Death Anxiety and Religious Belief: An Existential Psychology of Religion 9781472571625, 9781474297813, 9781472571632

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Death Anxiety and Religious Belief

Scientific Studies of Religion: Inquiry and Explanation Series editors: Luther H. Martin, William W. McCorkle, and Donald Wiebe Scientific Studies of Religion: Inquiry and Explanation publishes cutting-edge research in the new and growing field of scientific studies in religion. Its aim is to publish empirical, experimental, historical, and ethnographic research on religious thought, behaviour, and institutional structures. The series works with a broad notion of scientific that includes innovative work on understanding religion(s), both past and present. With an emphasis on the cognitive science of religion, the series includes complementary approaches to the study of religion, such as psychology and computer modelling of religious data. Titles seek to provide explanatory accounts for the religious behaviors under review, both past and present. The Attraction of Religion, edited by D. Jason Slone and James A. Van Slyke Contemporary Evolutionary Theories of Culture and the Study of Religion, Radek Kundt The Mind of Mithraists, Luther H. Martin New Patterns for Comparative Religion, William E. Paden Religion in Science Fiction, Steven Hrotic

Death Anxiety and Religious Belief An Existential Psychology of Religion Jonathan Jong and Jamin Halberstadt

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 Paperback edition first published 2018 © Jonathan Jong and Jamin Halberstadt, 2016 Jonathan Jong and Jamin Halberstadt have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing- in- Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN:

HB: PB: ePDF: ePub:

978-1-4725-7-162-5 978-1-3500-6-160-6 978-1-4725-7-163-2 978-1-4725-7-164-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Jong, Jonathan, author. Title: Death, anxiety, and religious belief : an existential psychology of religion / Jonathan Jong and Jamin Halberstadt. Description: New York : Bloomsbury, 2016. | Series: Scientific studies of religion: inquiry and explanation | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016010451 (print) | LCCN 2016017138 (ebook) | ISBN 9781472571625 (hardback) | ISBN 9781472571649 (epub) | ISBN 9781472571632 (epdf) Subjects: LCSH: Religion—Philosophy. | Fear of death. | Psychology, Religious. Classification: LCC BL51.J8175 2016 (print) | LCC BL51 (ebook) | DDC 202/.3—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016010451 Series: Scientific Studies of Religion: Inquiry and Explanation Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.

In memory of Jong Onn Fui, Song Siew Chin, and Jap Nam Soon. — JJ For my brilliant wife Cindy Ann Hall, and our grandest immortality project: Abigail and Paxton. — JH

Contents List of Illustrations Preface Acknowledgments 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

The Whats and Whys of Religious Belief A History of Thanatocentric Theories of Religion Measuring Faith and Fear Are People Afraid of Death? The Religious Correlates of Death Anxiety Death Anxiety and Religion: Causes and Consequences The Future of Immortality, Literal and Symbolic

Notes References Index

ix xi xiii 1 27 47 85 115 137 169 185 191 227

Illustrations Tables 3.1 Items in the Supernatural Belief Scale 3.2 Items in the Supernatural Belief Scale-Revised (SBS-6) 3.3 Correlations between SBS-6 and religious behaviors and attitudes (Spearman’s ρ) 3.4 Reliability and validity of SBS-6 in Brazil, Philippines, Russia, and South Korea 3.5 Templer’s (1970) Death Anxiety Scale 3.6 Factors/subscales in multidimensional measures of death anxiety 3.7 The two-factor Existential Death Anxiety Scale 3.8 Scale statistics for EDAS, with correlation between factors 3.9 Items in the Supernatural Belief and Death Anxiety ST-IATs

56 58 59 61 68 71 74 74 81

Figure 5.1

Schematic diagram of inverted-U curve

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Preface The origins of this book can be traced back to three related ideas that inspired Jonathan as an undergraduate at the University of Otago. The very first academic paper he ever read, Deborah Kelemen’s Are Children “Intuitive Theists”?, introduced him to the possibility of studying religion from a social cognitive perspective. Soon after, through the work of the late Ziva Kunda, he learned about motivated cognition, the idea that our reasoning (and therefore our beliefs) is shaped by our desires. Then, thanks to Dr Jackie Hunter, he encountered motivated cognition in action, through Ernest Becker’s and Terror Management’s theories about the all-encompassing role of death anxiety in human psychology. For a young scientist, these ideas were an irresistible invitation to understand the nature and origins of religious belief. They have guided his research, in collaboration with Jamin, ever since. A more proximate account of this book’s genesis is that it started its life as Jonathan’s doctoral dissertation under Jamin’s supervision. Turning a doctoral dissertation into a book is a deceptively intricate task, which leads to ever deeper and more expansive questions, and in turn more research to answer them. We managed to reduce them to three:  Are people afraid of death? Does death anxiety motivate religious belief? Does religious belief mitigate death anxiety? Our efforts to answer these questions have required a new integration of philosophical, anthropological, and psychological theory, new ways to measure religious belief and death anxiety, and new data from around the world. We are proud of the result—the most comprehensive and current treatment available of the relationship between death anxiety and religious belief—but are not fooled into thinking it is the final one. Indeed, this book provides a starting point, which we hope will be a definitive source of the current state of knowledge and theory, but also a guidebook to what is not known. Most of all, we hope this book will inspire new scholars to bridge the known and unknown, to ask and answer the biggest questions in human psychology and behavior: how and why people pursue and benefit from their gods.

Acknowledgments Many people were involved in the original empirical research—particularly the data collection and data analysis—that appears in this book, including Jenn Arrell, Matthias Bluemke, Rachel Butler, Susanna Campbell, Brittany Cardwell, Si-Hua Chang, Marea Colombo, Donna Hendry, Christopher Jackson, Joshua Jackson, Christopher Kavanagh, Leila Morgenroth, Cathy Ng, Tristan Philip, Phoebe Poulter, Robert Ross, Keren Segal, Naomi Simons, Samantha Smith, Gabriela Visini, and other previous and current members of the Social Cognition Laboratory and the Department of Psychology (Otago); the Institute for Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology (Oxford); and the Centre for Research in Psychology, Behaviour and Achievement (Coventry). Jonathan would also like to thank Gregory Dawes, Jackie Hunter, and Marc Wilson for their advice and comments on the doctoral dissertation from which this book originated. We have also enjoyed research funding without which this book would not have been possible, including from the Marsden Fund (The Royal Society of New Zealand) and the John Templeton Foundation. On a more personal note, we would like to acknowledge our friends and family for their love and support. Jonathan thanks in particular Megan Kearney (fellow co-sufferer in writing), Rachel Neaum, Rachel Little, and Maud Hurley, who have helped much more and for much longer than they know. Thanks also to the clergy and congregation of St Mary Magdalen, Oxford, not least for putting up with an oft-absentee assistant curate. Finally, a big shout out to the crew at BREW, who kept Jonathan caffeinated and whose corner table he occupied for many hours of writing. Jamin also adds his appreciation to Anne Maas and Caterina Suitener at the University of Padua, where substantial parts of the book were drafted. Jerrie Miller, Jamin’s sister-in-law, deserves a special mention too, for lovingly hosting the authors at her home in Sleepy Hollow (where else to write a book on death?) for a final, intensive week in which the book finally came together. Most of all, Jamin

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thanks his inestimable wife Cindy Hall, without whose love, patience, common sense, and practical support this project would have faltered. Finally, many thanks for the opportunity and instigation to write this book, to the series editors of Scientific Studies of Religion:  Inquiry and Explanation, Luther Martin, William McCorkle, and Donald Wiebe; and to Lalle Pursglove and Lucy Carroll at Bloomsbury Publishing.

