (1) irreligious, (2) open and flexible, and (3) pacific, tolerant and 26 opposed to prejudice. Understood this way, there appears to be a gaping chasm between the triangle for conservative Texans and the triangle for liberal Swedes. If research by Kirkpatrick (1993) and Laythe et al (2001) is not a result of statistical artifact, then perhaps instead of being arranged into two comprehensible triangles separated by a line across a gaping chasm, it is perhaps more apt to conceive of these six points of liberalism-conservatism as being on a hexagon. The logic of this hexagon may not be the logic of black vs. white—a linear divide between opposite poles—but rather the logic of another well-known hexagon:.the hexagon of complementary colors (blue vs. orange, red vs. green, yellow vs. purple). If the color hexagon is arranged in rainbow order, it should go, say, blue-green-yellow-orange-red-purple. In like manner, a liberal-conservative hexagon may run as follows: irreligious, flexible, tolerant, religious, rigid, intolerant. This is certainly a more complex portrait of religion than one would get i f taking a religion-as-one-thing view. Wi th a color wheel view, it is still possible to conceive of a liberal-conservative divide, but it would be just one of several ways of conceptually dividing the hexagon. It is possible to conceptually cleave this hypothetical hexagon between a religious-rigid-intoleraht triangle and a tolerant, flexible, irreligious triangle, but it is just as possible to cleave it between a tolerant-religious-rigid triangle and an intolerant-irreligious-flexible triangle, or between a flexible-tolerant-religious triangle and a rigid-intolerant-irreligious triangle. In addition to Texas vs. Sweden think also Mother Teresa vs. Christopher Hitchens 4, or Mohandas 4 Christopher Hitchens is a popular columnist and former leftist who has been a major op-ed voice, supporting the War in Iraq since 2003, and who has cultivated a reputation for anti-religious hostility, especially hostility towards Islam and Muslims. With regard to Mother Theresa, Christopher Hitchens has repeatedly attacked her for, among other things, supporting rigid, conservative Catholic dogmas (see Hitchens, 2003). These accusations, even if all true, are not allegations of her supporting wars that result in • 2 7 Gandhi vs. Winston Churchill . The idea of there being such a polygonal relationship between apparently incompatible values has some empirical precedent. Schwartz's (1992) work on values also posits a polygonal relationship between apparently incompatible values and attitudes, a polygonal conception that allows for rather effective prediction of the clusters of cultural difference in attitudes across many countries in the world (Schwartz & Boehnke, 2004). 1.9 C o n c l u s i o n Overall, the evidence for a "one thing" view of religion appears to be mixed. If we confine "religious" phenomena to supernatural belief and devotion and dogmatic rigidity on existential and moral matters, then indeed these religious phenomena tend to co-occur psychologically (at least in contrast to the phenomena of being non-religious). However, to the extent supernatural devotion and dogmatic rigidity have opposing relationships to intolerance and prejudice, this threatens the "one thing" view of religion. Specifically religious intolerance may or may not be an exception to this apparently paradoxical pattern of relationships. It is possible that, like prejudice generally, intolerance or violence based on religious membership is not appropriately grouped with the general package of "religious" phenomena, but may be considered its own independent phenomenon. A s the next chapter explores, the "one thing" view of religion, while dominant in contemporary empirical psychology, is far from being the consensus view, among religion's serious investigators. Its most serious contender is a "two thing" view of religion. A "two thing" view of religion is perhaps more intuitive insofar as we hundreds of thousands more deaths than the regimes that were used to justify the wars. On this matter, at least, Mother Theresa is not guilty. 2 8 are inclined to ascribe different moral valences to the different religious phenomena, moral valences based precisely in our expectation of whether or not each phenomenon wi l l independently predict tolerance or intolerance. 2 9 C h a p t e r 2 : R e l i g i o n a s T w o T h i n g s Man's created wi l l is the source of selfish ambition as well as disinterested love. Although the true law of man's being is love, a harmonious relation among all l iving things, he rebels against this law when he imagines himself, not as a single individual in the whole, but the whole itself. A defiant self-affirmation which leads to enslavement, a false freedom which destroys itself, overtakes him. —Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan As we grow we learn to love more and more: first ourselves; then the family within the small kingdom of the home; then the school, the wider circle of friends, the home community of the nation; and finally, the greatest country of all , which has no boundaries this side of Hel l , and perhaps not even there. In some this process of enlargement is arrested at an intermediate stage, and then love turns in upon itself and becomes sour. —Kenneth Boulding 2 . 1 . I n t r o d u c t i o n Because the phenomena of religion are so many and varied—or at least because "religion" as a word can be used to refer to so many different kinds of thought and behavior—many theorists have attempted to organize religious phenomena according to a minimal set of psychologically plausible tendencies, something greater than one, and something less than "innumerable". Anthropologists, psychologists, philosophers, 30 theologians, and even religious figures have often proposed distinctions between two different kinds of religion or religiosity, morally elevating one kind of religiosity at the expense of the other. This dual understanding of religion is remarkably recurrent, and the joints at which religion is carved often appear to be similar across perspectives, temperaments and life callings. Generally these dual understandings contrast a subjective or natural kind of religion with a socially-transmitted or cultural kind. 2.2 S p i r i t v s . L e t t e r , D a o v s . R i t u a l Dual understandings of religion generally consider a sense of the omnipresence of the divine (whether sensed directly and spontaneously or with the aid of prayer, meditation or drug-ingestion) to be subjective or natural while religious dogmas are considered socially transmitted or cultural. There is a rich intellectual history of attributing the experience of divinity to something inward, personal and "subjective"—i.e. focused on individual experience and agency. This inward experience is contrasted with passively absorbing collective religious identity, creed and dogma, which is generally treated as outward, cultural and "objective"—i.e. focused on the objects and forces that shape everything and everyone. Some illustrative examples of this division of religious phenomena are: James' (1982/1902) distinction between the "babbling brook" from which all religions originate (p. 337) and the "dull habit" of "second hand" religion "communicated . . . by tradition" (p. 6) as well as that between "religion proper" and corporate and dogmatic dominion (p. 337); Freud's (1930/1961) distinction between the "oceanic feeling" as an unconscious memory of the mother's womb and "religion" as acceptance of religious authority and 31 morality as a projection of the father; Weber's (1947, 1978) distinction between religious charisma in its basic and "routinized" forms; Adorno's distinction between "personally experienced b e l i e f and "neutralized religion" (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswick, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950); Rappaport's (1979) distinction between the "numinous"—the experience of pure being—and the "sacred" or doctrinal; and, more recently, Sperber's (1996) cognitive distinction between two kinds of beliefs: "intuitive" beliefs—"the product of spontaneous and unconscious perceptual and inferential process" (89), and "reflective" beliefs "believed in virtue of other second-order beliefs about them." It is not only modern 20 t h and 21 s t Century philosophers and social scientists who have made this distinction. Even the Christian Apostle Paul elevated "the Spirit" of the new Christian convent over "the letter" (2 Corinthians 3:6), a distinction he equated with that between giving life and kil l ing. The text that inspired the Daoist religious and philosophical movements, the Dao De Jing, parallels this distinction between the revelatory and the culturally transmitted by warning against the decline from intuitive knowledge of the Way to an attachment to the trappings of ritual: . When Tao is lost, there is goodness. When goodness is lost, there is kindness. When kindness is lost, there is justice. When justice is lost, there is ritual. Now ritual is the husk of faith and loyalty, the beginning of confusion.(Feng and English trans., 1972) In all of these dual understandings, the subjective/natural is named and discussed in a more positive light than the cultural/socially-transmitted and they are sometimes even treated as mutually exclusive orientations. Assigning opposite moral valence to 3 2 subjective-natural and objective-cultural religion makes them seem more like dichotomies than distinctions, bitter rivals that cannot easily cooperate towards a common end anymore than good and evil should cooperate to a common end. 2 . 3 A m b i g u i t i e s i n t h e T w o T h i n g V i e w What is unclear in these categorizations of religion, therefore, is whether subjective-natural and objective-cultural religiosity are best understood as empirically incompatible, independent, or bound together. In all of these dual understandings, the subjective/natural is named and discussed in a more positive light than the cultural/socially-transmitted and they are sometimes even treated as mutually exclusive orientations. It is also possible, however, that subjective-natural religiosity reflects a process of expanding the boundaries of the self (the contemplation of God is often described as seeking after a reality larger than oneself), potentially expanding also the social boundaries of moral inclusion, while objective-cultural religiosity may reflect a pragmatic fixing of that boundary at a certain point that is optimal. A n optimal level of moral inclusion would psychologically enable self-sacrificing social coordination with those who wi l l help one attain important benefits and goals, but would also exclude those from whom it is unlikely to derive social benefit anyway. The most likely candidates for social exclusion would be those whose salient markers of difference—ethnic, linguistic, racial, religious—likely reflect different interests, values, loyalties, diet, means of selecting authorities, and (perhaps most importantly) disease immunities, that would impede effective and beneficial coordination. These two processes are potentially complementary, and likely analogous i f not identical to the processes outlined in 33 Brewer's (1991) optimal distinctiveness theory of social identity, which posits that we are motivated both to expand our identity to a level greater than ourselves and yet to have a clear boundary for that identity. However, the processes are also functionally opposite, so the engagement of one process may make an opposite social psychological prediction from the engagement of the other, even i f the two processes tend to co-occur empirically. The co-occurrence of these potentially opposite processes may explain why dichotomous understandings of religion have yielded messy, inconclusive, and contradictory findings on how religion relates to prejudice, as discussed below. 2.4. I n t r i n s i c v s . E x t r i n s i c R e l i g i o s i t y " Gordon Allport (1950) is widely credited with beginning empirical investigations of religion and prejudice and of religion generally. Allport arguably handicapped empirical investigations of religion and prejudice by speaking in terms of "mature" and "immature" religion, hypothesizing that "mature" or intrinsic religiosity was about directly experiencing one's religious faith while "immature" or extrinsic religiosity was about seeing religion as little more than a source of community or conventional moral values, friends, and financial opportunities. In this regard, Allport 's constructs map conceptually onto the widely-noted subjective/natural vs. objective/cultural distinction, but Allport, whose Protestant heritage likely inclined him to value the intrinsic as morally superior to the extrinsic (Cohen, Hal l & Koenig, 2005) was disappointed to find that intrinsic and extrinsic religiosity, which were supposed to be mutually incompatible, were unrelated to each other rather than inversely-related (Allport and Ross, 1967). 34 Even as unrelated measures, however, intrinsic and extrinsic religiosity were less than satisfactory tools for investigating how different aspects of religion predict prejudice. In the first couple of decades of research using Airport's scales, extrinsic religiosity predicted racial prejudice and some other undesirable outcomes (Donahue, 1985). Intrinsic religiosity, while only occasionally predicting lack of prejudice, was generally orthogonal to prejudice, at least to racial prejudice (Donahue, 1985). Since early investigations, however, measures of intrinsic religiosity have produced a whole spectrum of relationships with different kinds of prejudice under different circumstances, ranging from negative (Duck & Hunsberger, 1999; Ponton & Gorsuch, 1988; Fisher, Derison & Polley, 1994) to orthogonal (Donahue, 1985) to positive (Duck & Hunsberger, 1999; Fisher, Derison & Polley, 1994; Herek, 1987; McFarland 1989)—with the prediction of prejudice often depending on the kind of prejudice explored. Moreover, extrinsic religiosity has also shown inconsistent relationships with prejudice, predicting prejudice in Allport and Ross's (1967) research and in many occasions afterwards (see Donahue, 1985 for a review), but occasionally manifesting no relationship to prejudice (e.g. Griffin, Gorsuch & Davis, 1987) or even a negative relationship (Strickland & Weddell, 1972; Duck & Hunsberger, 1999). Further, extrinsic religiosity when measured as orthogonal to intrinsic has been found to have inadequate reliability (Trimble, 1997). When Hoge (1972) produced a psychometrically viable intrinsic religiosity scale with extrinsic reversed items, the three extrinsic items that fit in the scale were more indicative of a wholesale lack of religious devotion than an alternative socially-driven understanding of it (Batson, Schoenrade & Ventis, 1993). Generally, the body of literature on intrinsic and extrinsic religiosity has failed to reach empirically satisfying conclusions with regard to prejudice and intolerance (Kirkpatrick & Hood, 1990). These scales may still be useful for other pursuits, however, e.g. distinguishing the relative importance of socially-mediated and personally-felt religiosity in different religious faiths (Cohen, Siegal & Rozin, 2003). Several researchers (e.g. Altemeyer, 1996; Batson et al, 1993; Kirkpatrick & Hood, 1990) have suggested that part of the problem may be that intrinsic religiosity scales are not the ideal measure of non-prejudiced "mature" religiosity. Rather, these scales indicate religious devotion or commitment, a psychological inclination that is widespread, but logically (and often empirically) unrelated to prejudice generally conceived, and may be as easily held by "immature" as by "mature" religious people. Quest (Batson, Schoenrade & Ventis, 1993) has been identified as a kind of religious orientation that predicts lack of prejudice most of the time, but its psychometric properties are unimpressive (Altemeyer, 1996). Sadly for enthusiasts of religion, the religion-related scales that simultaneously have good psychometric properties and make consistent predictions with regard to prejudice are scales like Religious Fundamentalism (Altemeyer & Hunsberger, 1992) and Right Wing Authoritarianism (Altemeyer, 1981, 1988, 1996). The correlation of these scales with prejudice is robustly positive across numerous studies (see Altemeyer, 1996 for a discussion). 2 . 5 . ' R e l i g i o n i t s e l f v s . I n t e l l e c t u a l a n d D o g m a t i c D o m i n i o n This failure to empirically identify tolerant religiosity does not mean, however, that there is nothing potentially tolerant in religious processes. The two quotations that opened this chapter both come from very religious thinkers whose vision is tremendously 3 6 tolerant, tolerance motivated clearly by religious conviction rather than grafted unconvincingly onto their religiosity. These quotations point more towards an understanding of religion as the brotherly binding together of people or the living generally. Both quotations note that this binding together does not always reach its full unbounded potential, however, and that in fact what should be all-embracing unity turns into its opposite when individuals or groups begin to imagine themselves as "the whole i t s e l f rather than a part of the whole. This occurs when the "process of enlargement"— enlargement of one's sense of moral inclusion—"is arrested at an intermediate stage". If the "process of enlargement" and the "intermediate arrest" are complementary processes, however, then when one process is engaged the other is likely to be engaged also. Interestingly the model that best reflects this nuanced understanding of religion may have been that of Wi l l i am James ( 1 9 8 2 / 1 9 0 2 , p. 3 3 7 ) : 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. A n d the bigotries are most of them in their turn chargeable to religion's wicked intellectual partner, the spirit of dogmatic dominion. Here James speaks in excoriating terms of "corporate dominion" and "dogmatic dominion" and yet effectively admits that each may be a "practical...and.. .intellectual partner" of religion respectively. James generally admired "religion proper" and was somewhat defensive about its pollution by its "wicked" partners. Even i f corporate and dogmatic dominion rarely i f ever divorced themselves from "religion proper", James 37 might have had good moral reasons to wish for such a divorce. Specifically, i f corporate and dogmatic dominion predicted prejudice, intolerance and war while "religion proper" predicted openness, tolerance and peace then wishing for a divorce was quite reasonable for someone who morally preferred openness to prejudice, tolerance to intolerance and peace to war. 2.6. R e l i g i o u s D e v o t i o n a n d C o a l i t i o n a l R i g i d i t y : R e l i g i o n a s J a n u s - F a c e d Consistent with the Jamesian perspective, I propose a different distinction between styles of religiosity, a distinction that does not expect an apparent moral dichotomy to be reflected empirically, but rather expects to find the prejudice-attenuating and the prejudice-inciting forms of religiosity to be tightly wound together. I argue specifically that "religious devotion", the aspect of religion that involves devotion to the supernatural or to a specific supernaturally-grounded faith and practice, tends to co-occur with "coalitional rigidity", the aspect that involves adopting one community's epistemic and moral vision as exclusively true, and treating all deviations from that moral vision as false, dangerous, alien or degenerate. These two aspects should reflect "enlargement" and "intermediate arrest" respectively. I define coalitional rigidity as a set of interrelated attitudes and behaviors reflecting rigid, commitment-oriented understandings of religion, morals, politics, and epistemics. These rigid understandings make salient the distinction between collective self and collective other. I define devotional religiosity as a set of interrelated attitudes and behaviors reflecting the passionate costly commitment to understand and engage life with an orientation to numinous or "divine" beings or principles, e.g. God or the Dharma. 38 Coalitional processes are natural to the human social animal and also at play in the formation of religious groups (Atran & Norenzayan, 2004; Navarette & Fessler, 2005). For securing loyalty, widespread conformity to norms and effective coordination within a coalition, there may be psychological benefits to exalting one's own belief system, religious group or cultural tradition as uniquely true and good. Such an exclusive exaltation is likely to be associated with intolerance (potentially including violence) towards those who fall outside the boundaries of one's imagined coalition. Cognitive and behavioral styles tapped into by scales like religious fundamentalism (Altemeyer & Hunsberger, 1992) and authoritarianism (Altemeyer, 1981, 1988, 1996) may once have contributed to adaptive coalitional processes (Kirkpatrick, 1999) that enabled individuals to enhance their fitness by gaining the trust, cooperation and protection of a manageable number of people with some easily identifiable criterion for shared identity, who could in turn prey on and protect themselves from other groups with different criteria for shared identity. "Religion" as it is commonly understood, especially by its critics, appears highly inclined to cultivate this epistemologically and ideologically rigid grounding of coalitional cohesion, and thus of prejudice, intolerance and war. A s discussed in Chapter 1, variables like dogmatism and authoritarianism are more prevalent among the religiously affiliated than the unaffiliated (Altemeyer, 1981, 1988, 1996), and measures of religiosity that make no mention of moral or religious outsiders—e.g. intrinsic religiosity (Allport & Ross, 1967) and Christian Orthodoxy (Fullerton & Hunsberger, 1982) are reliably and substantially correlated with these coalitional variables (Altemeyer, 1988; Duck & Hunsberger, 1999; Kahoe, 1975; Leak & Randall, 1995; Moghaddam & Vuksanovic, 1990; Watson, Sawyers & Morris, 2003). 39 Given their rigid boundary-setting nature, it is not surprising to find coalitional rigidity variables correlated with expressions of real prejudice: e.g. racial prejudice (Altemeyer, 1981, 1988, 1996), and anti-gay prejudice (Laythe, Finkel & Kirkpatrick, 2001). Although unsurprising, the relationship between coalitional religiosity variables and prejudice is by no means tautological. Coalitional rigidity on matters of culture, politics and religion is not the same thing as being anti-Black or anti-gay, and indeed the correlations between coalitional variables and prejudice are often low or moderate, rather than being "same thing" correlations. Attendance at religious services is a behavioral variable that I would include in the coalitional category, though it clearly has devotional aspects also. I do not consider attendance coalitional by virtue of its affiliative interdependent feelings among co-religionists, however. Affiliative ingroup favoritism and intolerant outgroup hostility have generally been found to be orthogonal (Brewer, 1999). Other religious behaviors like prayer, while sometimes done in solitude, are also potentially affiliative and interdependent. What makes prayer and attendance potentially different is how their interdependence is manifested: while the affiliative interdependence of prayer is directed towards a divine being or principle, the affiliative interdependence of religious attendance is directed towards a certain bounded group with a distinctive identity. A focus of attention on the community may accentuate the salience of how one's religious community is morally and existentially distinctive compared with other communities and may thus implicitly reinforce what dogmatism, fundamentalism and authoritarianism assert more explicitly. L ike fundamentalism, authoritarianism and dogmatism, attendance at religious services has also been found to be a reliable predictor of prejudice 40 (Allport, 1966; Allport & Ross, 1967; Batson, 1976; Batson, Shoenrade, & Pych, 1985; Gorsuch & Aleshire, 1974). To define "religion" only in coalitional terms is to neglect the aspect of religion that is central to it—directed to the transcendent, the divine, the numinous, and the sublime. We might say that devotional processes are more "irrational" since they are directed towards invisible intangible hypothesized supernatural agents rather than to flesh and blood coalitions of people categorized as "like s e l f because of verifiable hard-to-fake existential, epistemic and moral commitments. Yet precisely because devotional processes are based more in imagination than in readily-perceived reality, devotional processes may actually expand the boundaries of moral inclusion beyond apparently "rational" limits. Like clapping hands, however, this devotional expansion may co-occur with the more rational coalitional processes that harden and thicken existing boundaries. If we measure coalitional processes independent of devotional ones and vice versa, then we can hear the sound of one hand clapping, and hear the extent to which each partnerless clapping hand makes a different sound. If it is correct to conceive of devotional and coalitional processes as co-occurring opposites, then these processes should also have opposite relationships to religious intolerance. As noted before, these processes appear to have opposite relationships to certain other kinds of prejudice (Kirkpatrick, 1993; Laythe et al., 2001). The potential for religious tolerance may also be psychologically nourished by devotional religiosity even as it is attenuated by the coalitional religiosity with which devotional religiosity co-occurs. 