I listened to Alister McGrath speaking at LICC earlier in the week on Richard Dawkins (pictured) and the meaning of life. I have a sneaking admiration for Dawkins and his teasing, tendentious rhetoric, but I thought McGrath's critique was well constructed until he came to his last point. He wanted to put forward as evidence against Dawkins' view that religion is intrinsically harmful recent scientific research that has tended to suggest that faith and spirituality can have measurable health benefits.
Even supposing that the research is sound, I can't imagine Dawkins being very impressed by this line of argument. I would have thought it would be relatively easy to explain the apparent link between health and faith as a matter of psychology: faith gives rise to a positive attitude which boosts the immune system and generally makes you feel better, or whatever. I don't see it as in any real way vindicating the truth claims made by faith - and certainly not of one particular faith. It is an argument, moreover, that relies on a very modern, individualized and self-centred model of spirituality: what practical benefits can I get by developing my spiritual potential?
I think Dawkins would be much more impressed by a paper by Gregory Paul published in the Journal of Religion and Society which argues for the consistently harmful effect of religion at a societal level.
In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion in the prosperous democracies.... The most theistic prosperous democracy, the U.S., ... is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developed democracies, sometimes spectacularly so, and almost always scores poorly.
There is evidence that within the U.S. strong disparities in religious belief versus acceptance of evolution are correlated with similarly varying rates of societal dysfunction, the strongly theistic, anti-evolution south and mid-west having markedly worse homicide, mortality, STD, youth pregnancy, marital and related problems than the northeast where societal conditions, secularization, and acceptance of evolution approach European norms....
This paper focuses mainly on the social consequences of a high level of theistic (and creationist) belief, but similar arguments could no doubt be made with respect to politics and intellectual activities. Should major political decisions - such as the decision to invade another country - be influenced by a leader's personal beliefs? Does social and political pressure from creationists distort the public practice of science?
So my question would be: what do we have to do to ensure that an emerging theology is socially, politically and intellectually benign? If we believe that faith and theology should have some sort of public commitment, how do we avoid simply reinforcing the correlation between belief and dysfunctionality that Gregory Paul has highlighted?
For further comment on Paul's research see George Monbiot, 'Better off without Him'.
consequence, or correlation
Hi, Andrew. I don’t want to detract from the main intent of your post, which is worth considering. However, I do want indicate a point of distinction between what the article you quote *says* and your own summary. The author merely stated a correlation between the societal evils and creationist beliefs. You seem to make a causal link.
I have yet to read Paul’s entire paper, but I would find it interesting to discover how he categorized belief, which could skey polling questions, etc. In this excerpt, he seems to link "worship of a creator" with "anti-evolution", thereby making a huge assumption that overlooks an entire other category that both worships the creator and has no scruples with evolutionary theory.
Good to be back. Sorry to be brief.
Correlation, causality and creationism
Eric, that’s a reasonable point (and it’s very nice to hear from you again), but I think most people who read the paper will naturally assume that Paul strongly suspects that there is some sort of causal link between public religious belief and the various ills that he lists. The evidence is also bound to be used by others who are anxious to find fault with religion and who may not be so careful to distinguish between cause and correlation.
It is, however, part of the debate whether the link is causal or in which way it might be causal. One might argue, for example, that the popularity of conservative Christianity in the US is a reaction to social dysfunctionality - and therefore a product of it. This reaction may have led to a stronger polarization and may also subsequently have provoked further social and ethical disintegration. Monbiot’s article also asks whether we are seeing causation or association between the two phenomena.
Paul does appear to see creationism as a central component of public religious commitment in the US. This does not take into account believers who have no problem with evolutionary theory, but then these are not the people who are rocking the boat at the moment.
It seems to me profoundly important that Christian theology engages in public life and public debate, but if we do the stakes are high. It’s the sort of thing that we are capable of getting horribly wrong.
Scriptural evidence :)
A slightly flippant response could be that Paul could have made his point much more simply had he read his Hebrew scriptures. It is mainly when the going gets tough that the people of Israel turn to YHWH. As soon as things things are going smoothly, their faith goes downhill. Scripture itself shows clear evidence of a strong negative correlation between faith and wellbeing.
Nothing new under the sun. I would like to see someone do a paper instead of a pamphlet.
Re: Scriptural evidence :)
New here! The discussion will prove to be addictive I am sure :-) Great stuff.