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The Whats and Whys of Religious Belief

It is an anthropological truism that religion is cross-culturally and historically ubiquitous. With the possible exception of the Amazonian Pirahã people—who lack numbers, color words, and social hierarchy of any kind (Everett, 2005)—as far as we know, there has never been a human culture or society totally devoid of what we might plausibly recognize as religious belief, behavior, and belonging. Indeed, even prehuman societies may have been religious: there is archaeological evidence of religious rituals— chiefly, burial practices that may imply afterlife beliefs—from the Upper Paleolithic, 50,000 to 100,000 years ago, and perhaps even earlier, prior to the emergence of modern humans (Dickson, 1990; Pettitt, 2011; Rossano, 2009). Certainly, since then the vast majority of people in the world have been, in some sense, religious. A recent Pew Research Centre (2012) study of 230 countries and territories estimated that 84  percent of the world’s population is affi liated to some religious group. Similarly, in a Gallup survey of 114 countries, 84  percent of respondents claimed that religion is an important part of their lives (Crabtree, 2010). Conversely, only an estimated 7  percent of the global population claim not to believe in God or gods (Keysar & Navarro-Rivera, 2013; Zuckerman, 2007). Religion turns out to be remarkably pervasive and persistent, despite the best efforts of acutely antagonistic political regimes—such as in the Soviet Union, Maoist China, and Socialist Albania—and the polemics of public intellectuals, from Baron d’Holbach and Denis Diderot to Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins.

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Defining “religion” By any reasonable definition, human beings are incorrigibly religious, but it pays to be clear about what we mean when we talk about “religion.” If the history of social scientific discourse on religion is any indication, this business of defining “religion” is an unenviable task (Baird, 1971; Berger, 1974; Boyer, 2011; Bruce, 2011; Hill et al., 2000; Horton, 1960; Spiro, 1966). It is also likely to be a futile one, if the goal is a watertight definition that lists necessary and sufficient conditions.

The Buddhism problem and the football problem Religion, like most social phenomena—indeed, like most natural phenomena—resists neat, uncompromising, and exceptionless conceptualization. Even apparently straightforward biological notions like sex and species are contested. Which anatomical or physiological factors—genes, gonads, genitalia, or hormones—should determine sex classification? What criteria—anatomical resemblance, reproductive viability, genetic similarity, phylogenetic history—should be used in biological taxonomy? In each case, every criterion is prone to counterexamples, and the separate criteria fail to correlate reliably. The world—particularly the human social world—is too messy, too complex, and too subtle for simple systemization. So it is with religion. There is no such thing as religion, such that we can identify its essential properties; there can therefore be no definition of religion that lists necessary and sufficient qualifying conditions, that identifies all and only all institutions and practices we would consider religious. Substantive definitions, which refer to the content of beliefs, tend to face what we might call the Buddhism Problem: they inadvertently exclude phenomena that should uncontroversially count as religion. For example, E. B. Tylor’s (1871a, p. 383) “minimal definition of religion” as “belief in Spiritual Beings” is often criticized for excluding ostensibly atheistic phenomena like Theravada Buddhism (Durkheim, 1912; Southwold, 1978)  that scholars of religion strongly prefer to include. Conversely, functional definitions, like Émile Durkheim’s (1912/2008, p. 46) “unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things . . . which unite into one single moral community,

The Whats and Whys of Religious Belief

3

called a church, all those who adhere to them,” are liable to face what we might call the Football Problem:  they promiscuously include phenomena, such that the concept of religion is so broad as to be scientifically useless. Indeed, Durkheim’s definition has been applied to football (Sterchele, 2007; see also Bruce, 2011), as well as a wide variety of other social phenomena, such as rave culture (St. John, 2004), adventurous leisure (Brown, 2013; Vester, 1987), and philanthropic volunteering (Bornstein, 2012). Similarly, germane to our present interests, James Donovan’s (2003, p. 92) more recent proposal that religion is “any belief system that serves the psychological function of alleviating death anxiety” faces the same problem of promiscuous inclusivity. As we shall see, a very diverse set of social phenomena—from sexism and racism, to national and political ideology, and even to football fandom (Burke, Martens, & Faucher, 2010; Dechesne, Greenberg, Arndt, & Schimel, 2000)— fits this description of religion (cf. Chapter 6).

A neo-Tylorian definition Fortunately, the inability to construct an exceptionless and universally accepted definition of religion does not prevent us from asking and answering questions about psychological factors underlying religious belief, behavior, and belonging. What we need is a working definition that delimits our field of enquiry and reliably identifies varied examples of the phenomena of interest. A working definition is a convenient starting point for research, but is neither incontrovertible nor exhaustive. Even if a more robust definition of religion were possible, it would be the product of a successful research program, not the prelude to one. What we want, then, is a definition of religion that enables us to discover empirical regularities across a theoretically meaningful set of phenomena, a definition that is narrow enough to render hypotheses both testable and replicable, yet broad enough to render what we learn interesting and generalizable. For our purposes, “religion” and its cognates will refer to the belief in supernatural agents and the phenomena associated with those beliefs, such as rituals, social structures, and emotional and perceptual experiences1 (Atran, 2002; Barrett, 2004; Bering, 2011; Boyer, 2001; Pyysiäinen, 2009; Tremlin, 2006). Note that belief here is a psychological concept, referring to the attitudes

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people have toward supernatural entities regarding their existence. The locus of belief is the individual, rather than a whole religious group or an abstract religious system. This definition of religion therefore avoids the Buddhism Problem described above:  Theravada Buddhism may technically be atheistic, but Theravada Buddhists certainly believe in supernatural agents (Slone, 2004). It also avoids the Football Problem by specifying our interest in supernatural beliefs. Thus, while most religions involve phenomena that occur outside of prototypically religious contexts—tightly knit groups, individual and collective rituals, and so forth—our interest in such phenomena is limited to their interaction with the supernatural. However, to say that the term “religion” refers to the belief in supernatural agents naturally leads to the question of what makes an agent supernatural. Rather than attempting to define “supernatural” metaphysically, as is commonly done—for example, in terms of immateriality or irreducibility to physics (Draper, 2005)—we will take the psychological route again. Agents are supernatural by virtue of their ability to overcome “the intuitively expectable limitations of normal agents” (Whitehouse, 2004, p.  11). To put it more formally, supernatural agents are those whose attributes violate our intuitive or automatic (i.e., natural), category-based expectations. These are expectations that occur cross-culturally, and are developmentally and cognitively basic. For example, agents—whether human or nonhuman—fall into the cognitive category of physical objects, our automatic expectations of which are now well known through the research on intuitive or naïve physics (Heyman, Phillips, & Gelman, 2003; Spelke, 1994). Agents who violate these tacit assumptions, such as the assumption of object permanence (e.g., by being able to walk through walls, as ghosts do), count as supernatural by our definition. Similarly, trees, which fit into the cognitive category plants, generate a set of automatic expectations (e.g., inanimacy), such that a talking tree (e.g., oracular trees in Druidic, Indian, and other traditions) would violate these expectations.2 Besides ghosts and oracular trees, a wide variety of beings that feature in religious belief systems—gods, bodhisattvas, djinns, ancestral spirits, and so forth—are all examples of supernatural agents, by virtue of their unusual properties and abilities, such as the ability to appear out of (and vanish into) thin air, to watch us unseen, or to create the entire cosmos ex nihilo.

The Whats and Whys of Religious Belief

5

Furthermore, by this definition, the category of supernatural agents is wider than the spiritual beings that feature in extant religious traditions: some fictional characters (e.g., Mickey Mouse; Atran, 2002), legendary figures (e.g., Santa Claus; Barrett, 2008), and abandoned deities (e.g., Zeus; Gervais & Henrich, 2010) also count as supernatural agents, albeit ones that do not (currently) inspire widespread costly devotion.3 The task of explaining religion—of discovering the causes underlying religious belief, behavior, and belonging— is therefore the task of not only explaining why we believe in supernatural agents, but also why we believe in the supernatural agents that we do.

The need for explanation The universality and persistence of religious belief is something of a psychological and evolutionary conundrum. Even among prescientific peoples, the belief in supernatural agents is not quite like the belief in everyday objects, such as tables and chairs, trees and animals. Most ordinary objects of belief are physical and tangible: we can point at them and straightforwardly verify their existence. In contrast, most supernatural entities are elusive: gods and ghosts are effectively invisible, appearing only in hazy apparitions, or they reside in inaccessible places, atop mountains or in realms beyond our own. Besides being atypical objects of cognition, gods can also often be terribly inconvenient or costly things to believe in. They often require risky rituals, such as massive pilgrimages and ecstatic acts of self-mutilation; they often mandate material sacrifices, from tithes and taxes to mass animal sacrifice; they often demand deprivative devotion, like abstinence from food or sex. Such activities, moreover, are not vestiges of a primitive past or statistically abnormal aberrations; perilous pilgrimages, risky rituals, and costly contributions are still very much a part of mainstream religious life.