41 This framework is consistent in some ways with Allport 's distinction between intrinsic or personally-felt religiosity and extrinsic or socially-derived, instrumental religiosity. Yet, unlike Allport, I do not treat devotional and coalitional religiosity as orthogonal or incompatible modes of religiosity, but rather as empirically co-occurring psychological processes that are potentially very different in nature. 2.7. C o n c l u s i o n The guiding framework being tested in this paper, therefore, is something of a two-in-one understanding of religion, rather than a one-thing-not-two or a two-thing-not-one view. I expect that the relationship between devotional religiosity and coalitional rigidity variables wi l l often be at or close to "same thing" levels of correlation, and yet the perfect sameness of these umbrella constructs w i l l be belied by their opposing predictions of religious intolerance and religious violence. As discussed earlier, it is not my intention to ignore the multifaceted nature of religion (a multitude of things go by the name "religion", not just one or two, or two-in-one). Rather, my intention is to focus on two highly important aspects of what-is-called-religion and to empirically establish their Janus-faced, two-in-one nature. The empirical link between coalitional rigidity variables (like authoritarianism, fundamentalism, dogmatism) and intolerance variables (like anti-black, anti-feminist and anti-gay prejudice) is already well-established. Thus it would not be surprising to find a link between these rigidity variables and intolerance towards Muslims, Hindus, Jews, Christians, atheists, or other potential religious outgroups (depending on the affiliations i of the study participants). 42 The empirical link between devotional variables and coalitional rigidity variables is also well-established (Altemeyer, 1981, 1988, 1996; Duck & Hunsberger, 1999; Kahoe, 1975; Kahoe & Meadow, 1977; Watson, Sawyers, Morris , Carpenter, Jimenez, Jonas & Washington, 2003). The most controversial aspect of the two-in-one framework for understanding religion is the prediction that there is some non-artifactual positive independent relationship between devotional religiosity and tolerance/anti-violence when coalitional rigidity variables are controlled. To the extent this independent relationship can" be found, it w i l l corroborate the Janus-faced portrait of religion. The following studies test this aspect of the framework both with multiple regression models and with controlled experiment. Since Laythe et al (2001) and Kirkpatrick et al (1993) have already done work that illustrates and provides some evidence for an independent positive relationship between religious devotion and lack of prejudice and thus for the Janus-faced nature of religion, it is important to clarify how the present thesis goes beyond their contributions. First, neither Laythe et al (2001) nor Kirkpatrick (1993) treat their findings on the independent negative relationship between religious devotion variables and prejudice as theoretically significant to the hypotheses they investigate. Certainly neither investigation hypothesized or even speculated post-hoc that religion might be understood as a Janus-faced phenomenon. In spite of the existing evidence for it, the Janus-faced theoretical model of religion is currently non-existent in the psychological literature. The present thesis both articulates this model in detail and tests it as a hypothesis about the psychological nature of religion. 43 Second, the samples used by Laythe et al (2001) and Kirpatrick (1993) are typical in the psychology of religion literature and the psychological literature generally: i.e. participants were predominantly Christian North American undergraduates. The studies of this thesis investigate religion and religious intolerance across diverse religious and national contexts, using measures both from the psychological literature as well as measures from a larger cross-national survey that included behavioral variables like prayer and religious attendance. One of these studies also allowed for investigating relationships with national demographics such as c iv i l and political liberty and outgoing refugees. Finally, Laythe et al (2001) and Kirkpatrick were investigating prejudice broadly, not religious intolerance specifically. Insofar as "religious intolerance" is not semantically misleading, one might expect that being religious in any way should facilitate religious intolerance even i f certain forms of religiosity negatively predict other kinds of prejudice, like racism, homophobia, etc. The evidence presented in this thesis wi l l suggest that "religious intolerance" is in fact a semantically misleading term in this regard, as religious devotion is a negative predictor of religious intolerance in all studies. This thesis wi l l thus demonstrate that both religious and irreligious variables have positive predictive relationships with religious intolerance (and, conversely, religious tolerance). If this Janus-faced portrait of religion is upheld, it wi l l imply that no religion or irreligion has a monopoly on either religious tolerance or religious intolerance, and that which predicts tolerance and peace is always closely empirically shadowed by that which predicts intolerance and war. 44 C h a p t e r 3 : E m p i r i c a l T e s t : S c a p e g o a t i n g , W a r a n d O p p r e s s i o n i n 1 0 N a t i o n s 3.1 I n t r o d u c t i o n Biologist Richard Dawkins (1989) has famously written, "religious faith deserves a chapter to itself in the annals of war technology, on an even footing with the longbow, the warhorse, the tank, and the hydrogen bomb" (p. 330). As global conflicts grow more saliently religious, the notion that the major world religions are incompatible and inclined to violent conflict is reaching an increasingly wide and sympathetic audience. This view implies two related hypotheses: (A) religious belief is potentially associated with aggressive hostility towards religious others; (B) rejection of religious belief is associated with less interreligious hostility. The present chapter tests these hypotheses in large, representative, international samples. 3 .2 O v e r v i e w o f S t u d y a n d S p e c i f i c H y p o t h e s e s This chapter specifically addresses religious scapegoating, a form of hostility highly relevant to intergroup intolerance and conflict, most notoriously the Holocaust and other genocides (Newman & Erber, 2002). It also addresses demographic variables suggestive of violent conflict and oppression. Religious belief, insofar as it is effective at fostering coalitional processes in human cultures may well enable scapegoating, prejudice and intolerance. However, insofar i f the hypotheses of this thesis are correct, then rigid religious belief and belief in the supernatural divine generally should be closely related and yet make opposite predictions of intolerant phenomena like scapegoating, war and oppression. To address this question, we examined representative survey data commissioned by the British Broadcasting Corporation and featured on a T V program "What the World Thinks of God" (2004), based on interviews of 10,068 participants from the U.S . , U . K . , Israel, South Korea, Indonesia, Nigeria, Mexico , Lebanon, Russia and India. A l l major world religions were represented. The survey assessed religious beliefs, attitudes and practices. We examined as dichotomous variables participants' responses to questions about their belief in God ("theism"), their belief that their God or beliefs was the only true God or beliefs ("exclusivity"), and whether they blamed "people of other religions for much of the trouble in this world" ("scapegoating"). We also examined other items reflecting various manifestations of religiosity as independent variables, and examined United Nations data on lack of c iv i l and political liberty, outgoing refugees, military spending, and volume of the arms trade in the nations surveyed by the B B C . 3.3 M e t h o d The British Broadcasting Corporation commissioned I C M Associates to partner with professional polling agencies in each country to conduct either phone or face to face interviews with participants. Participants in all nations were selected to be as representative as possible of either the national population or the population of its most populous major metropolitan areas. Out of 10,068 participants, 49% were male, 51% female; 20% were between the age of 18 and 24, 23% between 25 and 34, 20% between 35 and 44, 17% between 45 and 54, and 20% over 55; 1002 from the U S A , 1001 from the U K , 1000 from Israel, 1006 from India, 1000 from South Korea, 1038 from Indonesia, 1000 from Nigeria, 1000 from Russia, 1021 from Mexico, and 1000 from Lebanon; 1644 46 Catholics, 832 Orthodox (Roman and Greek Orthodox or Russian Orthodox), 1668 Protestant (Christian Protestant, Presbyterian or Evangelist), 566 other Christian (Quaker, Mormon, Jehovah's Witness, Christian Other), 866 Jewish, 1962 Mus l im, 1003 Hindu, 254 Buddhists, 917 not religious (Atheist or Agnostic), and 356 other (Jain, Sikh, Confucian, Chinese traditional or other) or refused to answer. A l l measures of religiosity-related variables were made binary for ease of analysis by binary logistic regression (and variables that were not originally binary were not clearly ordinal either). The three key variables for the analysis were (1) "theism" ("I have always believed in God" or "I believe in God but have not always" vs. other response5), (2) "rigid exclusivity" (agreement that " M y God (Beliefs) is the only true God (Beliefs)" vs. other response), and (3) "religious scapegoating" ("I blame people of other religions, for much of the trouble in this world"). Using binary logistic regression, I analyzed the three independent relationships between theism, rigid exclusivity, and . religious scapegoating, i.e. that between theism and rigid exclusivity controlling for religious scapegoating, between rigid exclusivity and religious scapegoating controlling for theism, and between theism and religious scapegoating controlling for rigid exclusivity. These three manifestations of "religion" could either form a coherent triangle, with all independent relationships being somewhere between mutually reinforcing and orthogonal (+, +, + or or +,+,0 or -,-,0 or +,0,0 or -,0,0 or 0,0,0), or 5 For all items except for theism and regular prayer, "other response" is either "disagree" or "don't know." Other responses that were contrasted with theism were "I have never believed in God", "I do not believe in God but I do believe in a higher power", "I do not believe in God but I am a spiritual person", "None of these" and "Don't know". Other responses that were contrasted with regular prayer were "only occasionally, at times of crisis", "only occasionally, at specific religious events", "At religious festivals during the course of a normal year", "Never" and "Don't know." . 4 7 an incoherent triangle with a seemingly incompatible pattern of independent relationships (+,+,- or -,-,+). I also examined these independent relationships separately by religion. To make sure that this pattern of scapegoating-predicting relationships was generalizable to other manifestations of broadly devotional religious belief and practice or broadly coalitional belief and practice, I also introduced all of the following intercorrelated religious variables (Chronbach's alpha = . 7 4 ) into a logistic regression predicting scapegoating: theism, rigid exclusivity, "religious attendance" ("I regularly attend an organized religious service" vs. other), "prayer frequency" ("regularly" vs. other response), "afterlife b e l i e f (agreement that "death is not the end" vs. other response), "textual exposure" ("I have studied religious texts" vs. other response), "wil l ing martyrdom" ("I would die for my God (beliefs)" vs. other response), and disagreement with three statements reflecting opposition to or cynicism about religion: "religion is not politics" (disagreement with "religion is a cloak for politics," vs. other response), "God is not war" (disagreement with "the world would be a more peaceful place i f people didn't believe in God (Higher power) vs. other response)", and "theodicy" (disagreement with "I find it hard to believe in God (A higher power) when there is so much [suffering]" vs. other response). Finally, I examined how the two most potent independent positive and negative predictors of scapegoating (these turned out to be rigid exclusivity and prayer frequency 48 respectively 6) were predicted by several binary logistic regressions in which the main predictor variables of interest were demographic signifiers of war and oppression. Specifically, these were measured as the rank of each participant's nation on the following demographics obtained from the website of the United Nations Human Development Program (2005) website: number of outgoing refugees/total population ("refugees"), (arms imports (U.S. dollars) + arms exports (U.S. dollars))/GDP ("arms trade-GDP"), (arms imports + arms exports)/total population ("arms trade-pop); military spending as a proportion of G D P (military-GDP); military spending/total population (military-pop). From Freedom House (2006) I obtained a combined measure of c iv i l and political liberty for each nation, ranked from 1 (free) to 7 (not free). A l l relevant data was for year end 2003 (the year before the B B C surveys were conducted), except for data on c iv i l and political liberty, which was from 2005. I did not analyze 2004 and 2005 data for other indicators as these—especially outgoing refugees—were likely affected by the Tsunami which drastically disrupted two of the ten nations: India and Indonesia. The controlled variables in all of these regressions were the other predictor (theism i f the predicted variable was exclusivity, exclusivity i f the predicted variable was theism), as well as the participant's sex, age, and national rank in GDP/capita. Finally, I ranked the religions, the nations, and the religions-within-nations by theism, exclusivity, and scapegoating. I had no hypotheses with regard to these means, and do not consider cultural differences in these means to be very reliable or meaningful. What I expect to be more meaningful is the pattern of independent prediction between 6 Technically, the reverse scored God=war item was the strongest negative predictor of scapegoating in the full sample 10-predictor regression, but of non-reverse-scored religious predictors, prayer was the strongest negative and exclusivity the strongest positive predictor. 49 devotional religiosity, coalitional rigidity and intolerance. I expect this pattern of prediction to replicate across several studies, even i f means-based group differences in any particular measure ofintolerance do not. 3.4 R e s u l t s When predicting rigid exclusivity with theism in a binary logistic regression (controlling for religious scapegoating), theism independently increased the predicted odds of rigid exclusivity by a factor of 20, Wald = 1739.16, OR = 20.02 [95% CI = 17.39 - 23.05], p < .001. When predicting scapegoating with rigid exclusivity (controlling for theism), rigid exclusivity independently increased the predicted odds of scapegoating by a factor of 1.32, Wald = 20.22, O R = 1.32 [95% CI = 1.17-1.49], p < .001. However, when predicting scapegoating with theism (controlling for rigid exclusivity) theism independently cut the odds of scapegoating in half, Wald = 69.50, O R = 0.55 [95% C I = 0.48-0.64], p < .001. The pattern of independent prediction thus formed an "incoherent triangle" (+,+,-). This incoherent triangle pattern of results did not change even i f also controlling for sex, age, and national rank in G D P per capita (measured by the U N H D P rankings). The positive relationship between theism and rigid exclusivity was at least nominally evident in every religious group in the sample (ranging from an odd ratio [OR] of 1.86, p = . 11 for Buddhists to an OR of 38.06, p < .001 for Christian Other; all non-Buddhist p's < .001). With regard to religious scapegoating, the predictive tension between theism and rigid exclusivity was also nominally evident in every religious group in the sample. This pattern is graphed in Figure 3.1. 50 c o a5 CD O 0 CL -O o "c ( D o C L § O) a) c £ E c i i si •D © O £ • Theism • Exclusivity t p< .1 * p < .05 ** p< .01 *** p <= .001 F i g u r e 3 .1 Separate binary logistic regressions with theism and rigid exclusivity independently predicting the odds (OR) of endorsing religious scapegoating, by religion. I also conducted a logistic regression predicting religious scapegoating in the whole sample with not only theism and rigid exclusivity, but also with religious attendance, prayer frequency, afterlife belief, textual exposure, wil l ing martyrdom, religion = politics (reversed), God = war (reversed), and anti-theodicy (reversed). Rigid exclusivity was a positive independent predictor of scapegoating, Wald = 43.17, O R = 1.56 [95% CI = 1.37 - 1.78], p < .001, as was religious service attendance, Wald = 5.87, O R = 1.17 [95% CI = 1.03-1.32], p < .05. These variables most directly implied an exclusive or coalitional orientation. In contrast, prayer frequency negatively predicted scapegoating, Wald = 17.46, OR = .76 [95% CI = .67-.86], p < .001, as did 51 afterlife belief, Wald = 5.67, OR = .89 [95% C I = .80 - .98], p < .05, "religion is not politics", Wald = 73.62, OR = .65 [95% CI = .58 - .71], p < .001, "God is not war", Wald = 90.68, OR = .53 [95% C I = .47 - .61], p < .001, and theodicy, Wald = 68.54, O R = .61 [95% C I = .55 - .69], p < .001. These five variables most directly implied belief in the supernatural and support for religious belief generally. Theism was not an independent predictor when these other variables were controlled, Wald = 1.38, O R = .91, ns, nor was textual exposure or wil l ing martyrdom, both Walds < 1. Given the conceptual overlap, it is not surprising that some included variables were not independent predictors. The results of how war and oppression variables predicted prayer and exclusivity respectively are shown in Figure 3.2. Due to the optionality of the basis on which to test for significance, significance levels are not shown. If significance is based on the outcome variable (prayer or exclusivity), then the N is 10068, with negative predictions of prayer highly significant'in all cases, and positive predictions of exclusivity highly significant for lack of freedom and outgoing refugees, all ps < .001. If significance is based on the predictor variables of interest, however (rank by demographics in the 10 nations) the N is only 10, and the findings are not significant. Whether statistically significant or not, it is clear from Figure 3.2 that the war and oppression demographics predict prayer and exclusivity in opposite ways. Since this result is based on a sample of only 10 nations, the findings should be interpreted with caution. St i l l , they are broadly consistent with the scapegoating findings. 52 0.6 -0.6 l l r " 1 i m 1 i P 2 i Q . •a o •3 a Prayer Exclusivity Key: Refugees/cap: Total refugees who fled the country in 2003 (per capita) Lack of freedom: Freedom House's Freedom score in 2005 (reversed) Armsvol/cap: dollar volume of arms imports and exports 2003 (per capita) Armsvol/gdp: dollar volume of arms imports and exports 2003 (as % of GDP) Milspend/cap: military spending per capita 2003 Milspend/gdp: military spending (as % of GDP) 2003 Bars represent independent unstandardized betas in separate logistic regressions with national rank in each X variable predicting regular prayer or exclusivity while controlling for the other along with age, gender and national rank in GDP per capita. F i g u r e 3.2. Prediction of regular prayer and rigid exclusivity, by demographics suggestive of war and oppression Finally, the rankings and means of religions, nations, and religions-within-nations by theism, exclusivity, and scapegoating are listed, along with the means, in Tables 3.1 and 3.2. These rankings are interesting intrinsically and also interesting because the rankings change study by study with different measures of intolerance. However, these rankings are not presented to test hypotheses. 53 T a b l e 3.1 Rankings and means of theism, exclusivity and scapegoating in each religious group Theism Exclusivity Scapegoating 1. Mus l im (.99) 1. Mus l im (.95) 1. Jewish (.34) 2. Hindu (.96) 2. Other Christian (.82) 2. Protestant (.254) 3. Other Christian (.95) 3. Catholic (.72) 3. Other (.247) 4, Catholic (.93) 4. Orthodox (.67) 4. Orthodox (.242) 5. Protestant (.89) 5. Protestant (.66) 5. Catholic (.236) 6. Orthodox (.80) 6. Jewish (.65) 6. Nonreligious (.223) 7. Buddhist (.73) 7. Hindu (.60) 7. Christian Other (.219) 8. Jewish (.71) 8. Other (.56) 8. Hindu (.17) 9. Other (.70) 9. Buddhist (.22) 9. Buddhist (.146) 10. Nonreligious (.12) 10. Nonreligious (.09) 10. M u s l i m (.142) 54 T a b l e 3 .2 Rankings and means of theism, exclusivity and scapegoating in each nation Theism Exclusivity Scapegoating 1. Nigeria (.999) 1. Indonesia (.96) 1. U . K . (.37) 2. Indonesia (.990) 2. Lebanon (.943) 2. Israel (.33) 3. Lebanon (.98) 3. Nigeria (.936) 3. Nigeria (.249) 4. India (.96) 4. Mexico (.79) 4. Mexico (.248) 5. Mexico (.91) 5. Israel (.70) 5. Lebanon (.236) 6. U . S . A . (.87) 6. India (.59) 6. Russia (.234) 7. Israel (.76) 7. Russia (.55) 7. India (.18) 8. Russia (.65) 8. U . S . A . (.51) 8. U . S . A . (.15) 9. U . K . (.56) 9. U . K . (.3117) 9. South Korea (.14) 10. South Korea (.54) 10. South Korea (.3110) 10. Indonesia (.08) These mean rankings do not appear to paint as coherent and stable a picture of scapegoating as do the predictive differences between theism and exclusivity. Another table not included in this thesis is a table of religions-within-nations (38 subgroups in total, excluding subgroups with N < 30). From this table especially there appeared little promise to the task of predicting a person's likely inclination to scapegoat religious others by their type of religion or type of nation. This kind of national-religious profiling is likely to yield serious errors. One apparent exception to the generally incoherent 55 pattern of this religion-within-nation table was the U . K . , with all the U . K . ' s religious and irreligious subgroups ranking in the top 10 of 38 for scapegoating. Another exception was Muslims, with Muslims from all sampled national groups ranking in the bottom half of the 38 subsamples. The last clear exception was Asians, as religious and irreligious subgroups from Asian countries (India, South Korea, Indonesia) also ranked in the bottom half of the 38 subsamples. 3.5 D i s c u s s i o n Together these studies indicate both that items with a religious devotional and rigid coalitional character tend to be positively correlated, often quite highly, most highly when considered over a broad multi-religious sample of the world. The studies also suggest a fundamental predictive tension between these correlated manifestations of religiosity when predicting outcomes like scapegoating, war and oppression. While coalitional rigidity is a positive independent predictor of scapegoating, war and oppression; devotional religiosity is an independent negative predictor. This predictive tension appears to vary in magnitude by religion, but generally the pattern appears in all . religions, and even among the professedly non-religious. While it is surprising that devotional variables appear to have such a strong negative independent relationship to scapegoating, war and oppression, what is more surprising is the weakness of the positive relationship between even rigid exclusivity and scapegoating. In fact, while there is a positive relationship when controlling for theism and other religious variables, there is no zero-order relationship between rigid exclusivity and scapegoating. Also, with the exception of rigid exclusivity, all religious variables 56 tested on the full sample had negative zero-order relationships with scapegoating, including predictors that were non-negative in multiple regression like religious attendance, textual exposure, and wil l ing martyrdom, all ps < .05. In addition, rigid exclusivity had a noticeable positive independent relationship with only 4 of the 6 demographic indices of war and oppression. Only two of these relationships could compare in magnitude with the negative relationships to prayer of all oppression and war demographics. While all evidence in this study is only correlational, it is nevertheless difficult to reconcile with the idea that religious faith is "war technology." In fact, given the strong negative relationship between the "God is not war" item and religious scapegoating, it would appear that calling faith "war technology" might well be more likely to incite religious scapegoating than to deter it. St i l l , it is possible that because this B B C survey used items that were not validated scales used by scientific investigators of religion, the results of the study are misleading. When psychometrically sound psychology scales are used, the pathological side of religious belief may become more evident. The next two chapters explore this possibility, looking at how psychometrically valid religious scales predict religious intolerance in multi-religious Malaysia and Canada. 