Ma Hamatzav? (Was’ Up?)

Sightings  10/23/08

– David G. Myers

Ridiculous, and worse.  So say the new atheist books:  In God is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens does not mince words, calling religion “violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children.”  Now Bill Maher’s movie Religulous lampoons the plausibility and social effects of all religion, ominously concluding that the world will end if religion does not end.  But I suggest that social science data point to a different conclusion than do the new atheist anecdotes of hypocritical and vile believers.

Many in the community of faith gladly grant the irrationality of many religious fundamentalists − people who bring to mind Madeline L’Engle’s comment that “Christians have given Christianity a bad name.”   But mocking religious “nut cases” is cheap and easy.  By heaping scorn on the worst examples of anything, including medicine, law, politics, or even atheism, one can make it look evil.  But the culture war of competing anecdotes becomes a standoff.  One person counters religion-inspired 9/11 leader Mohammed Atta with religion-inspired Martin Luther King, Jr.  Another counters the genocidal crusades with the genocidal atheists, Stalin and Mao.  But as we social scientists like to say, the plural of anecdote is not data.

Maher and the new atheist authors present anecdote upon anecdote about dangerous and apparently irrational religious behavior, while ignoring massive data on religion’s associations with human happiness, health, and altruism.  The Gallup Organization, for example, has just released worldwide data culled from surveys of more than a quarter-million people in 140 countries.  Across regions and religions, highly religious people are most helpful.  In Europe, in the Americas, in Africa, and in Asia they are about fifty percent more likely than the less religious to report having donated money to charity in the last month, volunteered time to an organization, and helped a stranger.

This finding – that the religious tend to be more human than heartless – expresses the help-giving mandates found in all major religions, from Islamic alms-giving to Judeo-Christian tithing.  And it replicates many earlier findings.  In a Gallup survey, forty-six percent of “highly spiritually committed” Americans volunteered with the infirm, poor or elderly, as did twenty-two percent of those “highly uncommitted.”  Ditto charitable giving, for which surveys have revealed a strong faith-philanthropy correlation.  In one, the one in four Americans who attended weekly worship services gave nearly half of all charitable contributions.

Is religion nevertheless, as Freud supposed, and Maher’s film seems to assert, an “obsessional neurosis” that breeds sexually repressed, guilt-laden misery?  Anecdotes aside, the evidence is much kinder to C. S. Lewis’s presumption that “joy is the serious business of heaven.”  For example, National Opinion Research Center surveys of 43,000 Americans since 1972 reveal that actively religious people report high levels of happiness, with forty-three percent of those attending religious services weekly or more saying they are “very happy” (as do twenty-six percent of those seldom or never attending religious services).  Faith (and its associated social support) also correlates with effective coping with the loss of a spouse, marriage, or job. 

Maher would surely call such religiously-inspired happiness delusional.  But what would he say to the surprising though oft-reported correlations between religiosity and health?  In several large epidemiological studies (which, as in one U.S. National Health Interview Survey, follow lives through time to see what predicts ill health and premature death) religiously active people were less likely to die in any given year and they enjoyed longer life expectancy.  This faith-health correlation, which remains even after controlling for age, gender, ethnicity, and education, is partly attributable to the healthier lifestyles (including the lower smoking rate) of religious people.  It also appears partly attributable to the communal support of faith communities and to the health benefits of positive emotions.

These indications of the personal and social benefits of faith don’t speak to its truth claims. And truth ultimately is what matters.  (If religious claims were shown to be untrue, though comforting and adaptive, what honest person would choose to believe?  And if religious claims were shown to be true, though discomfiting, what honest person would choose to disbelieve?)  But they do challenge the anecdote-based new atheist argument that religion is generally a force for evil.  Moreover, they help point us toward a humble spirituality that worships God with open minds as well as open hearts, toward an alternative to purposeless scientism and dogmatic fundamentalism, toward a faith that helps make sense of the universe, gives meaning to life, opens us to the transcendent, connects us in supportive communities, provides a mandate for morality and selflessness, and offers hope in the face of adversity and death.

David Myers is a professor of psychology at Hope College and author of  A Friendly Letter to Skeptics and Atheists:  Musings on Why God is Good and Faith Isn’t Evil (Jossey-Bass, 2008).