Perilous pilgrimages and risky rituals Every 12 years, millions of Hindus from all over the world gather to bathe on the banks of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers in Prayag, India, during the Purna Kumbh Mela pilgrimage (Fuller, 2004; Maclean, 2008). Most recently

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in 2013, an estimated 100 million people—one out of every seventy people on earth—undertook the Maha Kumbh Mela pilgrimage, making it the largest gathering of people in history; on February 10 alone, 30 million pilgrims congregated in Prayag. Besides incurring proportionally great individual and institutional financial cost, religious pilgrimages also come with significant physical risks. The Ganges is infamously polluted with human and industrial waste; Kumbh Mela pilgrims who bathe in it for ritual cleansing are therefore ironically at heightened risk of infectious diseases such as cholera, hepatitis, typhoid, and dysentery (Chatterjee, 2007). Indeed, the Kumbh Mela probably contributed to the first Asiatic cholera pandemic that began at the Lower Ganges in 1817 and spread rapidly, finally reaching Japan and Indonesia in the east and East Africa and the Mediterranean coast in the west, killing well over 100,000 people (Hays, 2005; Memish, Stephens, Steffen, & Ahmed, 2012). Furthermore, human stampedes occur regularly at massive religious festivals like the Kumbh Mela—79 percent of stampedes in India over the past 50 years have occurred at religious gatherings—senselessly killing devotees each year (Illiyas, Mani, Pradeepkumar, & Mohan, 2013). The February 10, 2013, stampede at the Prayag railway station led to the deaths of over 30 people (Pradhan, 2013, February 11); this tragedy is minor compared to the 1954 stampede, which killed up to 1,000 people on the most significant bathing day of the pilgrimage (Maclean, 2008). Hinduism is hardly atypical in its penchant for holy sites; other religious traditions also have analogous pilgrimages and festivals, albeit on somewhat smaller scales. Two to three million Muslims flock to Mecca annually to undertake the Hajj pilgrimage (Memish, Stephens, Steffen, & Ahmed, 2012; Peters, 1994), which is said to generate “some of the world’s most important public-health and infection control problems” (Ahmed, Arabi, & Memish, 2006, p. 1008). Like Kumbh Mela pilgrims, Hajj pilgrims are at heightened risk of communicable diseases—including meningococcal disease, respiratory tract infections, and severe diarrhea—not least because many come from low-income countries that lack adequate healthcare infrastructures. Human stampedes are also common during the Hajj, particularly at the al-Jamarat site just outside Mecca, where pilgrims ritualistically stone the devil. There have been over a half dozen major incidents since 1990, killing and injuring thousands. As recently as 2015, over 2,000 people were killed in a stampede

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(this, after a construction crane had collapsed two weeks earlier, killing over a hundred people in Mecca’s Grand Mosque). Millions of Christians also travel to pilgrimage sites all over the world at great cost; conditions are often better at these sites, but popular pilgrimages to Jerusalem certainly pose health and safety risks. For example, visitors to the River Jordan, where Jesus was purportedly baptized, risk triggering landmines (Cook, 2011, January 20)  and contracting bacterial infections from the polluted river (Sherwood, 2010, July 26). Closely related to such pilgrimages are collective rituals that are similarly resource intensive and physically taxing. The practice of ritually slaughtering livestock—as in the Jewish practice of shechita and the Muslim practice of dhabihah, to produce kosher and halal meat respectively—is well known, as is the widespread practice of symbolically offering foodstuffs to gods or ancestral spirits prior to consumption. Common examples of the latter include the preparation and sharing of special food (e.g., cakes, vegetarian dishes) during the Hungry Ghost Festival for Buddhists and Taoists in various parts of the world, the manipulation of animal blood and bones in ancient Greek and ancient Near Eastern divination, and even the Christian Eucharist. However, there are also nonalimentary sacrifices that require adherents to entirely destroy foodstuffs and other resources, leaving no part to be eaten or distributed. The word “holocaust,” now with its genocidal connotations, comes originally from the ancient Greek term referring to the practice of burning whole animals, usually in expiatory contexts or to appease gods and dead heroes (Mikalson, 2010; Petropoulou, 2012). The Hebrew Bible describes similar practices (korban olah; Lev. 1) and other nonalimentary rituals, including libation offerings in which edible liquid substances—typically wine or oil—are poured away, onto altars or into the ground (Gen. 35; Num. 28). More extreme, at least to our present sensibilities, are human sacrifices, including the ritual murder of children, typically associated with Aztec and other Mesoamerican civilizations, but also practiced in Mediterranean, Northern European and Near Eastern antiquity (Bremmer, 2007; Hughes, 1991). Furthermore, besides the injury and killing of others, religious rituals can also include self-mutilation, such as in the case of the Hindu vel kavadi, often practiced during the Thaipusam festival. In this ritual—still performed around the world, as part of the devotion to Murugan, the Hindu god of

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war—devotees pierce themselves with skewers and hooks, attached to carts that they then pull in procession while also carrying heavy burdens on their shoulders.

The everyday demands on religious life Admittedly, such intense religious behaviors are usually performed infrequently (Whitehouse, 2004), and often only by a minority of adherents. Most Muslims only undertake the Hajj once in their lifetime, for example, and most Hindus watch and support the kavadi bearers, rather than undergo the full extent of the ritual itself. In addition to these dramatic sacrifices, however, religious beliefs also often come with more mundane material resource demands and obligatory acts of deprivative devotion. Most Christian denominations famously expect congregants to tithe— to give 10  percent of—their income to the church; furthermore, church taxes are still imposed on members, practicing or otherwise, by officially recognized state churches in various Western European nations, including Croatia, Denmark, Germany, Sweden, and Switzerland. Religious commerce has also kept religious organizations in business for millennia. First-century Palestinian Jewish money-changing (Sanders, 1985), medieval European Catholic selling of Indulgences (Swanson, 1995), and the modern Christian music and Jewish kosher food industries (Romanowski, 2005; Fishkoff, 2010) come readily to mind, as do the goods and services exchanged in the sorts of pilgrimages discussed above. Indeed, so-called religious tourism is a burgeoning source of income for places blessed with holy sites, particularly in the increasingly affluent Islamic world (“Pennies from heaven,” 2013, October 12). These mundane material costs are hardly endemic to the Abrahamic tradition. Buddhism can be a costly affair too, particularly in rural or agricultural contexts:  for many Burmese Buddhists, a significant proportion of the family budget is set aside for expenditures related to ceremonies, supporting monks, and the upkeep of religious buildings (Nash, 1963). Indeed, Buddhist teachings—which denounce individual material wealth and encourage adherents to give up such wealth—have funded the building of some famously opulent temples in mainland China and elsewhere (Kieschnick, 2003).

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Religious belief and devotion may also incur fitness and reproductive costs in more direct ways. Fasting is an integral part of a wide variety of religious traditions, including all the world religions, with the notable exception of Sikhism. As is well known, fasting or sawm during the holy month of Ramadan is one of the Five Pillars of Islam. Members of the Bahá’í faith also observe a fast for 19 days in the month of ‘Alá’. Another common type of dietary restriction is the prohibition against eating certain foods, including the Muslim prohibition against pork, the Jewish prohibition against pork and shellfish, the lactovegetarian diet kept by many Hindus (who are prohibited from eating beef) and Buddhists, and Jainism’s strict vegetarianism (which also excludes onions and garlic). Although there is some (controversial) evidence that such dietary restrictions are beneficial to long-term health for many people (Shatenstein & Ghadirian, 1998; Trepanowski & Bloomer, 2010), they may also be detrimental to some (e.g., pregnant women; Shatenstein & Ghadirian, 1998), inconvenient and unduly restrictive in many situations, and might also lead to short-term competitive disadvantages (albeit only minor ones; Chaouachi, Leiper, Chtourou, Aziz, & Chamari, 2012; Maughan et al., 2012). Indeed, such concerns were raised during the 2012 Olympic Games in London, which coincided with Ramadan: having consulted their religious leaders, many Muslim athletes chose to postpone their fasts (Rakhmonova, 2012, August 7; Qureshi, 2012, July 22). Besides fasting and abstinence from certain foods, prescriptions about sexual behavior are also common among various religious traditions. Roman Catholicism, Buddhism, and Hinduism include castes of celibate clerics or students (Olson, 2007), and while celibacy is not generally prescribed in Islam, it does feature as part of Sufi spirituality (Bashir, 2007). Furthermore, religious adherents are often required to be temporarily abstinent, such as for ceremonial purposes or during periods of fasting. Most major religious traditions also condemn premarital and extramarital sexual intercourse as sinful (Spilka, Hood, Hunsberger, & Gorsuch, 2003), which arguably restricts men’s reproductive opportunities (Buss & Schmidt, 1993). These considerations raise a series of psychological and evolutionary puzzles. Given the evidential ambiguity involved in religious belief and the costs and risks involved in religious devotion, why is the belief in gods so pervasive and persistent? What is it about human cognition that enables and