57 C h a p t e r 4 . E m p i r i c a l T e s t : R e l i g i o u s I n t o l e r a n c e i n M u l t i - R e l i g i o u s M a l a y s i a 4 .1 I n t r o d u c t i o n I conducted this study in Malaysia, chosen mostly for the diversity that allowed me to examine the extent to which ( 1 ) the constructs generalize across diverse religious groups in a non-Western context and ( 2 ) to examine cultural differences in these constructs. Malaysia's population is a plurality of Malays (all legally Muslims), a large proportion of Chinese (mostly Buddhists with large numbers of Christians in urban centers like Kuala Lumpur), and smaller but still substantial proportion of Tamil Indians (vast majority Hindu). While there were not enough Hindu participants to compare to other ethnic groups, Chinese Buddhists, Chinese Christians and Malay Muslims were all well-represented. The majority of our sample was Chinese, primarily because research constraints and sensitivities in Malaysia inclined us to focus primarily on the Chinese population, which constitute the largest portion of the non-Malay population, and among whom there are religious differences that convenience sampling can easily capture. The Muslims in the sample were recruited largely from a one-time administration at University Putra Malaya after students had taken a final exam for one of their courses. A l l participants spoke English, and most were affiliated with a university in which the language of instruction was English. To aid Chinese speakers in the majority Chinese sample, however, the questionnaire was administered in both Chinese and English. 58 4.2 O v e r v i e w o f S t u d y a n d S p e c i f i c H y p o t h e s e s In this study, I examined the predictive power of variables that we considered both devotional and coalitionally rigid with regard to support for humane religious pluralism. Instead of using one-item measure of belief in God or prayer, we used Hoge's (1972) validated version of Allport & Ross's (1967) intrinsic religious motivation scale. This scale has been criticized as measuring religious devotion rather than intrinsic religiosity per se (Batson, Schoenrade & Ventis, 1993). It is perhaps apt to criticize the name given to the scale, but this is not a criticism of its overall psychometric utility. I also used several scales that reflect rigidity on religious, political, moral or epistemic concerns: namely, right wing authoritarianism ( R W A ) (Altemeyer, 1999), dogmatism as measured by Altemeyer's (1996) D O G scale, Religious Fundamentalism (Altemeyer & Hunsberger, 1992), and another scale, Religious Exclusivity, composed for the sake of this study. Altemeyer (2002) showed that the D O G scale correlated with Bibl ica l literalism, but on its face the scale is an ideologically neutral measure of dogmatism, similar to that of Rokeach (1960). We used Altemeyer's measure of dogmatism rather than Rokeach's (1960) scale because the latter contained several items that were dated and we also expected it would not translate well into Malaysian culture. Religious Fundamentalism (Altemeyer & Hunsberger, 1992) has been found not only among Christians but also in samples of Jews, Hindus and Muslims, and is strongly correlated with prejudice, particularly homophobia (Hunsberger, 1996). Both the D O G scale and Religious Fundamentalism correlate highly with R W A (Altemeyer, 1996). v 59 The purpose of the study was to predict the roles these aspects played in predicting attitudes towards humane religious pluralism, as embodied in the fictional character Piscine Patel 7 , the central figure in Yann Mattel 's (2001) international bestseller, Life of P i . We extracted and edited a passage from this novel where Piscine describes his sense of religious devotion to God and to three religions—Hinduism, Christianity and Islam—and then later finds himself at the center of a vicious verbal conflict between the authorities of those three religions—a Hindu pandit, Christian priest, and Mus l im Imam. Participants could either feel positively towards P i , consider him heaven-bound, and be open to him teaching their friends and family; or they could feel negatively towards him, consider him hell-bound and be closed to him teaching their friends and family. As with the B B C study, this study in Malaysia tested how religious devotion and coalitional rigidity related to religious intolerance. Again, I measured religious group differences in religious devotion, coalitional rigidity and religious intolerance for all religious groups of N > 30 (Buddhist, Christian and Mulsim). 4.3 M e t h o d 192 participants completed the study for 8 Malaysian Ringgit: 138 women, 49 men, and 5 unidentified; 131 Chinese, 34 Malay, 12 Tamil/Indians, and 15 mixed or 7 Though not discussed in detail here, we also analyzed attitudes towards religious outsiders generally-including a Hindu, Christian, and Muslim character in the story, and Pi's non-religious parents. Unlike in Chapter 5 which follows, attitudes towards each of these characters varied considerably, and could not form a coherent internally reliable "intolerance" index that held together throughout the sample. However, one could form a coherent index of attitudes towards "outsiders" (Pi, Hindu, non-religious, and Muslim for Christians; Pi, Hindu, non-religious, and Christian for Muslims; and all the characters for the Buddhists). The results are largely the same as using only Pi as the attitude lightening rod, but these results are more awkward and unwieldy to discuss in detail. 60 unidentified; 81 Buddhists, 48 Christians, 41 Muslims, 11 Hindus, and 11 other, unidentified or indicating "no religion". The mean age was 23. Participants were recruited either by posters advertising the study put up in public meeting areas in a university, or by invitations extended to students taking a course or members involved with a religious group, often with the help of wil l ing professors and leaders of religious organizations. Some were recruited over the internet (the latter—seven participants total—were compensated by postal order). Participants completed everything as a questionnaire packet on their own time, and returned the questionnaire for compensation at a scheduled time. To accommodate Buddhists and others whose spiritual and religious beliefs do not necessarily include an agentic Creator God, we took out references in all scales to "God" and instead put "The Divine". Thus, for instance, in the intrinsic religiosity scale, "Nothing is as important as serving God the best I know" becomes "Nothing is as important as serving the Divine as best I know." We explicitly told participants, "Some of the statements that follow are related to religion, and since many people use different words to describe the source of truth they believe in and follow, the statements below often refer to 'the Divine ' . If you do not like the phrase 'the Divine ' you may think of it as ' A l l a h ' or 'Buddha' or 'Christ ' or 'God ' or some other name you have stronger feelings about." We also asked participants to write down "the name or names you prefer for the Divine". The devotion to divine scale was not used in this study; only intrinsic religiosity was included as a measure of religious devotion. 61 We modified the authoritarianism scale so that religious items (often too specific to Christianity to be effective in this sample) became cultural items. Thus, the item "It is always better to trust the judgment of the proper authorities in government and religion than to listen to the noisy rabble-rousers in our society who are trying to create doubt in people's minds" became "It is always better to trust the judgment of the proper authorities in our government and our culture than to listen to the noisy trouble-makers and foreign elements who are making our people doubt our traditional cultural values." A statement like the latter could potentially field agreement both from supporters of a powerful church and from more secular defenders of cultural norms. The predictor variables thus were religious devotion (Hoge, 1972), authoritarianism (Altemeyer, 1999), Religious Exclusivity, Altemeyer and Hunsberger's (1992) Religious Fundamentalism Scale, and Altemeyer's (1996). D O G scale. The latter two scales we used mostly without changes, but sometimes changed words to make it less colloquial and easier to read in English for those raised in a different first language. Sample items from these scales (as well as sample items from a related scale in Chapter 5—Divine devotion) are listed in Appendix A . For each statement, participants were instructed to indicate how true they thought the statement was on a one to nine scale (from "totally untrue" to "totally true"). Following these scales participants completed the dependent measures assessing tolerance for religious others. Participants first read a heavily edited excerpt from Yann Martel's (2001) Life of P i , encompassing descriptions and events from Chapter 16 62 through Chapter 23, and condensed for this study into three single-spaced pages. A descriptive summary of the passage'can be found in Appendix B . After reading the passage, participants responded to a series of questions all answered on a 1 to 9 scale. A s a measure of tolerance for religious others, the first asked how positively they felt about each character (from 1, "extremely negative" to 9, "extremely positive"). For each question, participants were reminded that Piscine was "the main character of the story, who wishes to be close to God through Hindu, Christian and Mus l im belief and practice") that the Pandit "wishes Piscine to be Hindu only", that the Priest "wishes Piscine to be Christian only", and the Imam "wishes Piscine to be Mus l im only" and that Piscine's parents are not religious. Participants also indicated tolerance by stating how inclined they would be to forbid the following from teaching their beliefs to friends and family: People like P i who practice three religions at once, Hindus like the Pandit, Christians like the Priest, Hindus like the Imam, and people without a religion like Piscine's parents. In a final measure of tolerance, participants were asked to "imagine that at the moment Piscine is asked to choose between the faiths he practices, the story is interrupted by a bomb that explodes, ki l l ing Piscine, his parents, the priest, the imam and the pandit." Participants then indicated how likely it was that each character would go to heaven or to hell in this scenario (from 1, "definitely hell" to 9, "definitely heaven"). Finally, participants completed a demographics measure. M y hypothesis again was that religious devotion, coalitional rigidity and religious intolerance would form an incoherent (+,+,-) triangle of independent prediction. To 63 address this question, I again investigated how religious devotion predicted coalitional rigidity (with religious intolerance controlled), how coalitional rigidity predicted religious intolerance (with religious devotion controlled), and finally how religious devotion predicted religious intolerance (with coalitional rigidity controlled). To address whether any pattern in the overall sample was driven by one religious group within it, I again analyzed the predictive differences between religious devotion and coalitional rigidity in predicting intolerance for each religious group (Buddhists, Christians, Muslims, Other). To investigate whether any negative independent prediction of religious devotion by religious intolerance resulted from a statistical artifact, I controlled for multicollinearity in multiple regression. Finally, as with the B B C study, I ranked and listed the means of each religious group with N > 30 in order of religious devotion, coalitional rigidity and religious intolerance. 4.4 R e s u l t s When predicting the arithmetic mean of the exclusivity, fundamentalism, dogmatism and authoritarianism scales ("coalitional rigidity") with Hoge!s (1972) I intrinsic religious motivation scale ("religious devotion") [controlling for the arithmetic mean of the three items related to morally excluding Pi the pluralist ("religious intolerance")], religious devotion positively predicted coalitional rigidity, |3 = .55, S p = .05, t = 11.70, p < .001. When predicting religious intolerance with coalitional rigidity (controlling for religious devotion), coalitional rigidity positively predicted religious intolerance, (3 = .71, S p = .08, t = 9.06, p < .001. When predicting religious intolerance with religious devotion (controlling for coalitional rigidity), religious devotion negatively 64 predicted religious intolerance, P = -.14, S p = .07, t = 2.11, p = .04. The pattern of independent prediction thus again formed an "incoherent triangle" (+,+,-). In none of these regressions was multicpllinearity evident (all VIFs < 2). This incoherent triangle pattern of results did not change even i f also controlling for sex, age, ethnicity (Chinese vs. other), and religious group (Buddhist = 1, Christian = 2, Mus l im = 3 ). The significance of the negative prediction of religious intolerance by religious devotion was dampened by reduced degrees of freedom from adding these four extra control variables (p = .12), but the negative direction of the prediction remained the same, as did the Beta weight (p = -.14). The independent positive relationship between religious devotion and coalitional rigidity was at least nominally evident in all three well-represented religious groups in the sample, p = .38 for Muslims (N = 41), p = .48 for Christians (N=48), p = .54 for Buddhists (N = 81) and P = .57 for other (N = 20), all ps except other < .001 (p for other = .005). With regard to independently predicting religious intolerance, the predictive tension between religious devotion and coalitional rigidity was also nominally evident among Buddhists, Christians, Musl ims and other (though religious devotion was a significantly negative predictor of intolerance only among Buddhists). This pattern is graphed in Figure 4.1. This order reflects the rank order for religious tolerance assessed later in the results. 65 CD o c 03 ® o c CD c o a c a) CD ~i 1 r Buddhist Christian Muslim Other Full sample • Devotion U Rigidity * p < . 0 5 *** p <= . 0 0 1 Figure 4 .1 . Separate multiple regressions with religious devotion and coalitional rigidity independently predicting religious intolerance, by religion. Note that the pattern here is very much like the pattern for predicting scapegoating, except in this case, rigidity is a stronger overall predictor than devotion is. Finally, as in the B B C study, I ranked each religious group (Buddhist, Christian, Muslim) with regard to religious devotion, coalitional rigidity and religious.intolerance. These rankings are listed in Table 4 .1 . 66 T a b l e 4 .1 Rankings and means of religious devotion, coalitional rigidity and religious intolerance in each religious group Religious Devotion Coalitional Rigidity Religious Intolerance 1. Mus l im (6.67) 2. Christian (6.36) 3. Buddhist (5.07) 1. Mus l im (6.15) 2. Christian (5:51) 3. Buddhist (4.68) 1. M u s l i m (5.67) 2. Christian (4.95) 3. Buddhist (3.93) As with Chapter 3, Muslims were high on religious devotion and coalitional rigidity, Buddhists low, and Christians in the middle. Unlike with scapegoating, however, intolerance followed the same order of religions as devotion and rigidity. Interestingly, whether Mulsims are near the top or the bottom, religious devotion and coalitional rigidity make opposite predictions of religious intolerance. Another issue is the Mus l im vs. Christian and Buddhist difference is confounded with ethnicity in this case, with Muslims being almost exclusively Malay and Christians and Buddhists being almost exclusively Chinese 9 . The Christian vs. Buddhist differences, however, are not confounded with ethnicity, and may reflect a more stable intergroup difference, as Christians were also higher than Buddhists on scapegoating in Chapter 3. 9 There were 4 Chinese Muslims in the sample whose religious devotion, coalitional rigidity and religious intolerance measures were 7.45, 6.71 and 5.5 respectively—about the same as the Malay population in intolerance, nominally higher in religiosity measures. A l l were taking classes at a Saudi-funded institution in Kuala Lumpur. 67 4.5 D i s c u s s i o n These results, while different from those of Chapter 3 in several key ways, were a replication with regard to the predictive tension between religious devotion and coalitional rigidity in predicting religious intolerance. This predictive tension cannot be explained by multicollinearity. The next chapter replicates this finding again in a Canadian cultural milieu and uses measures of intolerance that are more saliently suggestive of violence and oppression. 68 C h a p t e r 5 . E m p i r i c a l T e s t : R e l i g i o u s I n t o l e r a n c e a n d S u p p o r t f o r V i o l e n c e i n M u l t i - R e l i g i o u s C a n a d a 5 . 1 . I n t r o d u c t i o n This study conceptually replicated in Canada the studies from Chapter 3 and Chapter 4. Again, the purpose was to explore whether religious devotion and coalitional rigidity make opposing predictions of intolerance—including more saliently oppressive and violent forms of intolerance than scapegoating (Chapter 3) or moral exclusion (Chapter 4). 5 . 2 . O v e r v i e w o f S t u d y a n d S p e c i f i c H y p o t h e s e s This study used all of the same religious devotion and coalitional rigidity scales discussed in Chapter 4, though it added a second religious devotion measure with more items and higher internal reliability. As in Chapter 4, the purpose of this study was to predict the roles these aspects played in predicting intolerance: including not only attitudes towards humane religious pluralism, as embodied in the fictional character Piscine Patel, but towards all the characters (unlike in Chapter 4, attitudes towards P i were significantly correlated with attitudes towards all the characters). Intolerance measures looked not only at general moral exclusion of pluralistic Piscine and other religious outsiders, but also at political intolerance for such outsiders (using a previously validated scale), aggressive feelings towards such outsiders, and religious/moral-aggression generally. I used the same edited passage used in the Chapter 4, and again I measured religious group differences in religious devotion, 69 coalitional rigidity and religious intolerance for all major religious groups substantially represented in the sample (Nonreligious, Buddhist, Christian). 5.3. M e t h o d 194 psychology undergraduates from the University of British Columbia completed the study for one academic credit. Participants were 128 women and 64 men, 109 East Asians, 53 Caucasians, 32 other or unidentified; 71 indicating "no religion" or agnostic, 71 Christians, 23 Buddhists, and 22 other or unidentified, and 6 and atheists. The atheists were excluded from the analysis 1 0. The mean age was 20. The predictor variables for this study were nearly identical to those in Chapter 4, religious devotion, exclusivity, fundamentalism, dogmatism and authoritarianism. We also added a "Divine Devotion" scale, adapted from items used by Fiorito & Ryan (1998) to assess the more spiritual aspect of religious belief. Sample items from this scale are included in Appendix A as mentioned in Chapter 4. We modified some of the items used in Chapter 4 to produce a "moral exclusion" index, included a validated measure of political intolerance (Sullivan, Pierson & Marcus, 1982) ["political intolerance"], and included measures more explicitly tapping religious aggression: feeling joy at the ki l l ing of the characters ("violent antipathy"), and four strongly-worded items indicating support for "ki l l ing the wicked" ("moral violence"). These measures are listed in Appendix C. In addition, we counterbalanced scales for order, with one version of the questionnaire ordered from not clearly religious to clearly religious (dogmatism, 1 0 The analysis does not change if atheists are included, but certain questions in some scales were phrased to presume some openness to religious belief. 70 authoritarianism, fundamentalism, exclusivism, intrinsic religiosity, religious spirituality) and the other ordered in the opposite direction. In each case, scales came first, story second, and religious intolerance outcome measures third. The analyses performed were the same as those of Chapter 4. 5.4. R e s u l t s When predicting the arithmetic mean of the exclusivity, fundamentalism, dogmatism and authoritarianism scales ("coalitional rigidity") with the mean of Hoge's (1972) intrinsic religious motivation scale and divine devotion ("religious devotion") [controlling for the arithmetic mean of moral exclusion, political intolerance, violent antipathy, and moral violence ("religious intolerance")], religious devotion positively predicted coalitional rigidity, P = .62, S p = .05, t = 13.34, p < .001. When predicting religious intolerance with coalitional rigidity (controlling for religious devotion), coalitional rigidity positively predicted religious intolerance, P = .76, S p = .08, t = 10.13, p < .001. When predicting religious intolerance with religious devotion (controlling for coalitional rigidity), religious devotion negatively predicted religious intolerance, p = -.38, S p = .06, t = 6.38, p < .001. A s in Chapters 3 and 4, the pattern of independent prediction again formed an "incoherent triangle" (+,+,-). In none of these regressions was multicollinearity evident (all VEFs < 2). This incoherent triangle pattern of results did not change even i f also controlling for sex, age, ethnicity (East Asian vs. other), and religious group (Christian = 1, Nonreligious = 2, Buddhist = 3 1 ' ) . The significance of the negative prediction of religious devotion by religious intolerance was reduced in its beta " As with Chapter 4, this order reflects the rank order for religious tolerance assessed later in the results. 71 weight (P = -.25), but the negative direction of the prediction remained the same, and significance remained high, p < .001. The independent positive relationship between religious devotion and coalitional rigidity was evident in all three well-represented religious groups in the sample, P = .70 for Christians (N = 71), p = .33 for the non-religious (N=71), p = .31 for Buddhists (N = 23) and p = .34 for other (N = 22), all ps except other < .01 (p for other = .05). With regard to independently predicting religious intolerance, the predictive tension between religious devotion and coalitional rigidity was also nominally evident among Christians, Nonreligious, Buddhists and other (though only significantly among Christians). This pattern is graphed in Figure 5.1. 72 CD O c ro i_ Q) O -t—> c o T3 CD i_ Q. c CD 'o ifc CD O o c o 'tn CO CD i_ O) CD rr 1 0.8 0.6 0.4 0.2 -0 -0.2 -0.4 -0.6 -0.8 *** *** -***-*** I *** 1 1 1 I Christian Nonreligious Buddhist Other Full sample • Devotion • Rigidity p <= .001 F i g u r e 5 . 1 . Separate multiple regressions with religious devotion and coalitional rigidity independently predicting religious intolerance, by religion. As in Chapter 4 , rigidity is a stronger overall predictor than devotion i s 1 2 . Unlike Chapter 4, however, the effect is found primarily among Christians. 1 2 For this dataset, a meaningful factor analysis was also possible. I submitted all devotion, rigidity, and intolerance variables to a factor analysis with direct oblimin rotation using principle axis factoring. There were two clear factors that explained 66% of the variance. The pattern matrix offered empirical support for my theoretical organization of the constructs. A l l devotional and coalitional variables loaded heavily on the first factor ("religious-devotion-coalitional-rigidity"). The four intolerance variables all loaded heavily on the second factor ("religious intolerance"), but did not load substantially on the first factor. The fact that all intolerance variables load on a second factor but not the first validates each of these measures as relevant to a general construct of religious intolerance that is distinct from religion more broadly conceived. The two-faced nature of the "religious-devotion-coaltional-rigidity" factor is evident when investigating the double loadings of devotional and rigidity variables on the religious intolerance factor. When religious devotion variables double-loaded (1 out of 2 variables), they loaded in the tolerant direction on the intolerance factor. When coalitional rigidity variables double loaded (3 out of 4 variables) they loaded in the intolerant direction. 73 Finally, as in Chapters 3 and 4,1 ranked each religious group (Christian, Nonreligious, Buddhist) with regard to religious devotion, coalitional rigidity and religious.intolerance. These rankings are listed in Table 5.1. T a b l e 5.1 Rankings and means of religious devotion, coalitional rigidity and religious intolerance in each religious group Religious Devotion Coalitional Rigidity Religious Intolerance 1. Christian (5.78) 1. Christian (4.32) 1. Buddhist (3.60) 2. Buddhist (4.03) 2. Buddhist (3.63) 2. Nonreligious (3.49) 3. Nonreligious (3.53) 3. Nonreligious (3.54) 3. Christian (3.11) As with Chapters 3 and 4, Christians were higher on religious devotion and coalitional rigidity than Buddhists. Unlike with Chapters 3 and 4, however, Christians were less intolerant than Buddhists rather than more. Chapters 3 and 4 offered some control for national or ethnic background, however, and in this sample Christian vs. Buddhist affiliation was somewhat confounded with Euro vs. East Asian ethnicity and Canadian vs. non-Canadian national identity. When controlling for ethnicity (East Asian vs. Other) and national identity (Canadian vs. other), there were no differences between Buddhists, Nonreligious and Christians, F < 1. If confining the sample to only ethnic East Asians to better replicate the nature of the sample in Study 4, a M A N O V A on the four intolerance measures (controlling for 74 national identity) was significant when contrasting Christians, Buddhists and the Nonreligious (p = .03). There was a significant difference among Christians, Buddhists and the Nonreligious with regard to moral exclusion (p = .02), but not with regard to any other measure. The estimated marginal means on this measure of moral exclusion replicated Chapter 4's finding that Christians were more morally excluding towards outgroups than Buddhists, M = 4.64 S E = .16 for Christians and M = 4.16 SE = .20 for Buddhists. Christians were also more morally excluding than the Nonreligious, M = 4.07 SE = .14. 