One has to be very careful with how data is presented. I agree that the article argues for a correlation effect. This is not causal, but it notes that two events are related without doing a more sophisticated analysis like a regression which does reveal a causal effect between variables. That is to say, if the research presents that one variable regresses on another, then we have a lot more to work with.
So with this in mind if religion correlates with another variable, the next step is to determine the variance of the model. What variables can we pull out that predict other variables to occur under specific conditions? Saying “religion causes violence” is not satisfactory since all religious belief clearly does not. If not all, under what conditions does religion cause violence and is it therefore the conditions in which religion acts on people that is the true cause of the violent behavior? Religion can then act as a secondary cause or even a catalyst, but not the source of violent behavior itself.
Variables and how they are related are vital in reporting research and I think that overall folks get a bit too eager to say “this causes this” and end up misrepresenting a given study. We see it on the Today show expert circuit all the time! :-)
Drew Tatusko
A very interesting subject
A very interesting subject to bring up. However I wonder whether we should be overly concerned about the way Christianity is perceived by the general public?
John the Baptizer’s spartan lifestyle was misunderstood by some people as the result of him having a demon, but that did not prompt him to hire a PR man to spruce up his image! And yet the masses still flocked to hear him preach and to get baptised.
Jesus was accused of being a drunkard and a glutton, of having a demon, of being a Samaritan, and of being out of his mind, but the Gospels do not record that he strove to put the record straight. Instead he just seemed to get on with his mission of preaching the gospel, teaching his disciples, and performing signs, while trusting his Father to draw chosen people to him despite the adverse propaganda.
The early church was accused of cannibalism, incest, and atheism because some of their innocent practices were misconstrued. I’m not a historian of the early church but I don’t ever recall hearing that they were at pains to explain to outsiders that the Eucharist was not literal ingestion of human flesh & blood, or that loving the brethren did not mean sexual relations with one’s physical family, etc.
Even without the fall-out resulting from Gregory Paul’s paper, I think the church in the UK today is generally not regarded very highly. It’s not so much that it is despised as being morally bad or doctrinally wrong, but rather it is regarded with a mixture of amusement and apathy as a quaint institution that is irrelevant to real life. And yet I keep hearing about individuals who seem to be spiritually hungry and who feel the church (yes, even evangelical churches!) might give them what they’re looking for.
Extra discussion
Your thoughts and especially questions intrigue me, as usual, Andrew.
I want to point friends on this boards to a very similar discussion going on in a very different venue (making for very different discussion!) at
www.tpmcafe.com
May I suggest we both engage and LISTEN to the discussion there as well and then bring some of that discussion back here to formulate some possible answers to your question, Andrew?
Looking forward to discussion.
Dawkins, McGrath, Gregory Paul, statistics and religion
Alister McGrath’s book "Dawkins’ God - Genes, Memes and the Meaning of life" is worth reading, even if you haven’t (like myself) read much of Dawkins. McGrath’s training, interestingly, was in chemistry and the natural sciences before he took up theology. Dawkins and McGrath are based in Oxford, and when I was there this summer, a whole section of Blackwells bookshop was promoting (at a discount) McGrath’s book!
Maybe it’s my ignorance about how statistical surveys work, but I felt Gregory Paul’s analysis was making some huge assumptions, and not giving me much of an insight into the complex nature of Christianity in America in particular, and the relationship of ‘faith’ (he tends to use the phrases ‘religious ’ or ‘theistic societies’ or something similar - which raises yet further questions) to the world or society it inhabits. But then I always was allergic to mathematics and statistical surveys. I also had a look at the tpmcafe website Makaden was referring to, and the paper by George Monbiot, mentioned above.
The main assumption Paul seems to be making is that there is a ‘correlation’ between the ‘religiosity’ of a society and the (negative) moral practice of that society according to certain indicators (the ones he has chosen to investigate) - at least in the western world, and the US in particular. Interesting as this is, I question the kinds of conclusions he seems to think can be drawn from this kind of approach by contrasting it with the benefits of Christianity has brought to society and the world in general through its humanitarian endeavours and its contributions (in the UK) to such things as the abolition of the slave trade, factory reform, child welfare, and education in the 19th century, its indirect contribution to the rise of the trades union movement especially towards the end of the 19th and early 20th century, its effect on the quality of life amongst the English working classes through the rise of Methodism in the 18th century and the Salvation Army in the 19th century, and its humanitarian contributions of education, medicine, and much else around the world. (I noticed that Indian relief conveys in the recent earthquake in Pakistan bore the red-cross symbol).