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promotes such beliefs in the absence of evidence? What psychological functions might religious beliefs fulfi ll, to compensate for the costs of such beliefs? Furthermore, in the logic of Darwinian evolution, behaviors that reduce competitive advantage or otherwise curtail reproduction ought to be selected out, and with them the beliefs that bolster such maladaptive behaviors. Is religion therefore, despite appearances to the contrary, evolutionarily adaptive after all? Or is it a costly by-product of other adaptive traits? These are the issues at the core of this book, summed up by Justin Barrett’s (2004) titular question, “Why would anybody believe in god[s]?”

Theories of religion: A brief historical survey Before we consider historical attempts to explain religion, a survey that will take us quickly to recent scientific approaches, it is worth considering the possibility that religion is not amenable to scientific explanation at all. The most extreme form of this proposal is that belief in God can only occur through revelation. Religious faith is, in this account, a divine gift, an act of supernatural intervention that is therefore out of bounds for scientific investigation, if not simply sacrilegious. We reject this version outright: whether or not the acts of God are beyond the scope of the psychological and human sciences, there is no doubt that the humans’ reactions to those acts are fair game. For example, even if a believer believes because God has, in fact, spoken to her, we can legitimately ask what it is about her psychology and her social context that makes her receptive to such revelation in the first place. Similarly, even if she believed on the basis of an actual miraculous event, we would want to know why she interpreted it as the act of a god, rather than as something else. Furthermore, while religious believers may object that their own religious beliefs are beyond scientific explanation, they might be curious about the origins of others’ religious beliefs that differ from their own. If so, then rendering their own religious belief immune from such explanation is just a case of special pleading. A milder form of this assertion that religion is not amenable to scientific explanation employs the formula that religion is sui generis (cf. Pals, 1987). There are many ways to understand this formula, but perhaps the most

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coherent is that religion is to be explained with reference to a special religious faculty. Rudolf Otto’s (1917/1958) appeal to the apprehension of “the holy” or Mircea Eliade’s (1957/1959) appeal to “the sacred” can be understood in this way, as can more recent popular ideas about a “god spot” in the brain (Biello, 2007; Connor, 2011, October 22). The problem with this view is that it is tautological, supernaturalistic, and/or false. It is tautological if the claim is simply that people are religious because they have an innate capacity to be religious. It is supernaturalistic if the existence of the special religious faculty itself defies naturalistic (e.g., evolutionary) explanation. It is very probably false if it asserts the existence of a special neurocognitive module dedicated to the production of religious feelings and their concomitant beliefs and behaviors. Finally, skepticism about explanations of religion can be an important corrective against the temptation to construct essentially monocausal theories that grossly overattribute explanatory power to a single factor or cluster of factors. This caution is best associated with the British anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard (1965) who, in his seminal Theories of Primitive Religion, criticized many of the theorists discussed below for proposing oversimplified explanations of religion that ignored the nuances of actual, lived religion. The first error to avoid is the supposition that any single factor—including the fear of death, the focus of this book—can do most of the explanatory work, to the exclusion of others. The second error is to think that explanations of religion that apply to one religious tradition necessarily apply to all other cultural and religious traditions. Evans-Pritchard’s warnings should not to be ignored. However, they also ought not hinder us from our attempt to explore how far an explanation of religion can take us. With this call to caution in mind then, we now turn to some historical approaches, before discussing the contemporary state of theoretical affairs. The history of ideas is replete with explanations of religion. Indeed, theories of religion are almost as many and varied as definitions of religion; definition and explanation are closely related, after all. In general, to understand the underlying causes of religious belief, behavior, and belonging, theorists have tried to identify examples of other human traits and activities that are analogous to religion as they understand it. So, among other things, religious belief has been compared to scientific theories, to children’s belief in imaginary companions, and to political worldviews (Mackendrick, 2012; Peterson,

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2001; Tylor, 1871a). In each case, the psychological processes involved in the formation, maintenance, and transmission of such beliefs have been applied to the religious case as well. So, like germs and gluons and gravity, gods are products of our inferences about the causes of observable phenomena. Or, like imaginary companions and other transitional objects, gods are surrogate attachment figures. Or, like cultural or political worldviews, gods represent religious worldviews that provide means to govern our social lives and to fulfill some other basic psychological needs. The diversity of definitions and analogies makes a truly exhaustive history and taxonomy of explanations all but impossible. Nevertheless, there are, broadly speaking, two explanatory strands. The first appeals to some basic human social cognitive tendencies, particularly the tendency to anthropormorphize (i.e., to project human traits onto nonhuman objects); the second appeals to the psychological and sociological functions of religion.

Anthropomorphic theories of religion The charge of creating gods in our own image, as it were, goes as far back as the pre-Socratic philosopher Xenophanes of Colophon (c. 570–475 BCE), in what is often (perhaps anachronistically) considered the first naturalistic theory of religion (Thrower, 1999; van Inwagen, 2009). In three fragments, Xenophanes (as cited in Lesher, 1992)  observes:  “But mortals suppose that gods are born, wear their own clothes and have a voice and body” (Fragment 14) and “Ethiopians say that their gods are snub-nosed and black; Thracians that theirs are blue-eyed and red-haired” (Fragment 16), further musing that “if horses or oxen or lions had hands or could draw with their hands and accomplish such works as men, horses would draw the figures of the gods as similar to horses, and the oxen as similar to oxen, and they would make the bodies of the sort which each of them had” (Fragment 15). This old idea—that our beliefs in and about gods are heavily influenced by, perhaps even derived from a tendency to project human attributes onto things around us—has been picked up again and again. David Hume (1757/ 2008, p. 141) certainly thought that our “natural propensity” and “universal tendency” to see “human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds” (i.e., to anthropomorphize nature) was an important factor in the origin of religion.

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Later theorists then elaborated this idea in various ways. Ludwig Feuerbach, for example, thought of religion as the personification or hypostatization of human nature:  “Religion is human nature reflected, mirrored in itself . . . God is the mirror of man” (Feuerbach, 1841/1989, p.  63). In this view, the belief in gods is a reification and personification of abstract human attributes. Developing this thought further, Feuerbach (1846/2004, pp. 7–8) argued that “the spirit of man, his imagination” is projected or transferred “involuntarily into Nature,” making “her a symbol and mirror of his being” and giving rise to the “belief that in Nature another being is manifested, distinct from Nature herself.” That is, according to Feuerbach (1846/2004), religious belief derives from projections of human attributes to the natural world. Similarly, Claude Lévi-Strauss thought of religion as consisting in “a humanization of natural laws” and the “anthropomorphization of nature.” Even Durkhiem (1912/2008), whose sociological functionalist perspective we shall discuss later, argued that gods are extrapolations and personifications of societies. Perhaps the most influential proponent of anthropomorphic theories of religion, however, was Edward Tylor (1871a), a version of whose definition we are currently assuming. He argues that the belief in spiritual beings comes from the human tendency to anthropomorphize, but also explicitly gives religion an explanatory or intellectualist role. Gods are, for Tylor, the products of our tendency to infer personal or anthropomorphic explanations for natural phenomena. This aspect of Tylor’s theory of religion therefore bridges the distinction between anthropomorphic and functionalist accounts of religion.