5.5. D i s c u s s i o n This study in Canada replicated and extended the finding of the Malaysia study in Chapter 4 and also conceptually replicated the B B C study of Chapter 3. Again, the predictive tension between religious devotion and coalitional rigidity cannot be explained by multicollinearity. This study shows that this contrast applies not only to simple moral exclusion, but also to more palpable forms of intolerance, including political intolerance, violent antipathy and moral violence. The findings on cultural difference in this study suggest, together with the studies. of Chapters 3 and 4, that when ethnicity is controlled for Buddhists are at least as tolerant as Christians and in some cases more so. In no study and with no measure of intolerance did I find that Christians of the same ethnicity were more tolerant than Buddhists of the same ethnicity. In contrast to this Christian-Buddhist difference, other religious differences in intolerance appear to jump around depending on the measure used—e.g. Muslims are towards the bottom with regard to scapegoating, but towards the top with 75 regard to moral exclusion. Chapter 6 w i l l explore whether any of the contrasts between Christians and Buddhists hold up when controlling for religious devotion and coalitional cohesion. 76 C h a p t e r 6 . A n a l y s i s : H o w Y o u B e l i e v e o r W h a t Y o u B e l i e v e ? T h e C a s e o f C h r i s t i a n s a n d B u d d h i s t s 6 . 1 . I n t r o d u c t i o n It would not be an exaggeration to say there is a wide gulf between Christianity and Buddhism in their respective reputations for tolerance. A google search for "Christians are intolerant" yields 2,720 entries (impressive for a three word sentence), while a search for "Buddhists are intolerant" yields three entries 1 3. For a century, or two at least, Westerners who have committed to Buddhism have arguably chosen it over the more culturally available Christianity not only out of a search for the exotic, but because of the latter's greater reputation for tolerance (Tweed, 2001). One issue that is much in dispute by public pundits on the value and danger of religion is whether intolerance-relevant features of certain religions' texts make anyone who believes'in those religions chronically more inclined to tolerance or intolerance. Generally, both believers and non-believers would agree that the content of their beliefs matters. The alternative viewpoint can sound preposterous and can be parodied thus: "People are not really motivated by religion. Religion is used as a rationale for other aims—political, economic, and social. Consequently, the specific content of religious doctrines is beside the point" (Harris, 2007). To the extent that religious processes are related to transmission of propositions and ideas, then the teachings of any specific 1 3 This search is from April 20, 2007. Even acknowledging that there are 1.3 million google hits for "Christians are" vs. 120,000 for "Buddhists are" this is only a 10: 1 ratio. Adding the word "intolerant" makes it into a 1,000 : 1 ratio. The gap appears to have intensified (or google has become a more all-encompassing search engine). When I did the google search in early 2005, "Christians are intolerant" got 756 hits, while "Buddhists are intolerant" got 2. Another interesting search: "Christians are violent" (5,510 hits) vs. "Buddhists are violent" (12 hits). 77 religion should indeed be consequential. The question is not whether specific beliefs are consequential in general, but how consequential they are to religious intolerance specifically, and what form their consequence is likely to take. To what extent the various written texts of Buddhism and Christianity enable their divergent reputations for tolerance is a matter of reasonable dispute. Since exclusivity makes intolerance more likely, Christians, insofar as three studies have found them to be more exclusivist than Buddhists, should also be more intolerant, consistent with their reputation. Since religious devotion, when exclusivity and other rigidity variables are held constant, can make tolerance more likely, however, The inclination to exclusivity, while possibly natural given its strong correlation with devotion across nations and religions, is arguably better triggered by Christian religious teaching than Buddhist religious teaching. Some theologians might argue that Jesus forbade intolerant strains of exclusivity (Luke 9:51-56), but the most reputation-making representatives of Christianity generally interpret Jesus' central teaching to be the necessity of believing in his divinity for salvation. Perhaps the doctrines of any religion may be considered important not so much for the logical implications of their content, but for the empirical implications. Religious doctrines—in spite of often presenting onerous challenges to the grain of human nature—may contain teachings that set off pre-existing "natural" inclinations to certain kinds of religious or moral orientations. The more teachings of this kind, perhaps, the more a religion's followers w i l l ignore or downplay the other teachings that run against their natural inclinations as religious people, even i f these other teachings are more numerous. 78 Chapters 3, 4 and 5 have all found some evidence that Buddhists are often less intolerant than Christians and never more intolerant (at least when ethnicity was controlled for). A much more consistent finding, however, was that Christians were higher on both religious devotion and coalitional rigidity. To the extent Christians of a culture are almost never less intolerant than Buddhists of the same culture, this may simply be because the teachings of Christianity more effectively trigger a natural inclination among religious people to be coalitionally rigid. Even i f we can statistically control for ethnic and cultural affiliation, teachings do not exist in a cultural vacuum, and this makes it difficult to know what words themselves would do in the absence of a certain interpretive framework set by economics, history, topography, etc. Even i f we cannot speak with certainty about Christian teaching per se, we can at least talk more vaguely of a Christian "gestalt": a combination of Christian teaching and the current contours of Christian economic and political culture. This Christian gestalt may trigger coalitional rigidity so effectively that it is difficult to overpower with its more tolerance-predicting psychological accomplice religious devotion, or with the anti-intolerance teachings of Jesus for that matter. 6.2. O v e r v i e w o f S t u d y a n d S p e c i f i c H y p o t h e s e s The present study reviews the Buddhist and Christian data of the last three studies and asks the question: does how you believe—devotional vs. coalitional—matter more than what you believe—Christian vs. Buddhist? That is, can differences between Buddhists and Christians in intolerance be reduced to differences in the interplay of coalitional rigidity and religious devotion? The working hypothesis of this chapter is that 79 there wi l l be no intolerance differences between Christians and Buddhists when coalitional rigidity and religious devotion are accounted for. Even leaving ethnicity and nationality to vary freely, I expect that whether a sample shows Christians as more intolerant than Buddhists or Buddhists as more intolerant than Christians, these differences w i l l disappear when coalitional rigidity and religious devotion are controlled for. The past three studies have already shown that coalitional rigidity and religious devotion remain significant independent predictors of intolerance when other variables— including religious identification—are controlled for. Ethnicity is a variable that sometimes explains (and can even suggest a reversal) of observed Buddhist-Christian differences in intolerance. Yet Buddhist-Christian differences in intolerance often remain even when controlling for ethnicity and nationality. W i l l the interplay of coalitional and devotional inclinations better account for Buddhist-Christian differences? For each of the three studies in Chapters 3, 4 and 5,1 confined the sample to Buddhists and Christians and then examined whether controlling for the interplay of devotional and coalitional religiosity was effective at eliminating any zero-order differences between Buddhists and Christians in intolerance. 6.3. M e t h o d ; For the B B C study, I analyzed 254 Buddhist participants and 4710 Christians. Among Buddhist participants, 113 were male and 141 female; 5 were from India, 7 from Indonesia, 1 from Russia, 225 from South Korea, 7 from the U . K . and 9 from the U . S . A . ; 47 were between 18 and 24, 68 were between 25 and 34, 54 were between 35 and 44, 52 were between 45 and 54, and 33 were 55 or older. Among Christian participants, 2031 male and 2679 female; 31 were from India, 156 from Indonesia, 14 from Israel, 294 from Lebanon, 935 from Mexico, 646 from Nigeria, 774 from Russia, 337 from South Korea, 711 from the United Kingdom, and 812 from the U . S . A ; 883 were between the ages of 18 and 24, 1019 between 25 and 34, 917 between 35 and 44, 797 between 45 and 54, and 1091 over 55. For the Malaysia study, I analyzed 81 Buddhist and 48 Christian participants Among Buddhist participants, 24 were male, 55 were female and 2 unidentified; 78 were ethnic Chinese and 3 were unidentified; the mean age was 24. Among Christian participants, 41 were female and 7 were male; 42 were ethnic Chinese and 6 were other or unidentified; the mean age was 22. For the Canada study, I analyzed 24 Buddhist and 71 Christian participants. Among Buddhist participants, 9 were male, 14 were female and 1 unidentified; 21 were ethnic East Asian, 2 were Caucasian and 1 unidentified; the mean age was 21. Among Christian participants, 50 were female and 21 were male; 36 were East Asian, 27 were Caucasian and 8 were other or unidentified; the mean age was 20. For each study I ran hierarchical regressions (binary logistic for the B B C study, linear regression for the Malaysia and Canada studies). The first step of the regression predicted that study's measure of intolerance with religious affiliation (Buddhist vs. Christian), and then the second step added coalitional and devotional variables as predictors. Finally I added other demographics: sex and age in all three samples; nationality and ethnicity in the Malaysia and Canada samples (nationality as Malaysia vs. other and ethnicity as Chinese vs. other in the Malaysian sample; nationality as Canada 81 vs. other and ethnicity as East Asian vs. other in the Canadian sample); and work type and Asian nation status (Indonesia, India and South Korea vs. other) in the B B C study. 6.4. R e s u l t s In the B B C sample, when analyzing the differences between Buddhists (=1) and Christians (=2) in scapegoating, the zero-order difference was significant, Wald =11.46, O R = 1.85 [95% C I = 1.29 - 2.64], p = .001 (Christians scoring higher). Interestingly, this significant difference remained even when adding all ten of the coalitional and devotional variables examined in the B B C study to the regression, and also when adding sex, age, and work type. Only when adding Asian nation status to the regression was the effect of Christian vs. Buddhist affiliation eliminated, Wald = 1.52, OR = 1.32 p = .22, ns. Wi th scapegoating the hypothesis of this Chapter was not supported—the interplay of coalitional and devotional inclinations was not sufficient to explain scapegoating differences between Buddhists and Christians. These differences are only eliminated when accounting for national background. However, it was still the case that certain coalitonal and devotional variables remained independent predictors in the expected direction: exclusivity was a positive independent predictor (p < .001), and the following were all negative: afterlife belief (p = .007), religion is not politics (p < .001), God is not war (p < .001) and theodicy (p < .001). There were no other significant predictors in the full regression except for Asian nation status, Wald = 9.641, OR = .62 [95% CI = .45 -.84],p = .002. In the Malaysian sample, when analyzing the difference in intolerance (moral exclusion of Pi) between Buddhists (=1) and Christians (=2), the zero-order difference 82 was significant, P = .26, S p = .09, p = .004 (again, Christians scoring higher). This zero-order difference was eliminated entirely, however, by adding the five devotional and coalitional variables of the study to the regression, F < 1 for religious affiliation. This elimination of the effect supported the hypothesis, that coalitional and devotional inclinations are more important for predicting tolerance than religious affiliation. Adding sex, age, ethnicity and nation to the regression did not change the result, and none of these variables were significant in regression. The only variables that were significant predictors in the full regression were exclusivity (positive), p < .001, and religious devotion (negative), p = .04. In the Canadian sample, when analyzing the difference between Buddhists (=1) and Christians (=2) in intolerance (mean of four intolerance scales), the zero-order difference was only marginally significant to begin with, P = .19, S p = .11, p = .07. This made any elimination of the effect unspectacular, though indeed when coalitional rigidity and religious devotion variables were included, the effect was reduced to non-significance, P = .13, S p= .10, p = .19, ns 1 4 , supporting the hypothesis. When the other demographics were included, there was no hint of a difference in religious affiliation, F < 1. In this case, the only significant independent effect in the full regression was the negative effect of the divine devotion scale on intolerance (p = .01). If coalitional rigidity was represented by the arithmetic mean of exclusivity, authoritarianism, fundamentalism H- Interestingly, the effect of religious affiliation was actually strengthened if controlling only for the four coalitional rigidity variables, yS = .29, Sp= AO, p = .005, and was only reduced to non-significance when the two religious devotion variables were included in the regression. This reduction in effect, from (3 = .29 to P = .13, is somewhat more impressive. It would appear that it is the greater religious devotion of Christians that contributes to their greater tolerance in the Canada study. 83 and dogmatism rather than the four scales separately (which were highly intercorrelated), it too remained as a significant (positive) predictor in the full regression, (p < . 001 ) 1 5 . 6.5. D i s c u s s i o n The evidence is mixed that devotional and coalitional religiosity can fully account for the difference between Buddhists and Christians in intolerance. The Malaysian and Canadian studies which used psychometrically sound psychology of religion scales found this to be the case, but the B B C study did not. It does appear, however, that even the Buddhist Christian-differences in the B B C study do not survive i f controlling for the right demographics, Asian nation status in that case. Also , in every study, the most reliable surviving predictors in full regression were scales used to measure either religious devotion or coalitional rigidity or both.- Also , surviving devotional and coalitional predictors always predicted intolerance in a direction consistent with the evidence of the Chapters 3, 4 and 5 (devotion negative, rigidity positive). Other surviving predictors did not tell as coherent a story: for instance, East Asian ethnicity was a positive independent predictor of intolerance in the Canada study, but Asian nation status was a negative independent predictor of intolerance in the B B C study. From the evidence of these three samples, it indeed appears that how you believe—devotionally and coalitionally—is more relevant to intolerance than what you believe—the religion you are affiliated with, and all its associated texts and doctrines. This is at least i f the two religions in question are Buddhism and Christianity. 1 5 When this change was' made, ethnicity (other = predictor (p = .04). 1, East Asian - 2) also became a significant positive 84 6.6. S u p p l e m e n t a r y a n a l y s i s — R e l i g i o u s I d e n t i f i c a t i o n Unlike Christianity (and most other monotheisms at least), it is arguably not an essential part of Buddhist religious devotion and practice to believe either in supernatural agency or to set a firm boundary between the beliefs and practices of one's own religious coalition and the beliefs and practices of others. Therefore, the notion of "religiousness" involving a combination of worship of some supernatural God-like being and the setting of some coalitional religious boundary between one's co-religionists and others might seem very alien to some Buddhists, at least to the minority of Buddhists who are well acquainted with the atheistic and in some ways counter-coalitional teachings of the Buddha. Buddhists would likely claim that both Buddhist devotion and Buddhist community cohesion have a very different character informed by very different assumptions, and thus that low Buddhist scores on Western-designed "religious ' devotion" or "coalitional rigidity" scales may say very little about how devoted or community-oriented Buddhists really are relative to Christians or anyone else. While this is almost certainly true, it also appears true that in spite of Buddhist doctrines, the people who call themselves Buddhists are not immune to belief in supernatural agents or coalitional rigidity, though certainly they appear more immune than Christians. This vulnerability of the Buddhist cultural immune system to theism and coalitional rigidity among its adherents suggests that much of what I am calling religious may be more hardwired than doctrinally inculcated. Moreover, i f serious Buddhists avoided devotion to the supernatural and coalitional rigidity, then as identification with Buddhism rises, evidence of monotheist-style religious devotion and coalitional rigidity 85 should fall or stay the same. This can be tested, since in the demographic measures of the Malaysia and Canada studies, I asked participants how much they identified with their religion on a 1 to 9 scale. I combined the samples of Christians and Buddhists in Malaysia and Canada to investigate religious identification with Ns that are not controversially small (N = 101 for Buddhists; N = 114 for Christians). For Buddhists and Christians, zero-order correlations between identification and religious devotion were positive and significant, r = .30 and r = .68 respectively, ps < .005. The same was true for coalitional cohesion, r = .38 and r = .56 respectively, ps < .001. If predicting religious identification in regression, religious devotion, but N O T coalitional rigidity, was an independent positive predictor of Christian identification, |3 = .60, p < .001 vs. P = .11, p = .31, ns. Coalitional rigidity, but N O T religious devotion, was an independent positive predictor of Buddhist identification, (3 = .10, t < 1 vs. P = .32 p = .008. Clearly, the devotional and coalitional measures are more relevant to Christian devotion and coalitional cohesion, but they are not inappropriate for Buddhists either. Certainly Buddhists who are more identified with Buddhism are not any less like monotheists. Surprisingly, it is the coalitional rigidity aspect of monotheistic religiosity that is most relevant to Buddhist identification, whereas this aspect is secondary in Christian identification. In Malaysia, the zero-order correlation between Buddhist identification and religious devotion (measured as intrinsic religiosity only) was non-significant but nominally positive, r(81) = .17, p = .12, ns; the zero-order correlation between identification and coalitional rigidity was also positive and considerably stronger, r(81) 86 = .36, p = .001. In Canada, these zero-order correlations were reversed in effect and not significant, given the low N for Buddhists, but still nominally positive: r(20) = .37, p = .11, ns and r(20) = .11, p = .63, ns respectively. It is important to compare Buddhists to non-religious and Christians in this respect. For participants who identified themselves as non-religious (all in the Canada study), identification was not correlated with religious devotion or with coalitional rigidity, r(74) = .16, p = .17, ns and r(74) = -.01, ns respectively. For Christians in Malaysia, the correlations were r(48) = .58 and r(48) = .52 respectively; For Christians in Canada the correlations were r(69) = .76 and r(69) = .56 respectively, all ps < .001. Buddhists appear to be showing up in between the non-religious and the Christian in what their religious identification predicts, whereas i f Buddhism were radically psychologically different from Christianity, and not really a "religion" at all, then Buddhist identification should be more like that of the non-religious. The evidence of the identification data suggests that religious psychology wi l l come to characterize any movement that takes a systematic and community-based approach to key concerns of existence, even i f such a movement attempts to do this by non-religious means. 6.7. G e n e r a l D i s c u s s i o n The findings of this chapter suggest that while religions are certainly different from each other in content, and this content is psychologically consequential, the slate on which these consequences play out is far, from a blank, one. While the evidence is very preliminary, a reasonable hypothesis to derive from this data is that those who are more religious (in any religion) are naturally predisposed to respond to and identify with both 87 devotional and coalitional content in their religious texts and doctrines. Anti-devotional or anti-coalitional content (to the extent it exists in a religious text) may be less likely to be incorporated temperamentally into religious people's sense of identification, and may ( even be harder to preserve in memory. Moreover, it does not appear that religious texts (or gestalts) have much to do with setting the empirical relationships between religious devotion, coalitional rigidity and intolerance. These patterns of inter-relationship can be found independent of religious identification. The upshot of this is that it is likely difficult to sociologically engineer either a "religion of peace and tolerance" or a "religion of war and intolerance." Even i f a religious text is predominantly devotional and anti-coalitional, this w i l l run against the grain of people's psychological inclinations. Religious people wi l l generally ignore or identificationally downplay the anti-coalitional passages and interpret coalitionally any passages that they can. The converse is the case with a religious text that is predominantly coalitional and anti-devotional. It should, however, be possible to nudge religious people who are both devotional and coalitional to see the difference between their two inclinations and to value one over the other, and commit to one over the other. A l l studies up to now have dealt primarily with long established religions. The next chapter wi l l speak to how the dynamics of religious devotion and coalitional rigidity play out in a relatively newer religion that is arguably more fundamentalist and conservative, and also one of the fastest growing churches in the world: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormons). 88 C h a p t e r 7 . E m p i r i c a l T e s t : R e l i g i o u s D e v o t i o n , C o a l i t i o n a l R i g i d i t y a n d R e l i g i o u s I n t o l e r a n c e A m o n g M o r m o n s 7 . 1 . I n t r o d u c t i o n While those who would be identified as "fundamentalists" were likely included in the B B C study, and several of the Malaysian and Canadian participants scored highly on fundamentalism and other measures of coalitonal rigidity, none of these studies have deliberately sampled individuals highly likely to hold fundamentalist views. I attempted to address this concern by.measuring devotional religiosity, coalitional rigidity and intolerance in a sample of Mormons at the Idaho campus of Brigham Young University with the assistance of John Rector and Sheldon Solomon. Mormons are among the most conservative religious groups in the United States, and guidelines for interpreting Mormon belief are kept within strict parameters by religious authorities in the church, authorities who include a living prophet who is considered to be in direct and privileged communication with God. Mormons are notorious for their religious endorsement of polygamy in the 1800s and also for refusing to allow people with dark skin to hold the priesthood until 1978. The predominantly Mormon, and Mormon-run, state of Utah is more reliably Republican than the former slave states of the South. Ezra Taft Benson, a former prophet for the church, once answered an interviewer who asked i f a good Mormon could be a liberal democrat: "I think it would be very hard i f he was living the gospel and understood it" (Mormon Quotes, 2007). Could religious devotion still be an independent predictor of religious tolerance in an exclusively Mormon sample? 89 O f course, Mormonism's reputation is not confined to histories of polygamy and racism. For a conservative state, the predominantly Mormon state of Utah is remarkably low on crime and violence. The culture of honor that sustains psychological inclinations to respond violently to insult in Southern states (Nisbett & Cohen, 1996) is not in evidence in Mormon communities. Mormons are internationally known not only for being "nice" but also "fun" and even "cool ." Also , a history of persecution against Mormons in the United States, and continuing anti-Mormon activism from some conservative evangelical Christian groups arguably makes many Mormons inclined to consider religious intolerance unMormon. Mormon devotion predicting religious intolerance is far from being a foregone conclusion. 