But this may be beside the point. A more pertinent question is in what ways a society, like the US, with a statistically high proportion of church attendance, can be described as a ‘theistic society’; what indicators, apart from numerical analysis, are we using to define what ‘theistic society’ means? (Makaden’s website link gives some interesting insights in this respect).
Perhaps even more to the point, should a mark of the ‘success’ of Christian belief and practice be the extent to which it provides measurable moral/social ‘uplift’ to the society it inhabits? On what basis does Christianity carry a mandate for this kind of social change? Clearly, in the UK, pressure groups such as ‘Care’ have been carrying this mandate for many years, and social concern is central to the objectives of groups such as Shaftesbury and Oasis. More recently, the pressure group led by Stephen Green, ‘Christian Voice’, has been seeking to bring influence to bear in a more strident, and to many, alarming way.
Has the effect of religious debates and controversy (‘liberals’ versus ‘evangelicals’) during the last century been to separate a ‘spiritual’ message and identity of Christianity from a ‘social’ conscience and identity? Do we need a better theology which will unite the spiritual and social relevance of Christianity? Is the ‘emerging church’ and its various theologies and practices any different, or potentially more effective, than other Christian groups which have been operating in the social field for a long time? I think there is a necessity for a better theology, but I suspect that the emerging church movement may prove less effective in relating to a social context than it would like to believe - or at any rate, like the charismatic movement, it may be a trail-blazer for more conventional expressions of the faith to follow and take up on a wider front.
It's about economics, education, and reason
Paul’s correlation between religious belief and negative social consequences is, to an extent, causal. Let me explain…
The difference between the Northeast and the South in America isn’t just the number of people who attend church and believe in God: there’s a marked difference in education, economics, heat, and the type of reasonless belief that tends to pervade down here (I am an American writing from Texas. YeeHaw). To the extent that a certain type of religious belief denies the value of reason, education, objectivity, and sympathy, belief influences cultures in a detrimental fashion.
I don’t think there is a causal link between general belief and negative social trends…I do think, however, that this trend exists when the belief systems are fundamentalist/reasonless/hyperstrict/etc. Obviously, we need look no further than Islamo-fascism (or whatever the vogue term is for oppressive Islamic theocracies) to see that the denial of reason and the usurpation of emotion over intellect, in general, leads to bad things, as it were. It is a bit of a chicken-and-the-egg dance. Underprivileged, uneducated people tend to latch on to ‘fundamentalist’ (is that the right word?) belief systems that have intrinsic to their structure an emotion, pride, and subtle (or not so subtle) anger. But those belief systems, in my view, also promote those negative tendencies.
It’s also like Darth Vader: the tighter and more forcefully you try to grip (judge) people who sin, the more deviants you will create.
I just came across a quote on this website. I was trying to say this, I think, but this does a much better job of it:
Now, there are reasonable psychological grounds to suggest that if an emphasis on believing some kind of external truth, such as ‘biblical teaching’, leads us to deny or repress what is going on in our inner spiritual and emotional life this will bear a range of fruits such as loneliness, depression, anxiety and panic attacks.
These negative inner-fruits cause negative social behaviors. The areas that Paul says have a high level of religiosity really have a high level of a CERTAIN KIND of religiosity (which perhaps sells better): fundagelism. (my own cute phrase for fundamental evangelicalism). So it all goes back to the basic problem, and what seems to be the basic reason for the emerging church movement: there are some bad repurcussions to be had from evangelical belief systems. So let us move forward by acknowledging both what is good about those systems and what is bad, and discard as best we can that which is not good and learn from that which is good.
simple, eh? :-) (Using a smiley-face on a theological blog might be the greatest sin of all)
Re: It's about economics, education, and reason
To this point I think that you pull out the other possible variables that cause such harmful behavior well enough. I also agree that McGrath’s book does a very nice job of using the same atheist rhetorical style (I have engaged in more of these debates with atheists in the Atheist v. Christian Google group than I can ennumerate and McGrath nails the style perfectly).
I would recommend something a little more old-school and that is H. Richard Niebuhr’s Social Sources of Denominationalism where he discusses the difference in religious belief between the poorer and more marginal groups and the majority class that legislates what is normative. The former will tend towards more sectarian and literalist interpretations that lend a more “fundamentalist/reasonless/hyperstrict” belief system. The latter tend towards a root in education as the means of religious transmission. The former comes from the pulpit and the latter comes from the classroom.