Functionalist theories of religion Besides the emphasis on human beings’ natural inclination toward anthropomorphism, also inherent in Tylor’s (1871a) account of religion is a functional claim that the belief in supernatural agents arose to fulfill a need for explanation, a “craving to know the causes at work in each event” (p. 332). The concept of the soul, for example, is an important element of so-called primitive explanations of the relationship between the conscious mind and unconscious body in dreams (i.e., how it is that we can move about in our dreams, when our bodies lie asleep), as well as the related difference between the living and the dead. This concept of soul is then extended beyond its place

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in human and animal life even into inanimate objects, to such an extent that there is “pervading life and will in nature” (p. 260). Such animistic beliefs are, for Tylor, the beginnings of religion, driven by an “intellectual appetite whose satisfaction claims many of the moments not engrossed by war or sport, food or sleep” (p. 333). This intellectualist explanation, which Tylor makes explicit, is also already suggested in Hume’s work, which we encountered briefly in our earlier discussion of anthropomorphic theories of religion. Hume (1757/2008, pp. 139– 140) concludes that: Agitated by hopes and fears of this nature, especially the latter, men scrutinise, with a trembling curiosity, the course of future causes, and examine the various and contrary events of human life. And in this disordered scene, with eyes still more disordered and astonished, they see the first obscure traces of divinity.

Thus for Hume, the craving to know is also one to control, or at least to feel in control, for the sake for quelling the anxieties caused by the unpredictability of the natural world. The intellectualist appetite is therefore driven or undergirded by baser affective concerns. Gods—who can be “the subject of peculiar prayers of thanksgivings”—remove the anxiety that comes from the unknowability and uncontrollability of the otherwise hidden forces of nature. Since Hume and Tylor, many other influential theorists—James G. Frazer (1922) and Robin Horton (1993) chief among them—have carried on this explanatory tradition, comparing the belief in gods and participation in rituals, to science and technology. There have also been suggestions that religion emerged to address other existential anxieties, including (as we shall elaborate on in the next chapter) the fear of death. Indeed, of the anthropomorphic and functionalist theorists we have already surveyed, most of them also speculate that religion emerged to fulfill some sort of emotional role. Gods are, in this way, quite unlike germs, gluons, and gravity: they do not just satisfy curiosities, but also appease our urgent passions. As Hume (1757/2008, p. 140) puts it, it is “[n]ot speculative curiosity, surely, or the pure love of truth . . . but the ordinary affections of human life; the anxious concern for happiness, the dread of future misery, the terror of death, the thirst for revenge, the appetite for food and other

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necessaries.” In this vein, Feuerbach (1851/1967) too supplemented his theory that gods are personifications of human nature with a functionalist account, in which human beings’ desires are projected onto Nature, which is deified to satisfy those desires. Thus, “Why did the Greeks lay such a stress upon the immortality and happiness of the Gods?” he asks rhetorically, “Because they themselves did not wish to be mortal and unhappy” (Feuerbach, 1846/2004). These desires in turn arise out of feelings of dependence and finitude, which chiefly (but not exclusively) manifest as fear. Indeed, fear, Feuerbach (1851, 1967, p. 29) argues, is what the religion of “uncivilized peoples or socalled heathen” has in common with modern religions like Christianity: The only difference . . . is that Christians do not transform the phenomena that arouse their religious fear into special gods, but rather into special attributes of their God. They do not pray to evil gods; but they pray to their God when they think He is angry, or when they fear that He may be angry with them and strike them with harm and disaster.

Similarly and perhaps more famously, Freud (1927/1961) argued that religious beliefs were paradigmatic examples of wish fulfillment, driven by “the oldest, strongest, and most urgent wishes of mankind” (p. 30), which include the desire for a powerful father figure who can protect us from the uncertainties and dangers of life, as well as the finality of death. The sense of helplessness that is natural to children persists into adulthood, albeit unconsciously; with it follows paternal yearnings ultimately to be fulfilled by gods whose power exceeds those of our human parents who are, after all, themselves also vulnerable to the perils of nature. Finally, just as there were sociological anthropomorphic theories of religion—those that conceptualize religion as a personification of society, not just of natural forces—there have also been considerations about the sociological functions of religion. Indeed, while Freud’s focus was on the role of religious ideas for individual psychology, he also speculated on the role of religion in the formation and maintenance of society. “Religious ideas in the widest sense”—that is, including, but not limited to supernatural ideas as we have defined them—are “perhaps the most important item in the psychical inventory of a civilization” (p.  14). Believing as he did that the state of nature was one in which a person would “without inhibition or fear, follow his

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asocial, egoistic instincts and seek to exercise his power” (p. 34), Freud also believed that sacrosanct, nonnegotiable ideas about moralizing gods were, at least for “the great mass of the uneducated and oppressed” (p. 39), necessary for keeping moral chaos at bay. Freud’s combination of psychological and sociological conditions are reminiscent of Karl Marx, who did not have a causal theory of the belief in gods so much as a socioeconomic analysis of what he considered to be the otherworldly fantasies of people whose lives in this world he thought wretched. Religion—particularly the belief in divine justice and the promise of heaven—was, for Marx (1843/1970, p. 131), “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people . . . illusory happiness.” Religion is thus the clue that something is wrong with the current social and economic order, but it is at the same time “its moral sanction” (p. 131). As “the universal basis of consolation” (p. 131), it is also the universal basis of the justification of the societal status quo: religion distracts the masses from their plight, thereby preventing revolt against their exploitative masters. For a more purely sociological explanation, we must turn to Durkheim (1912/2008, p. 46) who, as we have seen, defines religion as any “unified system of . . . set apart and forbidden, beliefs and practices” which unites “into one single moral community . . . all those who adhere to them.” Granted that Durkheim explicitly rejected the Tylorian emphasis on the belief in supernatural beings, preferring to focus on “beliefs and practices relative to sacred things,” he was still interested in explaining more or less the same gamut of human phenomena. Totemism, Durkheim thought, was the source of religion, much in the way that Tylor thought animism was primordial. Indeed, for Durkheim, even animism is founded upon a more basic totemic principle, which is simply the clan or society personified. Gods—and the rituals and acts of devotion that accompany belief in gods—are therefore merely symbolic expressions or manifestations of every society’s members’ deep desire to worship the society itself, to give the society power over and for its members. Sacralized, society can provide a robust framework—such as through a moral or political system—to govern and protect its individual members. To say that gods are symbolic manifestations of the secularizing of society is not to reduce them to epiphenomena, however:  for Durkheim, religious beliefs

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and practices play an active role in the maintenance of societal solidarity, stability, and survival.

Theories of religion: A cognitive and evolutionary turn There is something artificial about distinguishing the contemporary—that is, late twentieth and early twenty-first century—theories from earlier postEnlightenment endeavors: there is, perhaps unsurprisingly, more continuity than discontinuity in the content of theories over time. However, two recent theoretical shifts in the psychological and social sciences might justify the distinction as we have drawn it here. First, there is what is often called the “cognitive revolution” in the psychological and social sciences in the middle of the twentieth century. This qualitative shift of emphasis, from observable behavior (i.e., Skinnerian behaviorism) to unobservable mental representations and processes, paved the way for scholars of religion to investigate how supernatural agents are represented in the mind, and what processes are involved in the generation and transmission of religious ideas. Second, the rise of sociobiology (Wilson, 1975) and subsequent applications of evolutionary theorizing (Buss, 2015; Richerson & Boyd, 2005) to human social behavior raised new questions about the evolutionary history of religious cognition. Indeed, perhaps the most salient distinction among contemporary theories of religion is that between adaptationist and by-product theories. An adaptationist theory is one that posits an evolutionary function for the trait in question, such that it solved an adaptive problem (one that influenced the success of reproduction) in our evolutionary past. In contrast, a by-product theory is one that asserts that the trait did not itself have a function, but emerged as a side effect of other evolved traits. To cite a common example, the fact that blood is red is widely considered to be a by-product of its oxygen-carrying properties; the latter is an adaptation, whereas the former is simply a byproduct of it. Note that to assert that something is a by-product is not to say that it is not functional, only that any function it currently serves was not the reason it originally emerged. The distinction between adaptationist and by-product theories is relevant at the so-called ultimate level of explanation, which concerns itself with the

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phylogenetic history of a trait (Mayr, 1961; for a recent critical discussion, see also Ariew, 2003; Laland, Odling-Smee, Hoppit, & Uller, 2012), but psychologists are also interested in questions about the proximate mechanisms involved in the formation, maintenance, and transmission of religious beliefs. Psychologists often draw the distinction between cognitive and motivational factors in their proximate explanations of phenomena. One way to think about this admittedly loose distinction is that motivational factors involve the fulfillment of goals or needs, such as the need for self-esteem enhancement or the need to reduce existential anxiety, whereas cognitive factors concern basic structural or procedural properties of the mind, such as attention and memory. For example, prejudice is widely thought to involve both cognitive and motivational processes. The automatic tendency to categorize stimuli—including social stimuli—is a basic cognitive process that underlies prejudicial attitudes and behaviors; the need for self-esteem then motivates us to evaluate outgroup members negatively (Brown, 2010; Dovidio, Glick, & Rudman, 2005). These two sets of distinctions—adaptationist versus by-product and motivational versus cognitive—do not map onto each other perfectly, but neither are they entirely orthogonal. Because cognitive theories of religion do not generally suppose that the basic cognitive structures and processes evolved specifically to produce religious beliefs, they are generally more compatible with by-product theories. Meanwhile, because motivational theories of religion posit psychological functions they are generally more compatible with adaptationist theories, with an important caveat: not all psychological functions are biological evolutionary functions, though some may well be. For example, many people now listen to or produce music for some psychological benefit—enjoyment or relaxation, perhaps—but most evolutionary anthropologists hypothesize that the ability to produce and enjoy music originally evolved as a means of communication and warning (Morley, 2013).