7.2. O v e r v i e w o f S t u d y a n d S p e c i f i c H y p o t h e s e s This study was originally conceived as an experimental study. The experiment primed mortality salience (which as discussed in earlier chapters often causes intolerance and support for violence) as well as salience of God along with a control condition. The purpose was to determine how these primes impacted religious intolerance among Mormons as a more "fundamentalist" religious group. The experimental aspect of the study wi l l not be discussed, as significant effects by condition only emerge under very specific circumstances, and there were no differences between conditions on religious tolerance as an overall measure. Even without experimental effects, however, this study is relevant to the investigation of religion and religious intolerance. As in Chapters 3, 4 and 5, participants completed scales relevant to religious devotion, coalitional rigidity and religious 90 intolerance. They also completed scales testing for "desirable responding" reflecting self-deceptive self-enhancement (Paulhus, 1991): seeking to portray oneself as particularly and even unrealistically good with regard to certain thoughts and behaviors (claiming to never lie, never look at "sexy books", etc). It is theoretically possible that independent relationships of religious devotion with intolerance grow primarily from devoted people being more motivated to present themselves in a socially desirable way. The hypotheses of this study are that religious intolerance, fundamentalism and religious devotion wi l l form an "incoherent triangle" of independent prediction even among Mormons, and that the predictive tension between religious devotion and fundamentalism wi l l not be explained by self-deceptive self-enhancement. 7.3. M e t h o d 267 psychology undergraduates from the Idaho campus of Brigham Young University completed the study for academic credit. Participants were 151 women, 91 men and 25 did not indicate their sex; 215 Caucasians, 24 other and 28 did not indicate their race (likely Caucasian). Religiously^ 240 participants were Mormon, one was other, and 26 did not indicate their religion (likely Mormon). The mean age of the sample was 22. The measures that the participants completed which were relevant to the hypotheses were Hoge's (1972) Intrinsic Religious Motivation scale ("religious devotion"), Altemeyer & Hunsberger's (1992) Religious Fundamentalism scale ("fundamentalism"), and Sullivan et al's (1982) political intolerance scale (used also in 91 Chapter 5). The political intolerance scale was completed with regard to "Multireligious people like P i " , Hindus, Catholics, Muslims, Jews and Atheists, thus making it more explicitly a religious intolerance scale ("religious intolerance"). Participants also completed Paulhus' (1991) Balanced Index of Desirable Responding (Version 6) ("self enhancement") and John's (1990) 44 item measure of the B i g Five Index (BFI), measuring extraversion, agreeableness, emotional stability, conscientiousness, and openness. A s in Chapters 4 and 5, participants read an excerpt from Martel's (2001) Life of P i . Participants first completed the B i g 5, religious devotion, and self-enhancement items all mixed up together so that the character of each scale could not be readily detected. The purpose of this originally was to disguise a pre-measure of religious devotion. Participants then completed one of three experimental conditions, a mortality salience condition in which they wrote for five minutes about what would happen to them when they died; a divinity salience condition where they wrote instead about what happens to them when they encounter the divine, and a dental pain condition where they wrote about what happens to them when they experience dental pain. After completing the P A N A S -X (Watson & Clark, 1991) as a measure of affect, participants then read the edited passage from Life of P i used in Chapters 4 and 5. Upon completing the passage and answering comprehension questions, participants were asked how much they liked and agreed with P i . They then completed the religious intolerance measures (targets being "Multi-religious people like P i " , Hindus, Jews, Muslims, Catholics, and atheists) and fundamentalism measures, a shorter version of the P A N A S , and demographics. 92 A s with Chapters 3, 4 and 5,1 employed three multiple regressions to investigate whether religious devotion, fundamentalism and religious intolerance formed an incoherent (+,+,-) triangle of independent prediction. I then analyzed whether these results held i f controlling for demographics, as well as for the Big-5 and self-enhancement. I also analyzed whether religious devotion and fundamentalism differentially predicted self-enhancement, and I conducted zero-order correlations of all relevant variables in the study. To investigate whether any negative independent prediction of religious devotion by religious intolerance resulted from a statistical artifact, I controlled for multicollinearity in multiple regression. I also ranked and listed the means of Mormons along with the means of substantially represented religions in the Canadian study in order of religious devotion, fundamentalism and religious intolerance. Finally, I examined whether there was any difference between experimentalconditions in Mormon political tolerance of other religions. 7.4. R e s u l t s When predicting fundamentalism with religious devotion (controlling for religious intolerance), religious devotion positively predicted fundamentalism, (3 = .48, S p = .05, t(253) = 8.81, p < .001. When predicting religious intolerance with fundamentalism (controlling for religious devotion), fundamentalism positively predicted religious intolerance, J3 = .21, S p = .07, t(253) = 2.98, p = .003. When predicting religious intolerance with religious devotion (controlling for coalitionalrigidity), religious devotion negatively predicted religious intolerance, (3 = -.13, S p = .07, t (253) = -1.90, p = .06. The pattern of independent prediction thus again formed an "incoherent 93 triangle" (+,+,-). In none of these regressions was multicollinearity evident (all VIFs < 2). If also controlling for sex, age, and ethnicity (Caucasian vs. other), the independent negative effect of religious devotion disappeared (the positive effect of fundamentalism remained, p = .03). However, none of these control variables was even close to being a significant predictor, either zero-order or in regression, (rs < .06, ts < 1) so this elimination of the effect should be interpreted with caution, and may be a result of excluding listwise those who did not report sex, race or age data. If instead excluding missing cases pairwise, or completing missing data with the item mean, the negative independent effect of religious devotion remained closer to significance, p = . 11 and p = .09 respectively. In both of these cases, race was the only other significant independent predictor, p = .05, with the Caucasian majority being slightly less religiously intolerant. If controlling instead for the Big-5 and self-enhancement, the predictive effect of both religious devotion and fundamentalism remained. In fact the prediction of intolerance by fundamentalism and religious devotion became equal in magnitude and significance, and still opposite in predictive direction: positive for fundamentalism, P = .16, S p = .07, t(252) = 2.17, p = .03; negative for religious devotion, p = -.16, S p = .07, t(252) = -2.12, p = .04. The only other independent predictor of intolerance in this regression was openness (negative), p = -.21, S p = .07, t(252) = -3.07, p = .002. Religious devotion was a better predictor of self-enhancement than fundamentalism: for religious devotion p = .31, p < .001; for fundamentalism, p = .11, p = .11, ns. However, self enhancement was not a significant independent predictor of religious intolerance (nor even a zero-order correlate, r = .01). There is thus little reason 94 to believe that self enhancement has anything to do with the incoherent triangle of relationships between religious devotion, fundamentalism and religious intolerance. The B Y U sample did not present meaningful opportunities for cross-religious comparison. However, all the important measures of religious inclination and religious intolerance completed by the B Y U sample were also completed by the Canada sample in Chapter 5. Thus Table 7.1 lists the rankings and means of all major religious samples in Chapters 5 and 7 on religious devotion (intrinsic religious motivation), fundamentalism, and religious intolerance. The latter is measured as political intolerance towards the multireligious, Hindus, Muslims, Christians [Catholics in the Mormon study], and the non-religious [atheists in the Mormon study]. As Table 7.1 shows, while B Y U Mormons are substantially higher in religious devotion and fundamentalism than U B C Christians, Buddhists and the Nonreligious, they are not distinguished in intolerance—except, perhaps, in intolerance towards nonreligious people. However, intolerance was actually measured towards "atheists" among Mormons, and "atheists" has a different meaning and affective connotation than "nonreligious people". 7.5. D i s c u s s i o n It appears that the incoherent triangle of prediction between religious devotion, coalitional rigidity and religious intolerance is something that can be found even in a more fundamentalist culture like that of Mormonism. Moreover, this incoherent triangle pattern does not appear to be related to self-enhancement or mediated into non-existence by the Big-5. These findings replicate those of Chapters 3, 4 and 5. T a b l e 7.1 Rankings and means of religious devotion, fundamentalism and religious intolerance ("Int.") in Mormons (at B Y U ) and Christians, Buddhists and the Nonreligious (at U B C ) . Religious Devotion 3 Fundamentalism Int. Multireligious Int. Hindu Int. X i a n b Int. Mus l im Int. Nonreligious 0 1. Mormon 1. Mormon 1. Xian 1. Non-relig. 1. Buddhist 1. Mormon 1. Mormon (7.41) (6.00) (2.91) (2.98) (2.95) . (3:10) (3.45) 2. X ian 2. X i a n 2. Mormon 2. Mormon 2. Non-relig. 2. Non-relig. 2. X ian (5.46) (4.46) (2.85) (2.96) (2.87) (3.08) (2.68) 3. Buddhist 3. Buddhist 3. Non-relig. 3. Buddhist 3. Mormon 3. Buddhist 3. Buddhist (3.60) (3.39). (2.80) (2.93) . (2.79) (2.99). (2.65) 4. Non-relig. 4. Non-relig. . 4. Buddhist 4. Xian 4. Xian 4. X ian 4. Non-relig. (3.41) ' (3.15) . (2.70) (2.74) (2.45) (2.76) (2.34) a For Mormons, item 6 of this scale (Hoge, 1972) was not included in the summary index b For Mormons, intolerance was towards "Catholics" c For Mormons, intolerance was towards "Atheists" 96 C h a p t e r 8 : E m p i r i c a l T e s t : P r i m i n g S e l f E s t e e m , G r o u p E s t e e m a n d G o d E s t e e m 8 . 1 . I n t r o d u c t i o n The consistent evidence for an incoherent triangle of independent relationships between religious devotion, coalitional rigidity and religious intolerance raises important questions about causal relationships between these variables. Perhaps the most controversial relationship in the incoherent triangle is the independent negative relationship between religious devotion and religious intolerance. In 3 out of 4 studies in this thesis, religious devotion only emerged as a significant negative predictor of intolerance when coalitional rigidity was controlled for. This independent relationship appears to be real, however, since it is found in 4 out of 4 studies among 10720 participants in 12 different countries, and 11 substantially represented religious groups. What remains, however, is to make sense of this relationship. There may be some variable responsible both for increasing devotion and for reducing intolerance. Perhaps when people go through a temporary "good patch" in life, it fosters a sense of general gratitude that not only makes them feel more integrated with the "Divine", but also less threatened by religious others. Alternatively, as one's religious intolerance increases for other reasons (threat, bad experience, etc), this may . impede states of mind that allow one to feel devoted to and connected to the Divine—that is to say that religious intolerance can dampen religious devotion. Finally, devotional activities that cultivate divinity-oriented consciousness may expand one's sense of moral inclusion to include religious outgroups, which would mean that religious devotion dampens religious intolerance. 97 None of the possible causal explanations are mutually exclusive, but. this experiment deals specifically with the latter hypothesis. Jeremy Ginges and colleagues (Ginges, Hansen & Norenzayan, 2007) recently conducted a cognitive priming survey experiment among Israeli settlers living in the West Bank and Gaza. Settlers who were asked about how often they prayed (devotional prime) were less likely than settlers asked about how often they attended synagogue (coalitional prime) to consider "extremely heroic" a 1994 attack by Baruch Goldstein on Palestinian worshippers in Hebron that led to his violent death. Approximately 6% of settlers considered the act extremely heroic in the prayer prime condition, 23% in the synagogue prime condition, and 15% in the control condition. The prayer prime condition was significantly lower than the combination of the control condition and the coalitional condition (which did not differ in significance). This already constitutes preliminary evidence that religious devotion can have a causal impact in reducing religious intolerance and support for religious violence, even among groups that are very inclined to conservatism, fundamentalism, and support for violence under many circumstances. In fact, it is possible that this effect may hold only among highly religious groups like Israeli settlers, since these groups would be most motivated to see God or the Divine in positive terms. The non-religious, on the other hand, may become more aggressive when primed by mention of God. The present chapter seeks to investigate this question in a less religious population. It also presents divinity primes and coalitional primes as two differing levels of "selfhood". This understanding draws in part on Wi l l i am James' (1890) idea that we have three levels of the self: the material self, the social self, and the spiritual self. It also relates to 98 Kierkegaard's notion of the aesthetic, ethical, and religious sphere of existence (Bretall, 1946). Discussed in terms of boundaries, we might say that we have access to a self where the boundary stops at our own skin and our own memories, pleasures and pains, understandings, etc. We also have access to a self that includes others—the inclusive and yet still bounded selfhood of a marital or marriage-like relationship, of family bonds, of friendship, work, and community bonds; and of religious, racial, linguistic, ethnic and national identification (if not actual "bonds" per se). Finally, we potentially have access to an unbounded self, described in Kenneth Boulding's (1942) words as "the greatest country of all , which has no boundaries this side of Hel l , and perhaps not even there." In Kierkegaard's understanding, we progress through these spheres of existence in stages, moving from our most limited self to our most unlimited. Kierkegaard's stage theory understanding is to some extent backed up by the empirical work in moral development, particularly Kohlberg (1976), whose stages of moral reasoning largely mirror the notion of three levels of self, the preconventional stage (hedonistic reasoning), conventional stage (obey authorities reasoning), and the postconventional (reasoning that seeks moral authority beyond human authorities). For Kierkegaard, there were some people who would just never taste postconventional religious existence and thus would remain forever entrapped in the aesthetic or ethical. For Kohlberg, there were some whole cultures that appeared "stuck" at conventional stages of reasoning, unable to attain the liberal enlightenment of Western culture (Shweder, 1991). 99 What is also possible, in contradiction to both Kohlberg and Kierkegaard's stage theories—stage theories that imply cultural and religious winners and losers—is that human beings in general have all three levels of self available to us chronically. If this is true, then we should all have at least some experience, at least by a certain age, with engaging and embodying all three levels of self. Moreover, it may be the case that there are no cultures or nations that are psychologically "stuck" at a conservative intermediate stage, but rather that almost all people of all cultures, religions, and nations have some potential to know themselves and live at all three levels. It may, in fact, be possible to cause something usually thought constitutive of postconventional liberalism (religious tolerance) with something usually thought constitutive of conventional conservatism (religious devotion). If this is the case then perhaps all stages and all levels of self are with us no matter who we are. Perhaps these levels of self may even psychologically circle round on each other like a game of rock, paper scissors rather than progressing from absolute bottom to absolute top in linear order of praiseworthiness and cultural-religious superiority. While finally resolving contentious philosophical questions with one study is unlikely, the present chapter explores whether priming the "conservative" God-oriented or Divine-oriented level of self can causally induce a "liberal" reduction in support for war and intolerance. 100 8.2. O v e r v i e w o f t h e S t u d y a n d S p e c i f i c H y p o t h e s e s The basic structure of the experiment was to prime self-salience, religious group salience, or God salience, and then to measure the degree to which participants endorsed a Christians-should-stop-their-war-and-oppression essay and a Christians-need-to-stop-being-weak-egalitarian-and-apologetic-and-get-as-tough-as-Muslims essay. Both of these essays were nominally anti-war, in keeping with the general sentiments of Vancouver university students, but one essay was anti-war from a deeply-held pacifism, and the other anti-war in a way that suggested war might well be necessary i f Islam keeps rising—and that Christians should be prepared to use against Muslims the ruthless exercise of power that Muslims are supposedly inclined to use against their enemies. There were also a number of other postmeasures, including religious devotion and coalitional rigidity scales, as well as intolerance scales used in previous studies. M y hypothesis was that participants would be more supportive of the more pacifistic essay (or at least prefer it to the stop-apologizing-get-tough essay) when God-salience was primed, relative to the other two conditions. The other measures (religious devotion, coalitional rigidity and intolerance measures) were included in case the prime was powerful enough to spill over to some of these dependent measures, or in the event that the prime affected one or some of these measures instead of response to the first essay. These measures were included for exploratory purposes rather than hypothesis testing. 101 8.3. M e t h o d s 218 psychology undergraduates from the University of British Columbia completed the study for one and a half academic credits. Participants were 167 women and 49 men, 121 East Asians, 68 Caucasians, 22 other, and 7 unclear or unidentified; 104 indicating lack of religious belief or affiliation, 65 Christians, 18 Buddhists, and 31 other or unidentified. The mean age was 21. Participants completed the study on their own, and were instructed on the first page to "Please find a nice quiet space to complete this whole questionnaire in one sitting. A place with no distractions. Please turn off your cell phone, unplug your phone, and put your full attention into it. Please give yourself one and a half hours to complete it. Please complete it in order, without skipping ahead." Participants then completed an "identity exercise" consisting of 12 sentences missing either a subject or an object, and expressing praise for that subject or object, e.g. " --has accomplished many great things", " has/have given the world much that it should be grateful for", "I am thankful for ". In the self salience condition, participants were instructed to complete the sentences with "I, me, or myself as appropriate". In the group salience condition, participants were instructed to complete the sentences with "with the name of a group that defines your religious (or non-religious) identity, e.g. Musl ims, Buddhists, Christians, Atheists, etc." In the God salience condition, participants were instructed to complete the sentences with " ' G o d ' br another name you prefer to refer to divinity or a higher power (regardless of whether or not you believe)." 102 Participants then completed an "esteem" scale specific to each condition—either the Rosenberg (1965) Self-Esteem scale, or a variant that either measured group esteem or God esteem. In the group salience condition, references to "I", "me" or " m y s e l f in the Rosenberg self-esteem scale were replaced with "my people" (participants were instructed to think of their people as the religious group they used to f i l l in the identity exercise). In the God salience condition, references to "I", "me" or "myself were replaced with "The Divine" (participants were instructed to think of the Divine as the name they used for the Divine in the identity exercise). Participants then read two essays, one titled."When Christians stand against G o d " (I wrote this essay for this study) and the other "Is a War of Civilizations ahead?" (written by Pat Buchanan (2001), and edited for length and thematic consistency). A substantive excerpt from the first essay is: .. Jesus died as he lived: without fear. Where there is faith, there is no fear—only awe of the Lord. And where there is no fear, there is no need to control, and no need to whip and crucify, and no need to torture or k i l l or cluster bomb foreigners. Some of us feel we must support our government who kills and tortures men women and children to control Islam for the security of Christianity. But this kind of service to Christianity is disobedience to Christ. It serves a corrupted Christianity that trusts the material power of imperial Rome more than the spiritual power of God. A substantive excerpt from the second essay is: 103 If belief is decisive, Islam is militant, Christianity milquetoast. In population, Islam is exploding, the West dying. Islamic warriors are wil l ing to suffer defeat and death, the West recoils at casualties. They are full of grievance; we, full of guilt. Where Islam prevails, it asserts a right to impose its dogma, while the West preaches equality. Islam is assertive, the West apologetic - about its crusaders, conquerors and empires...To defeat a faith, you need a faith. What is ours? Individualism, democracy, pluralism, la dolce vita? Can they overcome a fighting faith, 16 centuries old, and rising again? The complete version of the pacifist essay is attached as Appendix D . Both essays were similar in that they were a Christian's critiques of the current state of Christianity, but each essay critiqued Christianity from very different ideological perspectives—one critiquing Christianity for being too controlling, oppressive and violent, the other critiquing Christianity for being too apologetic, egalitarian and pluralistic. After each essay, participants completed four statements indicating agreement or disagreement with each author (e.g. "The author tells the whole truth" and "I would be dismayed i f the author's message.became popular public opinion" [reversed]). After both essays, participants were asked to consider the essays in comparison to each other. Two statements reflected belief that the two essays said the same thing: "Both authors are saying essentially the same thing" and "The basic message of the first author is diametrically opposed to the basic message of the second author (reversed)". Then participants indicated agreement or disagreement with the following two statements: "I side with the first author more than.the second" and "I side with the second author more than the first (reversed)." Participants then completed scales used in Chapter 5: divine 104 devotion (devotion), intrinsic religious motivation (devotion), exclusivity (rigidity), dogmatism (rigidity), authoritarianism (rigidity), moral exclusion (intolerance), political intolerance (intolerance), violent antipathy (intolerance), and moral violence (intolerance). Participants did not read the Life of P i passage for this study, and so intolerance targets were atheists, Muslims, Buddhists, Jews and Christians. Participants then read and evaluated an essay related to another study (not discussed here) and completed demographic measures. I conducted four univariate A N C O V A s with condition as the predictor variable, esteem as a covariate, and support for the pacifist essay, support for the stop-apologizing-get-tough essay, evaluation of essays as the same thing, and preference for the pacifist essay over the stop-apologizing-get-tough essay as dependent measures. I included esteem as a covariate in order to control for pre-existing esteem inclinations (towards self, one's group, and the divine). 