So with the sect-church analysis that goes on well after Niebuhr, I think there are striking parallels between how a socially marginal person will tend to believe and behave more militantly versus an educated elite who will appropriate the margins of purity very differently.
To infer one more step it seems that the real cause is not religious belief or the kind of religious belief. Religious belief is more or less a given in most cultures to some degree. But the kind of behaviors that one exhibits in a religious worldview seem to be dependent on social issues that the religious behavior functions within. The problem seems to be the resources one has to live (housing, food, freedoms of speech and so forth). The more limited they become, the more exclusionary the religious behavior can become and be reinforced by those social conditions.
Now there are certainly a lot of rich folks who behave with equally rigid religious boundaries. But there again, I think we have to look at the social constructs first and the religious behavior second. And this is where the emergent church can do something quite tangible. By focusing on the social forces, the religious environment and behaviors can be held in different conditions that will promote different directions of development for those religious behaviors.
Drew Tatusko
Re: Is religion any good?
For a rather more positive take on the place of Christianity in society have a look at an article by Michael Burleigh in the Sunday Times yesterday: Christianity, the undercover agent of politics. His argument is basically that Christianity has shaped our best political and moral values, has provided outstanding examples of individual selflessness and courage, and isn’t half as bad as such secular religions as Jacobinism and Marxism. He concludes:
Re: Is religion any good?
Jason Cutshall
Not to be entirely cynical, but, first how we avoid the dysfunctionality that gregory Paul highlights is to think. In the west our societies have transformed from pseudo-theistic societies to secular and now more pluralistic societies. As we move forward with the gospel, we must reflect on the fact that the gospel does not have the place it used to have in society at large, if it has any place at all, in the contemporary mind.
What I mean by this is that we can no longer state, “the bible says…” with any sort of authority in most contemporary situations. 50 years ago, maybe you could have at least sparked a debate or an out right change of position with that statement, but today, in the west, you would at best be dismissed, at worst mocked for even suggesting it. (This is a general statement, which is inherently general and does not account for all fringe positions.)
So how do we engage with contemporary culture in a Christ like manner? In the public sector, tread lightly. I believe this is the example that Christ gives us. In his interactions with non-Jews or even everyday Jews Jesus seems to be treading lightly. Jesus doesn’t soften his message in the least, but rather he seems to engage with the poor and the everyday in a manner totally opposite from that which is used in relation to pharisees or other religious leaders.
The thought here is that Christ interacted differently with different people. Christ’s message was the same, but his actions were different, his words were different. In a pluralistic society, this must be held as a presupposition to any action or statement. Given our belief what would be the wisest course of action in this realm that we are in, whether it be church, politics, or at the pub. What would cause engagement without judgement or dysfunction, could be the question to wrestle with.
As emerging theologians we will offend, it is the nature of the gospel. The question is how do we maintain Christ-likeness in offending, rather than spiraling off into some form of cultural dysfunction, which Paul points out.
If emergent theology is on some level innovative, which I hope that it is. We must never cease to be innovative. This is said with the presupposition the the core of Christian faith remains in tact, but rather how that faith is related to our time is the innovative part. For instance, a resurrected Christ would be essential to Christian faith, in my view, but how does that notion interact with the contemporary mind and situation.
How do we maintain innovation or application, while maintaining our distinction and our Christ-likeness? The key, I see, is inherent in a reflective community. A community that is constantly reflecting on its own, are we, joyful, self-controlled,…loving. Rather, than reflecting on, are we imposing our truth, are we inviting others into a reflective community? Are we exposing others to the life-giving Christ, through service to them, rather than service to our own beliefs?
My state of mind through this is that I could be wrong. I don’t believe I am but I have to acknowledge that with my lack of understanding of the entire universe, i may be wrong. I know that I react better to humility and I assume most others do as well. In the public sector we must hold to humility (of our place in the universe), transparency (in our motivations and understanding), and service (to those around us).
Re: Is religion any good?
The question should be: Is religion an INDISPENSABLE force for good in the world? and, perhaps more importantly, is there any true to the fantastic claims of religions?If there’s an evil side to religions and if religions are a dispensable force for good, we can certainly do without religions.
erectie