The evolutionary cognitive science of religion The nascent cognitive science of religion (CSR; Barrett, 2007; Lawson, 2000; Xygalatas, 2014)  or, more recently, evolutionary cognitive science of religion (ECSR; Slingerland & Bulbulia, 2011; Watts & Turner, 2014), can be seen

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in these historical and intellectual contexts. Although the field includes a theoretically diverse set of research programs—including both adaptationist and by-product theories, and relying on both cognitive and motivational mechanisms—it is not unreasonable to speak of a standard model in CSR, which can be illustrated by the following story: A family moves into an old house. It is not uncommon for old houses to creak at night. Even if we know something about the effects of temperature change on wood and other building materials, creaking floorboards might sound uncannily like some person or animal walking has caused them. Perhaps the thought “Who’s that?” occurs to us, but we quickly dismiss it when our prior knowledge of the natural causes of creaking floors kick in. But let’s imagine that this family is not so familiar with this phenomenon and its explanation. They might continue assuming that an agent—a person or animal—is the cause of the creaking, and is at loose in the house. So, they search for the culprit. Failing to find any offender (there is none, after all) they might come up with the idea that there is an invisible person or animal in the house. This idea not only explains the noises, but also proves to be a very useful one in many different contexts. It might help to explain why the car keys have been lost, or why the painting on the living room wall never stays straight, or why the cat seems to avoid a particular room. It might also prove useful for the control of behavior: the parents might be tempted to say to their child that the invisible person kidnaps naughty children who do not wash behind their ears. Finally, the family might begin to suspect that the invisible person is, in fact, a deceased matriarch (perhaps the creaking began on the anniversary of her death). If so, the supernatural agent takes on further personal and emotional significance, preserving a deceased member of the family and providing comfort that there is more to life than can be seen in the physical world. These kinds of emotionally and existentially rich associations turn a mysterious apparition into an ancestral spirit, to be communicated with and perhaps even worshipped. What this example illustrates is how certain inchoate ideas about invisible agents can eventually become psychologically and socially useful, perhaps even indispensable in the life of a community. Similarly, evolutionary cognitive theorists of religion begin with an account of gods as by-products of certain (evolved) cognitive biases, and end up with a functional analysis of

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(cultural) god concepts. This is more or less the standard story told by CSR theorists, albeit on biological and cultural evolutionary timescales. Gods begin their lives as agents detected by human beings in uncertain situations, who are then elaborated upon to solve certain explanatory, social, or emotional problems. We begin, therefore, with the idea that religious cognition is, to a great extent, social cognition. Human beings are irreducibly social creatures, who therefore see the world in terms of their interactions with other persons. We are, consequently, hypersensitive detectors of agents (Barrett 2004; Guthrie, 1993); that is, we have a trigger-happy tendency to infer the presence of intentional beings in our surroundings. Leaves rustle, twigs snap, and we instinctively suspect that there is some friend or foe, prey or predator lurking nearby. But this is a bias we share with many other nonhuman animals, and probably evolved to help us avoid threats. As Guthrie (1993, p. 6) says, “It is better for a hiker to mistake a boulder for a bear than to mistake a bear for a boulder”; so it was with our phylogenetic ancestors. What might set us apart, from all except perhaps our closest primate relatives (cf. Call & Tomasello, 2008; Povinelli & Vonk, 2003), is our ability and tendency to impute rich mental and emotional lives to these agents we detect around us. Indeed, this ability to attribute thoughts and feelings to others, often based on scant information—our “theory of mind”—is crucial to our social lives. It is so important that deficits in this domain can be severely debilitating, as in autism (Baron-Cohen, 2000). It is so instinctive that we attribute psychological states not only to humans, but also to nonhuman animals such as our pets, and even to nonagentic natural forces and artifacts. We act out against computers and vending machines as though they were conspiring against us; we hear voices in the wind and see faces in the clouds; even the most sophisticated among us speak of invisible hands and blind watchmakers. According to the standard model in CSR this twin tendency, to detect agents in our environment and to attribute to them humanlike psychological states, form the building blocks of religious belief. Simply put, some of the agents that we detect are elaborated upon to become gods, which are really just agents with special powers, via a slew of other cognitive biases and motivations, both psychologically universal and culturally specific. Perhaps the most prominent of these cognitive universals in CSR is the memory bias for

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minimally or optimally counterintuitive concepts (MCIs) (Boyer, 1994), concepts that violate our intuitive or automatic category-based expectations in minimal ways. This notion of counterintuitive concepts is, you might recall, central to our definition of a supernatural concept:  as we alluded to earlier, ghosts (i.e., persons who, unlike most other physical objects, can walk through walls) and talking trees (i.e., plants that, unlike other plants, are sentient) are counterintuitive concepts that are familiar in multiple religious traditions. They are also minimally intuitive in that they do not violate too many automatic expectations. There is increasing experimental evidence that such concepts can be more memorable than either perfectly intuitive or very counterintuitive concepts (Banerjee, Haque, & Spelke, 2013; Boyer & Ramble, 2001; Upala, Gonce, Tweney, & Slone, 2007); text analyses of cross-cultural material also show that minimally counterintuitive agents are very common in folktales (Barrett, Burdett, & Porter, 2009). Thus, talking trees (which are otherwise normal) are, as we have said, a common trope in mythologies around the world, whereas regular trees generally only serve parts of scenic backgrounds; at the other extreme, no religion (as far as we know) features things like talking trees that are also made of metal, walk through walls, speak fluent Dutch, grant wishes, turn into werewolves during full moons, and lay eggs with puppies in them (but are otherwise normal). The biased detection of agents and the attribution of supernatural features to them provide an account of where gods come from, but not why they are worshipped in the costly ways described above (Gervais & Henrich, 2010). Extreme devotion seems to call for a functional account, and CSR has focused on three, familiar from our earlier historical overview: intellectualist, social, and affective. Combining the intellectualist and the social, the notion that religious beliefs are anthropomorphic explanations of natural phenomena is still very much around. Recent research, particularly from developmental psychology, suggests that we not only have a need to explain or understand the causes of things, but also that we are biased toward agent-based explanations. Deborah Kelemen’s (1999a, 1999b, 2003, 2004; Kelemen & DiYanni, 2005)  work on children’s “promiscuous teleology” is an example in this vein:  across many studies, Kelemen and her collaborators have shown that children, until at least about age ten, intuitively attribute purpose or function to natural objects, including living things. They insist that rocks are pointy