8.4. R e s u l t s There were 77 people in the self salience condition, with 67 in the group salience and 72 in the God salience conditions. When evaluating preference for the pacifist essay over the stop-apologizing-get-tough essay, the A N C O V A for the three conditions was closer to significant, F(2, 212) = 2.18, p = .12. The estimated marginal means on preference for the pacifist essay are graphed in Figure 8.1. Since my theoretical framework concerns a contrast between bounded and unbounded identification, and since—as Figure 8.1 shows—there was no difference between the self salience and the group salience conditions, the appropriate test is between the God-salience condition and 105 the other two combined conditions. This A N C O V A was significant, F(l ,213) = 4.29, p = .04. This effect remained (p = .07) even i f also controlling for age, sex, religious affiliation (affiliated or not), and ethnicity (East Asian or not). The only other independent effect in this A N C O V A was the effect of being affiliated or not, with the affiliated more preferring of the pacifist essay than the unaffiliated, F ( l , 204) = 3.84, p = .05, E M M = 6.11 SE = .21 for the affiliated and E M M = 5.52 S E = .22 for the unaffiliated. Interestingly, across conditions, the affiliated generally liked both essays more than did the unaffiliated, both ps < = .02. This finding in itself may serve as another piece of evidence for the Janus-faced nature of religious belief. The A N C O V A performed on the degree to which participants saw the two essays as the same found that participants were most inclined to see the essays as the same in the self salience condition, and least inclined to see them as the same in the God salience condition, F(2, 204) = 4.40, p = .01, For self salience, group salience and God salience respectively: E M M = 4.94 SE = .19, E M M = 4,31 SE = .21, and E M M = 4.20 S E = .20. For predicting support for the pacifist essay and the stop-apologizing get tough essay by themselves, no effect was found, ps > .2. 106 Condition • God esteem • Group esteem • Self esteem Figure 8 .1 . Estimated marginal means of preference for pacifist essay, controlling for salience, by condition (1 to 9 scale). When controlling for esteem, condition (God salience vs. combined self and group salience) also predicted authoritarianism, F(1.213) = 6.65 p = . 0 1 1 6 and political intolerance, F(l,214) = 3.11, p = .08. The latter effect attained significance (p = .04) i f intolerance was measured relative to one's religious affiliation (the intolerance index for Christians including only non-Christian targets of intolerance, the intolerance index for Muslims including only non-Muslim targets of intolerance, etc), and i f "affiliated or not" was included as a covariate in the A N C O V A . 1 6 Interestingly, it did not make a difference whether predicting the intolerant or the rigid subscales of authoritarianism, both ps < .03. 107 Condition did not predict any other devotional, rigidity or intolerance variables. Participants in the God salience condition were lower in both authoritarianism and political intolerance than participants in the self and group salience conditions 1 7 , as shown in Figure 8.2. These effects should be interpreted with caution as these findings are the result of exploratory analysis rather than hypothesis testing. It is certainly consistent with the other findings in this thesis, however, that where significant effects are found, the most supernatural oriented prime predicts less intolerance rather than more. Authoritarianism Intolerance Figure 8.2 Estimated marginal means on authoritarianism and political intolerance when controlling for esteem, by condition (1 to 9 scale) Estimated marginal means are based on A N C O V A s where all three conditions were considered separately. These A N C O V A s were also significant, p = .03 for authoritarianism, and p = .05 for political intolerance (measured with the specifications noted above). 108 8.5. D i s c u s s i o n This last study, to the extent it is reliable, may be capturing something about how the incomprehensible triangle of devotion-rigidity-intolerance works. It appears that priming an identificationally unbounded, Divine-oriented mindset can have a measurably negative causal impact on religious intolerance, support for war and violence, and even authoritarianism. Interestingly, there is no evidence that a Divine-salience prime actually makes one more inclined to esteem the divine. Religious devotion was not affected by condition, and aside from authoritiarianism other forms of rigidity (exclusivity, dogmatism) were not affected. In addition, a pilot study found that none of the three salience conditions raised explicit "esteem" for the object of salience relative to control conditions that did not have the word fi l l- in exercise. Overall, the findings of this study are consistent with the recurrent finding across studies, methods, nations and religions: there is something potentially and reliably tolerant and non-violent about religious devotion, in spite of the often rigid and authoritarian nature of those most likely to espouse it. This relationship between religious devotion and non-violent tolerance appears real, and likely reflects proximal causal processes that can be experimentally induced. While in no way proven demonstrably by this particular experiment, the key to understanding this relationship may be the idea of the bounded vs. the unbounded self. The bounded self—whether the bounded individual self or the bounded group self—is the self more ready to morally exclude and do violence to others in order to serve its own bounded ends. The unbounded self, the self that reaches beyond its own limits to the unlimitedness inherent in the idea of the Divine, is less likely, in the moment of that reaching, to morally exclude others and wish violence upon them. This may even extend to violence that is literally sanctioned by one's holy text. This possibility of a reminder of God leading to the transcendence of rigid textual literalism is beautifully illustrated in an event from Martin Buber's memoirs: I once met on a journey a man whom I already knew through an earlier meeting. He was an observant Jew who followed the religious tradition in all the details of his life-pattern. But what was for me essential (as had already become unmistakably clear to me at this first meeting) was that this relationship to tradition had its origin and its constantly renewed confirmation in the relationship of the man to God. When I now saw him again, it turned out that we fell into a discussion of biblical questions, and indeed not of peripheral questions but central ones, central questions of faith. I do not know exactly any longer in what connection we came to speak of that section of the Book of Samuel in which it is told how Samuel delivered to K ing Saul the message that his dynastic rule would be taken from him because he had spared the life of the conquered prince of the Amalekites. I reported to my partner in dialogue how dreadful it had already been to me when I was a boy to read this as the message of God (and my heart compelled me to read it over again or at least to think about the fact that this stood written in the Bible). I told him how already at that time it horrified me to read or to remember how the heathen king went up to the prophet with the words on his lips, "Surely the 110 bitterness of death is past," and was hewn to pieces by him. I said to my partner: "I have never been able to believe that this is a message of God. I do not believe it." With wrinkled forehead and contracted brows, the man sat opposite me and his glance flamed into my eyes. He remained silent, began to speak, became silent again. "So?" he broke forth at last, "So? Y o u do not believe it?" "No , " I answered, "I do not believe it." "So? So?" he repeated almost threateningly. " Y o u do not believe it?" A n d I once again: "No ." "What...what ..."—he thrust the words before him one after the other—"what do you believe then?" "I believe," I replied without reflecting, "that Samuel has misunderstood God." A n d he, again slowly, but more softly than before: "So? You believe that?" And I: "Yes." Then we were both silent. But now something happened the like of which I have rarely seen before or since in this my long life. The angry countenance opposite me became transformed, as i f a hand had passed over it soothing it. It lightened, cleared, was now turned toward me bright and clear. " W e l l , " said the man with a positively gentle tender clarity, "I think so too." And again we became silent, for a good while. There is in the end nothing astonishing in the fact that an observant Jew of this nature, when he has to choose between God and the Bible, chooses God: the God in whom he believes, H i m in whom he can believe (Buber, 2002, pp. 88-89). t 111 C h a p t e r 9 : S u m m a r y a n d P r o p o s e d D a r w i n i a n T h e o r e t i c a l F r a m e w o r k 9 . 1 . S u m m a r y o f t h e F i n d i n g s Across numerous nations, religions, and measures of religious intolerance, religious devotion and coalitional rigidity, the consistent finding is that religious devotion coalitional rigidity, and religious intolerance form an incomprehensible triangle of independent relationships. Religious devotion is very closely linked empirically to coalitional rigidity, yet these two closely-related constructs make opposite predictions of religious intolerance and support for religious violence. In addition, two experimental studies, one of which this thesis introduces (the other is Ginges et al [2007]), converge on the finding that priming the devotional aspect of religion has the potential to reduce intolerance relative to both coalitional primes and control primes. The experimental finding in Chapter 8 is weak in magnitude, in much the same way that religious devotion is generally a weakly negative independent predictor of intolerance in multiple regression (though religious scapegoating is an exception, as are war and oppression demographics). Religious devotion may inevitably be a weak predictor of religious tolerance insofar as it is psychologically shadowed by coalitional rigidity. And coalitional rigidity can be a strong predictor of intolerance, both correlational, as shown in Chapters 4 through 7, and experimental as shown in Navarrete et al (2004) and Ginges et al (2007). The robust and general finding of this thesis is that religious devotion and coalitional rigidity are tightly linked in numerous religions, cultures and methods of 112 measurement, and yet make opposite predictions of religious intolerance. This counterintuitive finding calls for an explanation. 9.2. A n E v o l u t i o n a r y P a r a d i g m f o r R e l i g i o u s I n t o l e r a n c e To make sense of why religion should have two sides that stand in opposition on the question of religious intolerance, it might be helpful to examine, from an evolutionary perspective, what the adaptive promises and dangers of religious intolerance are. As a subset of prejudice generally, religious intolerance should offer many of the same adaptive benefits of prejudice. To the extent prejudice is manifest as avoiding those marked as other, there are potential health benefits to this avoidance: those marked as other likely come from different topographical regions and thus have different disease immunities than those marked as self, i.e. the ingroup (Navarrete & Fessler, 2006). Those marked as other may thus be carrying health arid fertility-threatening pathogens. Other-avoiding prejudice can be thought of as "flight prejudice." When prejudice takes the form of fight rather than flight, this can also be adaptive. What is adaptive about conquest-oriented prejudice or "fight prejudice" is its self-serving policy of applying ostracism, discrimination, oppression, and violence to those marked as other in order to advance or protect the welfare of those marked as self. Admittedly, the adaptive benefits of conquest oriented prejudice are somewhat more subtle—to be a frontline part of conquest-oriented prejudice, you not only expose yourself to pathogens but also to enslavement or violent death. However, to the extent one can benefit those marked as self by either systematically avoiding or taking land and resources from those marked as other, it is at least potentially adaptive to do so. Those marked as self are more 113 likely to share food with you, guide you through reliable rules for finding good mates, help you find shelter and medicine, help you protect your offspring, etc. than those marked as other. From a genetic fecundity perspective, helping people who are like you—marked as part of your collective self—and keeping away from or smiting those who are not may occasionally be a good policy, worth braving the risk of pathogens, enslavement and violent death. In addition, it is possible that even when attacks are maladaptive for most attackers, commanders of the attack (presuming these commanders, at least, stand to benefit) may be able to manipulate otherwise adaptive features of human psychology to con haplessly gullible others into attacking outgroups even i f this is not in their own genetic interests. To understand how this works, consider the hungry frog. To some extent it is adaptive for hungry frogs to fire their tongues not only at real airborne insects, but also at airborne pieces of thick black dust, since such dust M I G H T be an airborne insect, and it is generally worth erring on the side of getting an airborne insect (Atran & Norenzayan, 2004). A willingness to eat thick black dust testifies to the fact that a hungry frog is less punished by false positives in insect detection than by false negatives. As discussed in the opening chapters of this thesis, many of our psychological inclinations appear to be geared towards selecting false positives over false negatives (Sperber, 1996), and while this generally serves our genetic interest, it can also be exploited in adaptively neutral or maladaptive ways. Pornographers exploit the fact that pixels on a screen can elicit a similarly desirous response from some humans as they would have to a real naked recumbent person (Atran, 2002). Under some circumstances, 114 our genetic material w i l l be better propagated i f we die to save our kin than i f we do not—these are circumstances that would set genes in competition with their hosts (Hamilton, 1964). Even i f these occasions are very rare, our inclination to die for our kin can be exploited to make us die for non-kin i f these non-kin activate kin-recognition cues (Atran, 2002). If people who are not actually our family are ritually marked in such a way as to activate these cues, then we are more likely to treat them as our family. We are thus more likely to sacrifice for them as we are genetically inclined to make sacrifices for our genetically similar family members under some circumstances. Thus, precisely because of our inclination to avoid false negatives and take a chance on false positives, coalitional rituals and exhortations designed to induce genetically unrelated people to treat each other as "fictive k in" may be employed to make enthusiastic participation in genetically dubious pursuits more likely (Atran, 2002). A benign example of this could be inducing the equal sharing of food, clothing, education and shelter among all fictive kin. A more intolerance-relevant example would be inducing the people of one's fictive kin to go on likely suicidal but potentially ruler-benefiting collective raids on cultural others. This sense of fictive kinship may be made even likelier i f a group can be fooled into believing that its materially-driven attack on another group is defensive and thus as morally-religiously justified as defending an attack on one's own family. Even given the likelihood of having one's inclinations to sacrifice exploited in this way occasionally, it may be genetically worth making the general commitment to be wil l ing to risk one's life for the group. It would thus also be worthwhile to internalize the 115 inclination to follow through on such commitments even knowing that fate may one day give you that short straw. B y making this kind of precarious commitment to those who are also making these commitments, one is necessarily participating in a cultural process. Being culturally marked as part of a collective self is generally conditional on a psychologically affecting display of commitment to the culture. The anthropological literature is full of examples of such high stakes commitment displays (Atran, 2002), which are presumably there to prevent defection from the cultural group when the going gets tough. It is certainly adaptive to defect from a cultural group under some circumstances—especially when the group is at war, and all individuals who compose a cultural group know this on some level. Even assuming equal power between those in a group, group members may reasonably be inclined to collectively decide to take high stakes measures to prevent anyone's individual defection. Not having a group is scarier than being part of a group that it is difficult to defect from. In fact, groups that it is scary to defect from wi l l appear to be safer groups than those that let anyone defect without consequence—this was probably more the case at an earlier time of human phylogenetic history, but in some areas it is still the case today. Thus the individuals who compose groups under high threat contexts tend to make hard-to-fake displays of unwavering commitment a requirement for group inclusion. Once people are made to display commitments publicly, they are more likely to follow through on them (Festinger, 1957), especially i f the commitments are costly and 116 thus hard-to-fake (Sosis & Alcorta, 2003; Atran, 2002). If you are going to risk your life decimating a neighboring group to steal its resources for your group, you would like some hard-to-fake assurance that people in the group you are risking your life for w i l l take care of you i f you come back wounded and maimed, and that everyone else in the group wi l l make similar sacrifices. To the extent people can get this solidarity cohesion from their cultural group, they are also more likely to get the material prosperity and peacetime physical safety that w i l l allow them to produce more genetic copies of themselves. Cultural ways of marking collective self offer better quality control in this regard than even ethnic and linguistic markings of collective self (though cultures that cross ethnic and linguistic boundaries arguably do so precariously relative to those that do not). 9.3. D i s t i n g u i s h i n g M o d e s o f P r e j u d i c e a n d I n t o l e r a n c e : G e n e r a l , C u l t u r a l a n d R e l i g i o u s Up to now, I have focused on the adaptive benefits both of prejudice in general and what might specifically be called cultural prejudice—prejudice based on who has made the hard-to-fake commitments to a certain culture and who has not. This kind of prejudice is different from racial or linguistic prejudice, because conceivably it could be expedient to invite people of other races and language groups to make hard-to-fake commitments to one's culture. In this case one might be inclined to prejudice not against these individuals but rather against even those of one's own race or linguistic group who have not made this cultural commitment. This sort of cultural prejudice is rooted in the moral internalization of cultural decision making, and might be even more adaptively 117 valuable than racial or linguistic prejudice. A s suggested above, this value may derive precisely from the fact that cultural markings of ingroup and outgroup entail quality control that racial and linguistic markings do not. Imagine two individuals who are part of a rare multi-racial multi-linguistic culture where all who are part of that culture must cut off their own left ear without showing pain or emotional distress, smear it in dog feces and eat it without vomiting while dancing on hot burning coals. A l l who fail to do this with sufficient grace are tied up, covered in honey and fed to red ants. Individual A would readily k i l l and steal from people of her own race or linguistic group (outside her culture) in order to be of service to those within her culture. Individual B would readily k i l l and steal from people of her own culture (outside her race and linguistic group) in order to be of service to those in her race or linguistic group (outside her culture). There is some reason to expect that individual A would probably have left behind more offspring in the Pleistocene than individual B . Individual B clearly was not getting the point of eating her feces-covered severed ear. To the extent that cultural prejudice like that' of individual A can be adaptive, its likelihood of yielding adaptive benefits is bound to how successfully cohesive a cultural coalition is. This is especially the case for risky conquest-oriented prejudice. Rigidity with regard to cultural allegiance should be a psychological aid to maintaining cohesion within a coalition. To the extent many people in a community can hold onto this rigidity successfully, conquest-oriented prejudice and intolerance wi l l often be worth the risk, and avoidance-oriented prejudice and intolerance should also be easier to coordinate. Individuals who convincingly display this rigidity should therefore be more trusted in 118 cohesion-rewarding anthropological contexts, and receive more fecundity-relevant benefits from the group. This line of reasoning could potentially account for the link between rigidity and cultural prejudice or intolerance, though of course none of the questionnaires used in this thesisreferred to traumatic hazing initiations. It is possible to supplement (or, given certain conditions, replace) rigidity forged from such traumas with rigidity about some shared set of propositional statements and values. Rigidity about regularly-practiced rituals and ways of interacting can work by a similar principle. For propositional rigidity to work best, that rigidity should have clear symbolic content: some set of communicable values or practices that one is rigid about. Also, for successful displays of hard-to-fake rigidity with regard to these values and practices, one must be able to internalize them. To internalize these values, it would be better that they be memorable, transmissible, existentially relevant and emotionally arresting in much the same way that cutting off your own ear and eating it is existentially relevant and emotionally arresting. It may even be beneficial to have propositional beliefs that are mildly traumatic to hold. This brings us to the potential benefits of religious prejudice and intolerance, above and beyond cultural prejudice and intolerance. Supernatural beliefs are good candidates for beliefs by which to organize a cohesive coalition, partly because such beliefs run optimally counter to intuitive folk physics, folk biology, folk psychology, etc.—not so counterintuitive that they cannot be made sense of, but counterintuitive enough to trigger our sensitivity to anomaly—and thus be distinctly memorable (Boyer, 119 2003; Atran & Norenzayan, 2004). It is easier to remember "talking squirrel" than "foraging squirrel", and easier to remember "sin-punishing flood" than "wet flood." This memorability is essential to making these beliefs more culturally transmissible (Norenzayan et al, 2006). Ideas that can be more easily transmitted between people are better candidates for coalition-building narratives, and supernatural beliefs have this cognitive feature, as do folktales generally. Supernatural beliefs can also have important emotive features. Many supernatural beliefs in human history have involved some kind of agency-attribution to what scientists today would consider a dubious source of independent agency—the wind, the lightening, the rain, the sun, etc. Again, this appears related to a perceptive bias towards making false positives over false negatives when the stakes are high. The stakes are especially high when there is a potential threat to our life. Threat to life is an emotionally arresting and existentially relevant thing. To the extent we posit our supernatural agents under conditions of such imagined threat, we wi l l have a very emotive and existentially relevant relationship to these imagined agents. The stories we tell each other about such agents wi l l thus have a very emotionally arresting quality and internalization of and identification with these stories wi l l be that much easier.' The internalization should be easier even than the internalization of garden variety folktales, which have a cognitively memorable character, but not necessarily an emotionally arresting one (Norenzayan & Atran, 2004). Supernatural stories that tell us how to live and die may be the most worthwhile for cultivating coalition-building rigidity, to the extent we rely on stories to do this. 120 Thus, as it makes good evolutionary sense that there should be a positive link between cultural intolerance and rigidity, it also makes good evolutionary sense that there . should be a positive link between rigidity and devoted belief in supernatural agency. A n d bringing supernatural agency into the equation makes the cultural prejudice in question look more discernibly like "religious" prejudice. 9.4. E x p l a i n i n g t h e N e g a t i v e R e l a t i o n s h i p B e t w e e n R e l i g i o u s D e v o t i o n a n d R e l i g i o u s I n t o l e r a n c e What remains in need of explanation, then, is the negative independent relationship between devoted belief in supernatural agency and cultural prejudice or intolerance, especially the negative link between such, devoted belief and religious intolerance. There are several potential lines of explanation for this, all of which are necessarily speculative. One uncharitable explanation is that maladaptive inclinations should correlate with each other. As noted earlier, supernatural belief is potentially a good source of arbitrarily-derived values and practices for organizing rigid coalitions that are distinct from other coalitions—making it not so much adaptive by its own merits but rather by its facilitation of adaptive rigidity. However, the actual beliefs adhered to by these coalitions might manifest a more maladaptive side i f they are relied on not only for coalition-building but for prediction and control of the environment. Supernatural beliefs and supernatural-supplicating behaviors may be a maladaptive liability to one's fecundity insofar as they potentially impair one's ability to predict, control and make full effective use of one's environment. , 121 To the extent being too unprejudiced or too religiously tolerant is also potentially maladaptive, it is perhaps not surprising that this maladaptive inclination correlates with the maladaptive tendency to sincerely believe one's preposterous religious dogmas even outside of the domain of their greatest adaptive utility (i.e. for building social solidarity). When the adaptive aspect of religion—coalitional rigidity—is controlled for, what is left over is the part that is maladaptively imaginative and fanciful and thus distorting of predict-and-control reality. These imaginative distortions of fact may graft naturally onto other maladaptive flights of imagination like naive or traitorous beneficence towards religious and cultural outgroups. Such outgroups, while one can vividly imagine them as "all beloved children of the Great Moon God Pambo", can certainly be dangerous at times, even i f it might be going too far to say that their deeply-ingrained biological or cultural nature inclines them to destroy our way of life, rape and eat our children, spread war, tyranny and genocide, etc. However, it is not clear why all supposedly maladaptive features of human psychology should be related to each other. Nor is it clear that prejudice and religious intolerance are always adaptive or their absence maladaptive. Even in the early phylogenetic history of humans, there may have been adaptive rewards for overcoming both flight and fight prejudices with regard to cultural and religious others. The potential technological and material rewards of, e.g., trade can make fraternizing with those marked "other" worthwhile both for certain defecting individuals and for individuals acting in benign cultural concert. Humans are a knowledge-accumulating species (Tomasello, Kruger & Ratner, 1993). Knowledge accumulated from past generations and neighboring cultures can facilitate better prediction and control than could be had i f every 122 ' generation depended only on the knowledge it could accumulate by its own wheel-reinventing discoveries by its own coalition members. The potential rewards from intercultural fraternization can sometimes make it worthwhile to overcome health and greed-related inclinations to cultural fear and hostility. Often a group of individuals can gain as much or more prosperity from trading with outgroup members as from violently conquering them, and with considerably less risk to life and limb. From this perspective, it might be genetically better to have flexibility with regard to tolerance and intolerance rather than a chronic inclination to one or the other. This is not to suggest unhelpfully that everything is adaptive. On average over the range of possible situations, both tolerance and intolerance are adaptively neutral—adaptive under some circumstances, maladaptive under others. The ability to be tolerant or intolerant when it is situationally appropriate, however, would be considerably more positive. Absent some impossible "perfect discernment module", this flexibility might be most efficiently attained i f one has two competing and co-occurring chronic inclinations: one to expansive embracing acceptance, and the other to contractive intolerance. Depending on feedback from the environment, one competing inclination could be deployed more than the other to guide behavior, but both inclinations could always be accessible to accommodate rapid changes in circumstances. Religious devotion appears to enable tolerance (and the absence of it intolerance) while coalitional rigidity enables intolerance (and the absence of it tolerance). The inclination to be religious-rigid or irreligious-flexible wi l l l ikely be normally distributed in any population. Wherever one falls on the distribution, one is more likely to have an inclination to both tolerance and intolerance than a chronic inclination to the one and a chronic disinclination to the other. 123 Assuming this tolerance flexibility model has merit, then by what process does an inclination to devoted belief in the supernatural enable tolerance? What does believing that the lightening struck your house because it was animated by Angry Lightening God have to do with morally including religious others as full human beings? One possibility is the common one that imagining these gods (and imaginatively giving them the power to punish and reward) enables powerful internalization of the moral framework of one's culture. Tolerance for cultural others may result simply from the practical difficulty of keeping moral training domain specific. If religious training trains one to be squeamish about kil l ing people in one's own culture, it may require extra training (coalitional, presumably) to dispense with that squeamishness when kil l ing outgroup others is expedient. Another explanation may lie in the emotions and cognitions that are stimulated by engaging one's imaginative faculties to spin cognitively and emotionally-arresting stories about such supernatural agents. The very imagination of deities, to the extent one actively engages in and elaborates on it rather than passively absorbing it through indoctrination and mimicry, may stimulate the kind of abstract thought that can enable transcendence o f cultural conditioning. To the extent people exercise their imaginative faculties in any way, their boosted capacity for innovation may spill over into other domains—from art to morality to science. Any link between religious and moral imagination, in fact, might be another part of what maintains the link between religious devotion and coalitional inclinations. To feel kinship with one's coalition, one must imagine that those in one's coalition are 124 morally included as part of an extended self, i.e. as part of one's extended family. As explored in Chapter 8, it can make a difference whether the boundaries of self stop at your own skin, at a certain group of people, or i f the self is so completely unbounded that one no longer recognizes " s e l f as distinct from "other". As discussed in Chapter 2, coalitional rigidity may set and thicken the boundaries on this extended self, but perhaps it is the imaginative processes of devotion that are more responsible for the process of extending this sense of self in the first place, with most people settling at a kind of "optimal distinctiveness" (Brewer, 1991). These expansive processes may give some people temporary access to what is often called a "religious experience", feelings of an unbounded sense of identification. Even short of a bringing about a mystical religious experience, however, these processes may at least give some basic emotional underpinning to certain kinds of moral reasoning like, "I really shouldn't do to others what I would not want others to do to me.' These processes may also attenuate cynical war-facilitating reasoning like, "peace through superior firepower," or "pre-emptively attack them before they pre-emptively attack you." Without the counterbalancing effect of coalitonal rigidity, such imaginative processes of devotion might extend towards infinity to include all humans, all beings, and even all matter and energy in the universe. There are obvious adaptive dangers to this kind of unlimited expansion of the moral imagination. Including those who would, e.g., exploit and k i l l you as " s e l f may be justified by imaginative moral reasoning, and yet unwise for one's genetic fecundity. As discussed in Chapter 2, coalitional rigidity may have evolved to shadow devotional expansion precisely as a way of psychologically addressing these dangers. 125 Admittedly, there is a chicken and egg problem emerging in my evolutionary explanation. Does supernatural belief become related to coalitional rigidity because its cognitive and emotive salience allows for better internalization of beliefs and values that can be rigidly adhered to for successful coalition building? Or does coalitional rigidity arise to adaptively shadow and constrain the expansive moral imagination of religious devotion? These two processes are certainly not mutually exclusive and both might be part of the reason for the tight empirical link between tolerance-predicting religious devotion and intolerance-predicting coalitional rigidity. Without more research, any evolutionary account of the devotion-rigidity-intolerance triangle remains largely speculative. Since this incoherent triangle appears to be a reliable reality, however, its origin story is worth investigating, and these investigations could yield interesting and generative findings. A simple study, for instance, could test whether there is any fitness advantage to the correlation between devotion and rigidity on the one hand and lack of devotion and flexibility on the other. Male and female participants could be divided into four quasi-experimental groups based on whether they manifested both rigidity and devotion, flexibility and lack of devotion, or some rarer combination: rigidity with lack of devotion or devotion with flexibility. Participants who did not fall clearly into one of these categories would be excluded from the analysis. Participants could then be photographed and write a blurb about themselves for a supposed online dating site—participants would be instructed not to indicate their religious or political views. 126 If there is a fitness advantage to the correlation between devotion and rigidity, then participants who have both traits at once (or a simultaneous lack of both traits) should project more confidence, be considered more physically attractive and write blurbs that are rated as more appealing than those with a rarer combination of religious and ideological qualities. This result would not be evidence for a fitness advantage to religious (vs. non-religious) orientation so much as it would indicate the fitness advantage of being either both religious and rigid or both irreligious and flexible. If this fitness advantage could be found across both cultural and religious contexts it would be even better supported. 9.5. C o n c l u s i o n : W h a t D o W e D o N o w ? Regardless of what further investigations may uncover, it is difficult to say whether the results of the investigations here are encouraging or discouraging, in terms of giving some helpful guidance to action in life. This thesis w i l l be vindication to those who are skeptical of justifying a war of civilizations or a culture war with simplistic dichotomies like "good religion vs. bad religion", "secularism (all good) vs. religion (all bad)", or "religion (all good) vs. secularism (all bad)". The empirical findings and the theoretical thrust of this thesis suggests that all religious and irreligious groups and individuals have closely-related psychological proclivities that are likely to invite opposing moral labels. It appears hard to escape Jekyll and Hyde psychology no matter what religion one chooses, or i f one chooses to reject religion altogether. The apparent Janus-faced nature of religion may appear as bad news, however, to those who dream of a world where intolerance, oppression and violence are no more, 127 where evil is wiped from the face of the world forever and nothing but goodness, prosperity, growth and all-embracing love remain. If my thesis can be generalized, then . no major religion or irreligion seems reliably adept at unraveling the incomprehensible triangle, since no major religion or irreligion has figured out a way of empowering the tolerant face of Janus without also empowering the intolerant face. What, then, can be done to reduce intolerance, oppression and violence in the world? Perhaps there is a one-faced purely tolerant religion that exists somewhere in the shadows, unrecognized by all but a self-selecting vanguard. If everyone could be converted to this religion then perhaps the incomprehensible triangle could be unraveled at last and a brave new world would stretch out before us: This solution, however, is highly unlikely and not necessarily even desirable. When brave new worlds arrive on the heels of such humanity-subverting ideologies, those new worlds are usually dystopic nightmares until they are vanquished or fundamentally transformed by the re-assertion of something more in line with complex human nature. Another answer may lie in contemplating the opposite question: how does one promote intolerance and war? This is not an idle question to some people, as conning a nation into supporting a pointlessly destructive war can be more difficult than cynics about human nature might imagine. At the time of writing, the U.S . is mired in a war in Iraq, a war that would have been highly politically improbable had the messy and expensive events of 9-11 not occurred. Convincing a nation to go to war is especially difficult i f the normal distribution of left-right ideology makes it l ikely that only about 40% of a nation's population wi l l ever support any war over the long haul without significantly impactful new provocations. Even i f enemies of the United States could be 128 goaded into it, however, it is just not cost effective to have a 9-11 attack every year, and judging by the close U.S . election of 2004, such attacks are not necessarily a panacea to the problem of human antipathy towards war and kil l ing. At the time of writing, American support for the war in Iraq and war generally is perilously low, and has been so for a few years. This is an especially troubling drop in support to those whose salaries depend on kil l ing people and stealing their land and resources. The efficient political organization of the Religious Right has helped to ensure that religious people in the U.S . are regularly bombarded with psychological invitations to pump up their natural inclination to war-facilitating rigidity. Conservative Christians remain the most stalwart American supporters of the Iraq war. From a war profiteer's perspective, however, it would be ideal to design a way to bring the American Left psychologically onside with never-ending war also. Popular support for the Iraq war might be a lost cause, but a broader War of Civilizations against Islam might be an easier sell, and a considerably more profitable one in the long run for those in the business of war. This thesis would suggest that just as blitzing religious people with invitations to rigidity makes them more psychologically ready for war, so blitzing liberal-minded people with invitations to atheism should be comparably effective to this end. The best way to promote war and intolerance in religious communities would be to encourage religious preachers with large audiences not only to emphasize a rigid coalitional message, but to denounce "spirituality" "faith healing" and "mysticism" with as much vehemence as they denounce liberalism, homosexuality, feminism, etc. In tandem, 129 liberal communities should be subjected to a steady stream of emotionally and imaginatively impoverished atheist screeds on the New York Times bestseller list. These works should not only make aggressive arguments for atheism and denounce religion, but denounce Islam as a particularly virulent and evil religion, and denounce liberalism and religious tolerance as soft, naive, appeasing stances. It would also help to include in some of these books rational-sounding arguments for torture and pre-emptive nuclear strikes against nations and cultures whose religiousness makes them dangerously foreign. It may be psychologically inevitable that one's nation be afflicted with a normal distribution of ideological inclinations. With careful-culture-shaping attention, however, it can be divided between nominally religious Other-hating rigid coalitionists and nominally liberal Other-hating atheists. If this happy division can be achieved, the normal distribution of ideological inclinations wi l l no longer stand as effectively in the way of war and carnage. Then Halliburton stockholders wi l l be able to afford their post-apocalyptic Green Zone on Mars at last and human existence wi l l go on. So it goes. 130 R e f e r e n c e s Adorno, T .W. , Frenkel-Brunswick, E . , Levinson, D.J . , & Sanford, R . N . (1950). The authoritarian personality. New York: Norton. Allport, G . (1950). The individual and his religion. New York: Macmil lan. Allport, G .W. & Ross, J . M . (1967). Personal religious orientation and prejudice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 5, 432-443. Allport, G . W . (1966). The religious context of prejudice. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 5, 446-457. . Altemeyer, R . A . & Hunsberger, B . (1992). Authoritarianism, religious fundamentalism, quest, and prejudice. International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 2, 113-133. Altemeyer, R . A . (1981). Right-wing authoritarianism. Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada: University of Manitoba Press. Altemeyer, R . A . (1988). Enemies of freedom: Understanding right-wing authoritarianism. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Altemeyer, R . A . (1996). The authoritarian specter. Cambridge, M A : Harvard University Press. Altemeyer, R . A . (1999). Right-Wing Authoritarianism [1990 version]. In J.P. Robinson, P.R. Shaver & L . S . Wrightsman (Eds.), Measures of Political Attitudes (Vol . 2), (pp. 104-106). Toronto: Academic Press. Altemeyer, R : A . (2002). Dogmatic behavior among students: Testing a new measure of dogmatism. Journal of Social Psychology, 142, 713-721. 131 Altemeyer, R . A . , & Hunsberger, B . (1992). Authoritarianism, religious fundamentalism, quest, and prejudice. International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 2, 113-133. Atran, S. & Norenzayan, A . (2004). Religion's evolutionary landscape: Counterintuition, commitment, compassion, communion. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 27, 713-770. Atran, S. (2002) In gods we trust: The evolutionary landscape of religion. Oxford University Press. Oxford. Barrett, J. (2000) Exploring the natural foundations of religion. Trends in Cognitive Science 4,29-34. Batson, C. D . (1976). Religion as prosocial: agent or double agent? Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 15, 29-45. Batson, C D . , Schoenrade, P. & Ventis, L . (1993). Religion and the individual. New York: Oxford University Press. Batson, C D . , Schoenrade, P . A . & Pych, V . (1985). Brotherly love or self concern? Advances in the Psychology of Religion, 11, 185-208. Becker, E . (1973). The denial of death. New York: Free Press. Becker, E . (1975). Escape from Evil. New York: Free Press. Boulding, K . (1942). The practice of the love of God. Retrieved March 14, 2007 from the World Wide Web: http://www.quaker.org/pamphlets/wpll942a.html Boyer, P. (2001). Religion explained: The evolutionary origins of religious thought. New York: Basic Books. 132 Boyer, P. (2003). Religious thought and behaviour as by-products of brain function. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7, 119-124. Bretall, R. (Ed). (1946). A Kierkegaard Anthology. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Brewer, M . (1999). The psychology of prejudice: Ingroup love or outgroup hate? Journal of Social Issues, 55, 429-444. Brewer, M . B . (1991). The social self: On being the same and different at the same time. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 17, 475-482. British Broadcasting Corporation (2004). What the World Thinks of God. Retrieved January 1, 2005 from the World Wide Web: http://news.bbc.co.Uk/l/hi/programmes/wtwtgod/3475359.stm Buber, M . (2002). Martin Buber. In A . C . Danto (Ed,), Genius in their own words: The intellectual journeys of seven great 20th-century thinkers, (pp. 61-96). Chicago: Cams. Buchanan, P. J. (2001). Is a war of civilizations ahead? WorldNet Daily. Retrieved March 15 from the World Wide Web: http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp7ARTICLE ID=25590 Burkert, W . (1996). Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religions. Cambridge, M A : Harvard University Press. Bushman, B . J. & Baumeister, R. F. (1998). Threatened egotism, narcissism, self-esteem,-and direct and displaced aggression: Does self-love or self-hate lead to violence? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 219-229. 133 Cohen, A . B . , Ha l l , D . E . , Koenig, H . G . , & Meador, K . G . (2005). Social Versus Individual Motivation: Implications for Normative Definitions of Religious Orientation. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 9, 48-61. Cohen, A . B . , Siegel, J. I. & Rozin, P. (2003). Faith versus practice: Different bases for religiosity judgments by Jews and Protestants. European Journal of Social Psychology, 33, 287-295. Daly, M . , & Wilson, M . (1999). A n evolutionary psychological perspective on homicide. In M . D . Smith & M . A . Zahn (Eds.), Homicide (pp. 58-71). Thousand Oaks, C A : Sage. Dawkins, R. (1989). The selfish gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dechesne, M . , Pyszczynski, T., & Arndt, J. (2003). Literal and symbolic immortality: The effect of evidence of literal immortality on self-esteem striving in response to mortality salience. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 84, 722-737. Donahue, M . J . (1985). Intrinsic and extrinsic religiousness: Review and meta-analysis., Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 48, 400-419. Duck R., & Hunsberger, B . (1999). Religious orientation and prejudice: The role of religious proscription, right-wing authoritarianism and social desirability. International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 9, 157-179. Durkheim, E . (1915/1965). The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. New York: Free Press. Feng, G.F. & English, J., trans. (1972). The Tao Te Ching. New York: Vintage. 134 Festinger, L . (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Palo Alto , C A : Stanford University Press. Tomasello, M . , Kruger, A . & Ratner, H . (1993) Cultural learning. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 16, 495-511. Fiorito, B . & Ryan, K . (1998, August). Development and preliminary reliability of a new measure of religiosity: Religiousness and spirituality questionnaires. Poster session presented at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, San Francisco, C A . Fisher, R.D.^ Derison, D . , & Polley, C.F. (1994). Religiousness, religious orientation, and attitudes towards gays and lesbians. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 24, 614-630. Freedom House (2006). Freedom in the World in 2005. Retrieved January 1, 2006 from the World Wide Web: http://www.freedomhouse.org/research/freeworld/2005/table2005.pdf Freud, S. (1930/1961). Civilization and its Discontents, trans. J. Strachcy. New York: W . W . Norton. Fullerton, J. T. & Hunsberger, B . (1982). A unidimensional measure of Christian orthodoxy. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 21, 317-326. Ginges, J., Hansen, I. & Norenzayan, A . (2007). Religion and support for suicide attacks. . Unpublished manuscript. Gorsuch, R . L . & Aleshire, D . (1974). Christian faith and ethnic prejudice: a review and interpretation of research. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 13, 281-307. 135 Gould, S. J., & Lewontin, R. C. (1979). The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: A critique of the adaptationist programme. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B , 205, 581-598. Greenberg, J., Schimel, J., Martens, A . , Solomon, S., & Pyszczynski, T. (2001). Sympathy for the devil: Evidence that reminding Whites of their mortality promotes more favorable reactions to White racists. Motivation and Emotion, 25,113-133. Griffin, G . A . , Gorsuch, R . L . & Davis, A - L . (1987). A cross-cultural investigation of religious orientation, social norms, and prejudice. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 26, 358-365. Guthrie, S.E. (1993). Faces in the Clouds. New York: Oxford University Press. Hamilton, W . D . (1964). The genetical evolution of social behaviour I and II. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 7, 1-52. Harris, S. (2004). The end of faith: Religion, terror and the future of reason. Los Angeles: W.W.Nor ton . Harris, S. (2007). Retrieved March 13, 2007 from the World Wide Web: http://www.edge.Org/discourse/bb.html#harris Haselton, M . G . , & Gangestad, S. W . (2006). Conditional expression of women's desires and men's mate guarding across the ovulatory cycle. Hormones and Behavior, 49,509-518. Herek, G . M . (1987). Religious orientation and prejudice: A compilation of racial and sexual attitudes. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 13, 3A-AA. 136 Hoge, D.R. (1972). A validated intrinsic religious motivation scale. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 11, 369-3'/'6. Hoge, D.R. (1972). A validated intrinsic religious motivation scale. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 77,369-376. Hunsberger, B . (1996). Religious fundamentalism, right-wing authoritarianism, and hostility toward homosexuals in non-Christian religious groups. International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 6, 39-49. James W . (1890). The principles of psychology. 