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to keep animals from sitting on them, clouds are for raining, and lions are for putting into zoos; furthermore, these beliefs are robust against attempts at correction. In other words, from childhood, our intuitions naturally gravitate toward thinking in terms of intelligent design. It is no wonder then, that mechanistic explanation for natural phenomena, such as the theory of evolution by natural selection, are so difficult to teach. More recent work has also looked at teleological reasoning by both children and adults about significant life events. This work suggests that even individuals who claim to be nonreligious (e.g., atheists) infer purposeful causes of important events in their lives (Banerjee & Bloom, 2014, 2015; Heywood & Bering, 2014). They—we—feel that “everything happens for a reason” and that things are “meant to be,” even as we explicitly deny that there is a cosmic agent that has such reasons and meanings. Some might argue that these are just metaphors, but the fact that these irreducibly agentic manners of speaking seem so indispensable is a testament to the hold that this kind of implicit and intuitive theism has on us. Barrett (2004) has also proposed that the belief in gods—from ancestral spirits to the high gods of the world religions—helps us to make sense of positive and negative events, of fortunes and misfortunes, the vicissitudes of life. With the help of the gods, we can see positive events as rewards, and negative events as punishments, and modify our behavior accordingly. The hypothesis that gods function as causes of positive and negative events is related to accounts of religion that posit a more distinctively social function for religious belief. There is, for example, the notion of gods as supernatural watchers, who evolved as moral police to keep our behavior in check (Johnson, 2015; Norenzayan, 2013). This is a modern version of the Durkheimian idea that religion evolved for the good of society (or, at least, the individual-insociety), and can be interpreted in at least two subtly different ways. First, as a straightforward evolutionary psychological claim: the tendency to believe in morally concerned gods evolved by natural selection to decrease maladaptive (e.g., antisocial, reputation damaging) behavior (Bering, 2011; see also Wilson, 2002 for a group selection account). Second, as a cultural evolutionary claim: the idea of a supernatural watcher became widespread because it kept people morally in check by tricking them into thinking that someone was watching.

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Unfortunately for such theories, the evidence for the relationship between religion and morality is mixed. Certainly, religious people consistently report that they donate more to charities (both religious and nonreligious), and that they volunteer and donate blood more frequently (Brooks, 2006; Putnam & Campbell, 2010). However, although there is some evidence that religious individuals actually do donate more to charity (Brooks, 2006), well-controlled studies have generally failed to find a correlation between various dimensions of religiosity and actual helping behavior (Batson, 1976; Batson & Gray, 1981; Darley & Batson, 1973; though see Blogowska, Saroglou, & Lambert, 2013). This has led many to conclude that the relationship between religion and prosociality is spurious at worst or exaggerated at best (Bloom, 2012; Galen, 2012; Norenzayan & Shariff, 2008; Saroglou, 2012). Furthermore, there is plenty of evidence of a link between religiosity and arguably undesirable attitudes, such as rejection of outgroups, both moral (Batson, Eidelman, Higley, & Russel, 2001; Jackson & Esses, 1997)  and racial (Batson & Stocks, 2005; Hall, Matz, & Wood, 2010; Newheiser et al., 2013). Experimental studies that employ religious priming also demonstrate religion’s moral ambivalence. Such studies have shown, for example, that subtle reminders of religious ideas increase racially prejudiced attitudes (Johnson, Rowatt, LaBouff, 2010), support for violence against outgroups (Choi & Bowles, 2007; Ginges, Hansen, & Norenzayan, 2009), and aggressive behavior against other individuals (Bushman, Ridge, Das, Key, & Busath, 2007). On the other hand, studies have also shown religious primes to increase generosity and helping (Ritter & Preston, 2010; Shariff & Norenzayan, 2007; Xygalatas, 2013) and honesty (Bering, McLeod, & Shackleford, 2005; Randolph-Seng & Neilsen, 2007). Part of the reason for the mixed results is that there are conceptual and methodological differences in the studies themselves. Different researchers tend to focus on different kinds and aspects of religiosity and morality. Indeed, the question of whether religious people are “more moral” than their secular counterparts is misguided, not only because religion is a polysemic concept, but also because morality is: just as one group’s freedom fighter is another’s terrorist, so one group’s prejudice is another’s loyalty. In light of the cultural contingency of moral judgment, there is a better way to think about the role that religion plays in morality: gods might not make people

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more moral in some absolute and universal sense, but may make people more moral relative to the norms of the culture in question. Just as human police officers enforce the laws of the land, so do gods police the norms of the societies in which they are worshipped, and in so doing, allow these societies to flourish in security. On this view, gods may have begun life as by-products of our social cognitive tendencies and mnemonic biases, but morally concerned gods or supernatural watchers are cultural constructions that spread because they are inordinately useful at controlling behavior, and enabling cooperation and, eventually, the formation of complex societies (Atkinson & Bourrat, 2011; Norenzayan, 2013; Roes & Raymond, 2003). Furthermore, the finding that religious priming is a better predictor of moral behavior than are religious traits is more consistent with cultural evolutionary theory than with evolutionary psychological theory. The latter posits that religious individuals were more reproductively successful in our evolutionary past because of the moral consequences of their religious beliefs. In contrast, the cultural evolutionary version of the theory is less about the evolution of religious persons, and more about the evolution of religious ideas. We might therefore not necessarily expect religious people to be moral; rather, we would expect reminders that the gods are watching to (temporarily) remind people to behave well. The belief—even the fervent belief—that traffic police exist might not lead us to keep our seatbelt fastened, but the sight of a traffic camera might. Furthermore, this account is consistent even with findings about the seemingly unsavory moral effects of religion, such as those concerning punitiveness and prejudice. Finally, a number of theories posit affective needs to be fulfilled by religious belief. A  variety of candidates have been proposed, including loneliness (Epley, Akalis, Waytz, & Cacioppo, 2008), the fear of randomness (Kay, Moscovitz, & Laurin, 2010; Kay, Gaucher, Napier, Callan, & Laurin, 2008) or uncertainty (Hogg, Adelman, & Blagg, 2010; McGregor, Nash, & Prentice, 2010), and death anxiety (Vail, Rothschild, Weise, Solomon, & Pyszczynski, 2012). In each case, correlational and experimental evidence has been brought to bear, the latter showing how priming each alleged psychological need increases religiosity. The most theoretically and empirically well developed of these affective concerns is death anxiety (Vail, Rothschild, Weise, Solomon, & Pyszczynski,

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2012), which is the central concern of this book. As we shall see, the thought that death and religion are intimately connected is one that has occurred to many theorists of religion, including most of those we have already met in this chapter. There has, since the very beginning of our theorizing about religion, been speculation about how religion is somehow, at least in part, about death, about our inability to really conceptualize it despite its looming inevitability, about our ambivalent relationships with corpses and those who have left them behind, about our multifarious fears and worries surrounding that most certain of human fates. Gods are, so many have thought, ultimately about mortals.

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A History of Thanatocentric Theories of Religion

The belief in and devotion to gods may, we suggested at the end of the previous chapter, really be driven by death, and in particular, our fear of death. But this is not the only way in which these two grand existential themes—gods and mortality—may be connected. Thus, before we turn to various theoretical perspectives that emphasize death anxiety as a motivating factor for religious belief, it is worth noting that in one way or another, death also features prominently in some cognitive theories of religion, particularly those that implicate anthropomorphism and other social cognitive tendencies in the evolution of religion. Here, we consider three examples: the classical animistic theory of religion as represented by E. B. Tylor and two more recent cognitive evolutionary theories about mental representations of the dead.

Religion and (conflicting) cognitions about death and the dead Death and the desire for explanation In the previous chapter, we summarized Tylor’s theory that our need to understand the world converges with our tendency toward anthropomorphic explanations to produce the belief in “spiritual beings,” which includes both souls and gods. A close look at his magnum opus, Primitive Culture, reveals the kinds of phenomena that Tylor thought provoke the sorts of naïve theorizing that leads to religious belief: “In the first place, what is it that makes