2 vols. New York: Henry Holt and Company. James, W . (1982/1902). The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Penguin Books. John, O. P. (1990). The "Big Five" factor taxonomy: Dimensions of personality in the natural language and in questionnaires. In L . A . Pervin (Ed.), Handbook of personality: Theory and research (pp. 66-100). New York: Guilford. Jonas, E . & Fischer, P. (2006). Terror management and religion: Evidence that intrinsic religiousness mitigates worldview defense following mortality salience. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91, 553-567. Jost, J. T., Glaser, J., Kruglanski, A . W . & Sulloway, F. J. (2003). Political conservatism as motivated social cognition. Psychological Bulletin, 129, 339-375. Kahoe, R . D . & Meadow, M . J . (1977, October). Religious orientations dimensions: Individual and institutional interrelations. Paper presented at the annual convention of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, Chicago. [163] 137 Kahoe, R . D . (1975). Authoritarianism and religion: Relationships of F-scale items to . intrinsic and extrinsic religious orientations. JSAS Catalog of Selected Documents in Psychology, 5^284-285. Katz, S. T. (1983). The 'conservative' character of mysticism." In S. T. Katz (Ed.), Mysticism and Religious Traditions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kirkpatrick, L . (1993). Fundamentalism, Christian orthodoxy, and intrinsic religious orientation as predictors of discriminatory attitudes. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 32, 256-268. Kirkpatrick, L . A . (2005). Attachment, evolution, and the psychology of religion. New York: Guilford Press. Kirkpatrick, L . A . (2006). Religion is not an adaptation. In P. McNamara (Ed.) Where God and Science meet: How brain and evolutionary studies alter our understanding of religion (Vol 1): Evolution, genes, and the religious brain, Westport, C T : Praeger/Greenwood, pp. 173-193. Kirkpatrick, L . A . , Waugh, C. E . , & Valencia, A . (2002). The functional domain specificity of self-esteem and the differential prediction of aggression. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82,156-161. Kirkpatrick, L . . A . (1999). Toward an evolutionary psychology of religion and personality. Journal of Personality, 67, 921-951. Kirkpatrick, L . A . & Hood, R . W . (1990). Intrinsic-extrinsic religious orientation: The boon or bane of contemporary psychology of religion? Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 29, 442-462. 138 Koenig, L . B . & Bouchard, T. J. Jr. (2006). Genetic and Environmental Influences on the Traditional Moral Values Triad-Authoritarianism, Conservatism, and Religiousness—as Assessed by Quantitative Behavior Genetic Methods. In P. McNamara (Ed.), Where God and Science meet: How brain and evolutionary studies alter our understanding of religion (Vol 1): Evolution, genes, and the religious brain, Westport, C T : Praeger/Greenwood, pp. 47-76. Kohlberg, L . (1976). "Moral stages and moralization: The cognitive-developmental approach" In T. Lickona (Ed.) Moral Development and Behavior: Theory, Research and Social Issues, Rinehart and Winston. Kurzban, R. & Neuberg, S. (2005). Managing ingroup and outgroup relationships. In D Buss (Ed.), The handbook of evolutionary psychology, Hoboken, N J : John Wiley & Sons. pp. 653-675. Landau, M . J., Solomon, S., & Greenberg, J. (2004). Deliver us from E v i l : The Effects of Mortality Salience and Reminders of 9/11 on Support for President George W . Bush. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 30, 1136-1150. Lawson, E.T. & McCauley, R. (1990) Rethinking religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Laythe, B . , Finkel, D . , Kirkpatrick, L . A . (2001). Predicting prejudice from religious fundamentalism and right-wing authoritarianism: A multiple-regression approach. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 40, 1-10. Leak, G . K . & Randall, B . A . (1995). Clarification of the link between right-wing authoritarianism and religiousness: the role of religious maturity. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 34, 245-252. Martel, Y . (2001). Life of Pi. Orlando, Florida: Harcourt. McFarland, S. (1989). Religious orientations and the targets of discrimination. Journal for the scientific study of religion, 28, 324-336. McGregor, H . A . , Liebman, J. D . , Greenberg, J., Solomon, S., Arndt, J., Simon, L . , & Pyszczynski, T. (1998). Terror management and aggression: Evidence that mortality salience motivates aggression against worldview-threatening others. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 590-605. Mithen, S. (1999). Symbolism and the supernatural. In R. Dunbar, C . Knight & C . Power (Eds.), The Evolution of Culture. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. Moghaddam, F . M . & V . Vuksanovic. (1990). Attitudes and behavior toward human rights across different contexts: The role of right-wing authoritarianism, political ideology, and religiosity. International Journal of Psychology, 25, 455-474. Mormon Quotes (2007). Retrieved March 14, 2007 from the World Wide Web: http://www.ils.unc.edu/~unsworth/mormon/politics.html Navarette, C . D . & Fessler, D . M . T. (2005). Normative bias and adaptive challenge: a relational approach to coalitional psychology and a critique of terror management theory. Evolutionary Psychology, 3, 297-325. Navarrete, C. D. , & Fessler, D . M . T. (2006). Disease avoidance and ethnocentrism: The effects of disease fears and disgust sensitivity on intergroup attitudes. Evolution and Human Behavior, 27, 270-282. Navarrete, C . D . , Kurzban, R., Fessler, D . M . T., & Kirkpatrick, L . A . (2004). Anxiety and intergroup bias: Terror management or coalitional psychology? Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 7, 370-397. Newman, L . S . & Erber, R. (2002). Epilogue. In L . S. Newman & R. Erber, (Eds.) Understanding genocide: The social psychology of the Holocaust, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nisbett, R. E . , & Cohen, D . (1996). Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press. Norenzayan, A & Hansen, I. G . (2006). Supernatural belief in the face of death. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 32, 174-187. Norenzayan, A . & Heine, S. (2005). Psychological Universals: What Are They and How Can We Know? Psychological Bulletin, 13, 763-784. Norenzayan, A . , Atran, S., Faulkner, J. , & Schaller, M . (2006). Memory and mystery: The cultural selection of minimally counterintuitive narratives. Cognitive Science, 30, 531-553. Otto, R. (1917). Das Heilige: Uber das Irrationale in der Idee des Gottlichen undsein Verhaltnis zum Rationalen. Breslau: Trewendt & Granier. Park, J. H . , Faulkner, J., & Schaller, M . (2003). Evolved disease-avoidance processes and contemporary anti-social behavior: Prejudicial attitudes and avoidance of people with physical disabilities. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 27, 65-87. Paulhus, D . L . (1991). Measurement and control of response bias. In J.P. Robinson, P.R. Shaver, & L . S . Wrightsman (Eds.), Measures of personality and social psychological attitudes (pp. 17-59). New York: Academic Press. 141 Ponton, M . O . , Gorsuch, R . L . (1988). Prejudice and religion revisited: A cross-cultural investigation with a Venezuelan sample. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 27,260-271. ' ' ' Pyszczynski, T., Abdollahi, A . , Solomon, S., Greenberg, J., Cohen, F. & Weise, D . (2006). Mortality Salience, Martyrdom, and Mili tary Might: The Great Satan Versus the Axis of E v i l . Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 32, 525-537. Pyszczynski, T., Greenberg, J., Solomon, S., Arndt, J., & Schimel, J. (2004). Why do people need self-esteem? A theoretical and empirical review. Psychological Bulletin, 130,435-468. Pyysiainen, I. & Anttonen, V . , Eds. (2002) Current approaches in the cognitive science of religion. Continuum. Rappaport, R. (1979). Ecology, Meaning and Religion. Berkeley, C A : North Atlantic Books. Rokeach, M . (1960). The open and closed mind: investigations into the nature of belief systems and personality systems. Oxford, England: Basic Books. Rosenberg, M . (1965). Society and adolescent self-image. Princeton, N J : Princeton University Press. Schliermacher, F . E . D. (1958). On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers. J. Oman (Trans, and Ed.). New. York: Harper & Row. Schwartz, S. H . (1992). Universals in the content and structure of values: Theoretical advances and empirical tests in 20 countries. In M . P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol . 25, pp. 1-65). New York: Academic. 142 Schwartz, S. H . , & Boehnke, K . (2004). Evaluating the structure of human values with confirmatory factor analysis. Journal of Research in Personality, 38, 230-255. Shweder, R. A . (1991). Thinking through cultures: Expeditions in cultural psychology. Cambridge, M A : Harvard University Press. Solomon, S., Greenberg, J., Schimel, J., Arndt, J., & Pyszczynski, T. (2004). Human Awareness of Mortality and the Evolution of Culture. In M . Schaller and C . S. Crandall (Eds.), The psychological foundations of culture (pp. 15-40). Mahwah, N J : Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers. Sosis, R. & Alcorta, C. (2003). Signalling, Solidarity, and the Sacred: The Evolution of Religious Behavior. Evolutionary Anthropology, 12, 264-27'4. Sperber, D . (1996). Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach. London: Blackwell . Strickland, B . R . & Weddell, S.C. (1972). Religious orientation, racial prejudice, and dogmatism: A study of Baptists and Unitarians. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 11, 395-399. Sullivan, J .L. , Pierson, J .E. & Marcus, G . E . (1982). Political tolerance and American democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Thornhill, R., & Palmer, C . T. (2000). A natural history of rape: Biological bases of sexual coercion. Boston: M I T Press. Ti l l ich , P. (1957). Dynamics of faith. New York: Harper & Row Tomasello, M . , Kruger, A . & Ratner, H . (1993) Cultural learning. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 16, 495-511. 143 Trimble, D . E . (1997). The Religious Orientation Scale: Review and meta-analysis of social desirability effects. Educational & Psychological Measurement, 57, 970-986. Tweed, T . A . (2001). The American encounter with Buddhism, 1844-1912: Victorian United Nations Human Development Program. Human Development Index. Retrieved January 1, 2005 from the World Wide Web: http://hdr.undp.org/reports/global/2004/pdf/hdr04 HDI.pdf Watson P., Sawyers, P., & Morris, R.J . (2003). Reanalysis within a Christian ideological surround: Relationships of intrinsic religious orientation with fundamentalism and right-wing authoritarianism. Journal of Psychology & Theology, 31, 315-328. Watson P., Sawyers P., & Morris, R.J . (2003). Reanalysis within a Christian ideological surround: Relationships of intrinsic religious orientation with fundamentalism and right-wing authoritarianism. Journal of Psychology & Theology, 31, 315-328.' Watson, D . , & Clark, L . A . (1991). Manual for the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (Expanded Formj.Unpublished manuscript, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, T X . Weber, M . (1947). The theory of social and economic organization. Glencloe, 111: Free Press. Weber, M . (1978). Economy and society. G . Roth and C. Witt ich (Eds.) Berkeley: University of California Press. 144 Wilson, D . S. (2002). Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wolf, G . (2007). The crusade against religion. Wired News. Retrieved March 13, 2007 from the World Wide Web: http://www.wired.corn/news/wiredmag/0,71985-0.html 145 A p p e n d i x A : S a m p l e I t e m s f r o m r e l i g i o u s d e v o t i o n a n d c o a l i t i o n a l r i g i d i t y s c a l e s R e l i g i o u s d e v o t i o n s c a l e s : (1) Intrinsic Religious Motivation (Hoge, 1972) a. In my life I experience the presence of the Divine. b. M y religious beliefs are what really lie behind my whole approach to life. c. (Although I believe in my religion) 3 I refuse to let religious considerations influence my everyday activities (reversed). d. It doesn't matter so much what I believe as long as I lead a moral life (reversed). (2) Divine Devotion (based on Fiorito & Ryan (1998) a. A n important aspect of my prayer experience is to feel a deep sense of connectedness with the Divine. b. Part of my being religious involves a constant search for deeper truths behind the words of my sacred texts. c. I have no interest in feeling a sense of awe about 'the truth and greatness of the Divine ' (reversed). d. I never try to achieve the feeling of oneness with the Divine (reversed). C o a l i t i o n a l R i g i d i t y s c a l e s : (1) Exclusivity a. It is not enough to believe in a religion that is partly true, because there is one religion that is absolutely true. b. There is only one religion that understands the source of all goodness and evil in this world; without believing in that religion, you cannot truly do good or escape evil . c. If you pray sincerely, your prayer can do good, no matter what religion you believe in (reversed). d. The Divine is revealed to us through different religions (reversed). 146 (2) Fundamentalism (Altemeyer & Hunsberger, 1992) a. The long-established traditions in religion show there is a best way to honor and serve the Divine, and this best way should never be compromised. b. E v i l beings are the agents of evil in this world; and those evil beings are constantly and ferociously fighting to tempt humans away from the Divine. c. It is silly to think people can be divided into "the Good" and "the E v i l . " Everyone does some good, and some bad things, (reversed) d. There is no body of teachings, or set of scriptures, which is completely without error, (reversed) (3) Dogmatism (Altemeyer, 1996) a. The things I believe in are so completely true, I could never doubt them. b. "Flexibili ty in thinking" is another name for being "confused and indecisive." c. There are so many things we have not discovered yet, nobody should be absolutely certain his beliefs are right, (reversed) d. The people who disagree with me may well turn out to be right (reversed). (4) Authoritarianism (Altemeyer, 1999) a. Obedience is the most important virtue children can learn. b. Authorities such as parents and our national leaders generally turn out to be right about things, and the radicals and protestors are almost always wrong. c. Students must be taught to challenge their parents' views, confront the authorities, and criticize the traditions of our society (reversed). d. There is nothing wrong with premarital sexual intercourse (reversed). 147 A p p e n d i x B : D e s c r i p t i v e s u m m a r y o f t h e p a s s a g e a d a p t e d f r o m M a r t e l (2002) The passage includes four short paragraphs describing how Piscine came to consider himself simultaneously Hindu, Christian and Mus l im, as well as one passage describing a profound religious experience which he describes as follows: "Every element lived in a . harmonious relation with its neighbor, and all was related. I felt like the center of a small circle coinciding with the center of a much larger circle. The individual soul met the world soul: Atman met Al lah . The presence of God is the finest of rewards." The following day, Piscine is walking with his parents (described as not religious) in the park and is simultaneously (though coincidentally) approached by the three religious authorities he sees regularly: the Hindu pandit, Christian priest, and M u s l i m Imam. After arguing at first over whether Piscine is Hindu, Christian or Mus l im, these authorities begin insulting each other's religions, as in the following exchange: I M A M : Piscine, can this be true? Hindus and Christians believe in many gods. There is only one God. P A N D I T : A n d Muslims have many wives. PRIEST: Piscine, there is salvation only in Jesus. P A N D I T : Nonsense! Christians know nothing about religion. I M A M : Yes, Christians refuse to recognize the last and holiest messenger, peace be upon him. PRIEST: The holiest messenger was Jesus Christ the Son of God, and i f you don't accept him as your Lord and Savior you wi l l burn in hell. I M A M : I 'm afraid you are mistaken—it is you who wi l l burn in hell. P A N D I T : Y o u wi l l both burn in each other's hells. The real question is, why is Piscine involved with these foreign religions? The three authorities then demand that Piscine choose one of the three faiths. Piscine responds as follows: "Mahatma Gandhi said, ' A l l religions are true.' I just want to love God" (see Martel, 2002, p. 69). Piscine then says the following about Gandhi (invented for this study): "There is something rude about interrupting an interfaith battle with the name of a man who died begging the religions around him to bring the people he loved together, not to tear them apart." The three wise men then pull away with "stiff, grudging smiles on their faces" (p. 69) and Piscine's father takes the family out for ice cream. 148 A p p e n d i x C : I n t o l e r a n c e S c a l e s M o r a l E x c l u s i o n 1. Refer to the following scale to indicate how you feel about each character in the story. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. Extremely Very Generally. Slightly Neutral Slightly Generally Very Extremely negative negative negative negative positive positive positive positive Piscine Patel 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 The pandit 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 The priest 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 The imam 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Piscine's parents 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 2. How wicked (evil, bad) and how righteous (good) do you think each character is in the story? [1 = extremely wicked; 9 = extremely righteous] 3. State how likely it is that each character w i l l go to heaven or hell. I f y o u d o n o t b e l i e v e i n h e a v e n a n d h e l l , c h e c k h e r e a n d l e a v e t h e q u e s t i o n b l a n k . [1 = definitely hell; 9 = definitely heaven; 2 and 8 = "very probably hell/heaven"; 3 and 7 = "more probably hell/heaven"; 4 and 6 = "slightly more probably hell/heaven"] 4. Do you think that each character w i l l have good or bad experiences after they die? If you are not sure, mark neutral. I f y o u d o n o t b e l i e v e t h a t p e o p l e h a v e e x p e r i e n c e s a f t e r t h e y d i e , c h e c k h e r e a n d l e a v e t h i s q u e s t i o n b l a n k . [1 = totally bad (experience after death); 9 = totally good experience after death; 2 and 8 = "very bad/good"; 3 and 7 = "generally bad/good"; 4 and 6 = "slightly bad/good"] 5. If you ruled the world and could easily punish people who did not do as you told them, whom would you forbid from talking about their beliefs to your friends and family and to others in your religious group? [1 = definitely forbidden; 9 = definitely not forbidden; 2 and 8 = "very probably"; 3 and 7 = "more probably"; 4 and 6 = "slightly more probably"] 149 P o l i t i c a l I n t o l e r a n c e ( b a s e d o n S u l l i v a n , P i e r s o n & M a r c u s [ 1 9 8 2 ] ) People who believe and practice 3 religions at once 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Hindus 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Christians 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Muslims 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Nonreligious people 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1. should be B A N N E D from being a political leader of your country. 2. should be A L L O W E D to teach in public schools, (reversed) 3. If form groups, these groups should be O U T L A W E D . 4. should be A L L O W E D to make a speech in your town or city. (reversed) 5. should have their P H O N E C O N V E R S A T I O N S S E C R E T L Y L I S T E N E D T O by your government. 6. should be A L L O W E D to hold rallies in your town or city (reversed) [1 = totally disagree 9 = totally agree; 2 and 8 = "strongly disagree/agree"; 3 and 7 = "disagree/agree"; 4 and 6 = "slightly disagree/agree" V i o l e n t A n t i p a t h y Piscine Patel 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 The pandit 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 The priest 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 The imam 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Piscine's parents 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1. How sad or joyous do you think the Divine would feel at the ki l l ing of each character—in other words, how much do you think each character deserved to be killed? Assume that the Divine is n o t j o y o u s to see a righteous person killed. P l e a s e p a y c l o s e a t t e n t i o n t o t h e s c a l e . I f y o u d o n o t b e l i e v e t h a t t h e D i v i n e " f e e l s " e m o t i o n s , t h e n p l e a s e c h e c k h e r e a n d l e a v e t h e q u e s t i o n b l a n k . 2. How sad or joyous would you feel at the ki l l ing of each character? [1 = extremely joyous (to see the person killed); 9 = extremely sad (to see the person killed); 2 and 8 = "very joyous/sad"; 3 and 7 = "joyous/sad"; 4 and 6 = "slightly joyous/sad"] 150 M o r a l V i o l e n c e 1. The Divine rejoices in the ki l l ing of the wicked—glad that they are taken off the earth—but the Divine is sad at the ki l l ing of the righteous, because their loss is a great loss. 2. It is good when a wicked person dies. (It is a pity i f they go to hell, but the Divine is better served i f the wicked are gone). 3. It is good to k i l l a wicked person. 4. The Divine sometimes calls on the righteous to k i l l the wicked. [1 = totally untrue; 9 = totally true; 2 and 8 = "very untrue/true"; 3 and 7 = "generally untrue/true"; 4 and 6 = "slightly untrue/true"] 151 A p p e n d i x D : P a c i f i s t E s s a y W h e n C h r i s t i a n s s t a n d a g a i n s t G o d Christianity is in danger. I see some of you nodding your heads. "The Islamists" think some of you. "The atheists and evolutionists" think others. Those of you fresh from seeing The Passion are probably thinking "The Jews". But you're all wrong. The danger is not coming from atheists, Muslims or Jews—or Buddhists or Hindus or Shintoists for that matter. The danger comes from us. Christians. The state of Christianity itself. That's not to say that atheists, Musl ims, Jews and the rest are perfect. I 'm sure they're all endangering themselves too, but that's their own business. I am a Christian, and all of us here are Christians, so the evil we do as Christians should be our first concern. We are responsible for the corruption of our own faith, and stopping our own evil should matter more to us than stopping the evil of others. We only condemn others to congratulate ourselves, and we congratulate ourselves at our peril. So what is the danger we face? Fear. We are afraid of everything we see going on around us that we can't control. We're especially afraid of the people we can't control. A n d who are the people we can't control? Non-Christians. We're afraid of nuclear weapons in the hands of non-Christians. We're afraid of non-Christians blowing up our sky scrapers, corrupting our values, kil l ing the next generation of Christians in body or soul or both. And so, in our terror of non-Christians, we want to make war on them to get them under control: a War on Terror to get Islam under control, a Culture War to get atheism, evolutionism and postmodern liberalism under control. If we don't conquer and control them, we fear, they wi l l conquer and destroy us. Why do we fear this? Because . the evil are strong and the good are weak, we say, just as the Roman soldiers were strong but Christ's body was weak, so his body was whipped and crucified by the Roman soldiers. So we, the good, the meek, the gentle, must make ourselves stronger by any means necessary to beat back the evil that threatens to destroy us. In this way, we can be just like Jesus. As we all know, when the Roman soldiers were about to crucify Jesus, he conjured up all his Godly powers, pulled his hands and feet from the nails, grabbed a soldier's sword and cut them all down. Finally, with the severed head of Pontius Pilate raised in his right hand, he brought freedom to his people and peace on earth, and evil came to an end at last. We all know the story doesn't end this way. Because Jesus died as he lived: without fear. Where there is faith, there is no fear—only awe of the Lord. And where there is no fear, there is no need to control, and no need to whip and crucify, and no need to torture or k i l l or cluster bomb foreigners. Some of us feel we must support our government who kills and tortures men women and children to control Islam for the security of Christianity. But this kind of service to Christianity is disobedience to Christ. It serves a corrupted Christianity that trusts the material power of imperial Rome more than the spiritual power of God. We do not need to bring non-Christians to "shock and awe" by bombing their cities with carnal weapons made to serve carnal ends. To bring others to awe of God, let us free them from the violence and oppression our nation does to them, make what amends we can and ask their forgiveness. A n d i f corrupted Christians' worst fear-152 fantasies come true—if tolerance leads to degeneracy and thus to conquest—-let not our dismay and fear harden us into suicide bombers. Let us be instead suicide truth tellers: telling the truth right to the grave. If those who were once oppressed by our nation come to rule it, let us bare our necks before their swords to show them that we have no fear but only awe of God. If they take our lives, they only hurry us to our eternal lives. A n d i f they spare our lives, then we wi l l be witnesses to God giving them life.