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the difference between a living body and a dead one; what causes waking, sleep, trance, disease, death? In the second place, what are those human shapes which appear in dreams and visions?” (Tylor, 1871a, p. 387). That is, it is neither the sheer existence of the world nor the appearance of order and design in it that first inspires religious beliefs: rather, religion springs from our puzzlement at ourselves, our dreaming and dying. To account for the stark difference between living bodies and corpses, the “ancient savage philosophers” (as Tylor charmingly calls them) posited an apparitional-soul or ghost-soul, which is the substance that animates bodies and departs from them upon death. Conveniently, these souls can also interact with the living world, not least through dreams and visions. So explanatorily powerful and parsimonious is this idea of a soul that, as Tylor points out, it appears across many different, distant cultures and people, from the Tasmanian aborigines to the Native American Algonquin and, indeed, even to modern-day philosophers. To be sure, there are many cross-cultural differences—for example, in the varieties of souls and their properties—but the idea that there is some aspect of physical objects (particularly people) that are detachable from their physical bodies seems to have been independently invented again and again. Although the belief in a soul need not entail the belief in an afterlife, it seemed to Tylor that the former has generally led to the latter. The step from afterlife beliefs to ancestor veneration or worship is smaller still, and Tylor notes the cross-cultural ubiquity of such beliefs and practices. Furthermore, once we have the concept of a spiritual substance that can affect physical bodies, we have a ready-made explanation for previously inexplicable phenomena, such as physical and mental ailments. Thus were born unattached spirits—particularly evil spirits—who were free to roam and wreak havoc, but could perhaps be manipulated (and subdued) via special persons or special ritual actions. According to Tylor’s account, it is not the fear of death that first motivates religious belief, but the desire to explain it, particularly the difference between the living and the dead. Indeed, even when considering how animism leads to afterlife beliefs, Tylor does not mention existential anxiety as a motivating factor. He merely asserts that “the doctrine of a Future Life as held by the lower races is the all but necessary outcome of savage Animism” (Tylor, 1871b, p. 1). Although this particular intellectualist account of religion has not survived

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into more recent theories, the idea that questions thrown up by death led to religious beliefs still holds some currency, albeit from a different angle. Social psychological research on causal attributions—the human habit of searching for and inferring causes of events—indicates that unexpected and/or negative events lead us to spontaneously seek causal explanations and to form personbased rather than situation-based attributions (Wong & Weiner, 1981). This has led some contemporary theorists of religion to posit that death, as an unambiguously negative event, triggers just this natural inclination toward explanation in person-based or social terms. As we saw earlier, Justin Barrett (2004) expands on this idea, arguing that our social and moral intuitions lead us to see our fortunes and misfortunes in terms of morally relevant social exchanges:  rewards and punishments meted out by agents. Sometimes the agent in question is obvious and identifiable:  parents, pedagogues, police officers, and other such authority figures regularly reward and punish us to shape our behavior. However, fortunes and misfortunes often cannot easily be linked to human agents. This opens up an epistemic gap for supernatural agent concepts to fi ll. For example, evil spirits might snatch lives away for their own malicious pleasure. Ancestral spirits who are, by virtue of being (or having been) authority figures, morally concerned with the behavior of the living, might bring death as warning or punishment. On this view then, death is the ultimate misfortune that demands explanation, and the gods—be they capricious spirits or morally concerned ancestors—are the obvious explanatory candidates.

Theory of Mind and the inconceivability of death While Tylor traces the origins of religion to attempts to explain the difference between the living and the dead, some more recent theorists have emphasized the similarities between them or, more specifically, of our cognitive representations of living and dead persons. In the previous chapter, we considered how our evolved social cognitive capacities and tendencies might lead to the “detection” of supernatural agents under ambiguous circumstances: we see faces in clouds and hear voices in the wind, and some of these become the faces and voices of gods. These same cognitive tendencies also lead to particular limitations in our ability to represent what it is like to be dead. As

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Freud (1915/2001, p.  289) insisted, “It is indeed impossible to imagine our own death; and whenever we attempt to do so we can perceive that we are in fact still present as spectators . . . [I]n the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own immortality.” Given our inability to represent our own deaths, the inability to imagine the death of others makes sense on a “simulationist” account of Theory of Mind, according to which we normally infer the mental states of others by putting ourselves in their cognitive shoes (cf. Goldman, 2006; Harris, 1991; but see Carruthers, 1996 against simulationist theories of mind). This means that our ability to infer particular mental states depends on our ability to simulate them in our own subjective experience. This presents an obvious problem for representing death, which is the complete cessation of conscious experience. Not all absences of first-person experience are impossible to simulate, of course. We have direct experience of many kinds of absences, particularly in the psychobiological and perceptual domains: we know what it feels like to lack hunger or thirst, or to lack vision or hearing. Every time we eat or drink, close our eyes or sit in silence, we know what such experiences are like and can therefore simulate them to attribute to others. Other psychological states provide greater hurdles: the absolute absence of proprioception, emotion, desire, and belief, for example, are much more difficult, if not impossible, to simulate. Indeed, along these lines, there is empirical evidence that we find it much easier to conceptualize the postmortem cessation of some psychological states over others. In a series of studies, Jesse Bering and colleagues (2002; Bering & Bjorklund, 2004; Bering, Blasi, & Bjorklund, 2005) found that participants who were presented with a story about a person who had suddenly died were more likely to state that biological needs, and psychobiological (e.g., hunger) and perceptual (e.g., auditory) states ceased upon the character’s death than they were to state that emotional (e.g., love), motivational (e.g., the desire to be alive), and epistemic states (e.g., awareness of one’s own death) ceased. This reluctance even extended to nonreligious individuals, including those who explicitly claimed to disbelieve in any afterlife (“extinctivists”); about a third of these individuals admitted to thinking that emotional, motivational, and epistemic states survived death. Furthermore, participants took a longer time to respond to questions about these states than to questions about biological,

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psychobiological, and perceptual states. Bering and Bjorklund’s (2004) work with children has also shown that while children learn very early that biological processes (e.g., the need to eat and drink) cease upon death, the belief that psychological processes cease comes later. By late elementary school (i.e., about age 12), children nearly resemble adults in their representations of the dead, in that they understand that psychobiological and perceptual states cease, while retaining the intuition that emotional, motivational, and epistemic states persist. A replication study in Spain showed similar results and also found that the developmental trajectory of children’s afterlife reasoning was independent of their parents’ religiosity (Bering et al., 2005). To sum up this view of the connection between death and religion:  our evolved social cognitive tendencies render it difficult to imagine the complete cessation of our own and others’ mental lives. It may be therefore not so much that we have an irrepressible urge to explain some radical difference between the living and the dead, but that we have an incorrigible intuition that the dead and the living are somehow psychologically similar. Thus, in Bering’s simulation constraint account, more so than in Tylor’s account, afterlife beliefs really are “the all but necessary outcome” of basic social cognitive tendencies (Tylor, 1871b, p. 1).

Corpses and hazard precaution The other recently proposed cognitive route from death to religion concerns our intuitive responses to corpses. In contrast to views in which the inconceivability of death or the fear-mitigating effects of religious belief take center stage, Pascal Boyer (2001) proposes that corpses automatically trigger contradictory cognitive and affective responses that require resolution. When we see a dead body—their face in particular—our Theory of Mind tendencies are activated, telling us that there is a person in front of us; however, we also immediately infer from the corpse’s inanimacy that it is a nonliving object. Furthermore, our evolved intuitions about contagions tell us that the corpse is a polluting object, to be disposed of or otherwise avoided (McCorkle, 2010). In this way, corpses generate a host of contradictory intuitions: we need to get rid of the polluting corpse, but one does not just “get rid” of a person! This cognitive conflict requires resolution, as the research on cognitive dissonance

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implies (Cooper, 2007; Festinger, 1957). Thus, Boyer suggests, we attempt to reconcile our contradictory intuitions via ritual and theological elaboration. We do not, for the most part, simply dispose of corpses with other kinds of potentially infectious organic waste. Rather, at least since the Upper Paleolithic, we have treated our dead with care: all over the world, different cultures independently developed special ways to dispose of the dead, from burial to burning to mummification. This is not to say all mortuary practices are solemn, tidy, or polite affairs. For example, the old Zoroastrian practice of abandoning corpses atop dakhma—so-called towers of silence—to be excarnated by birds seems uncaring to us, but of course the construction of these towers is costly and arguably an inefficient way of getting rid of pollutants. Afterlife beliefs, particularly those that locate the essence of a person in an immaterial soul rather than in the physical body, may also serve to justify the disposal of corpses. Once the corpse is no longer identified with the deceased, we are permitted to allow it to decay. In other words, supernatural agent concepts like disembodied souls, spirits, and ghosts serve a convenient function in helping to resolve our conflicting intuitions about corpses. It is no surprise, in Boyer’s view, that burial rituals provide our earliest indication of religious belief and that afterlife-related concepts like souls, spirits, and ghosts are the most cross-culturally common supernatural agents (Barrett, 2004; Boyer, 2001; Rossano, 2006): after all, death is inevitable, and the question of how to deal with the dead was (and is still) a salient one for most people who find themselves responsible for a corpse. So, in this account, religious beliefs and ritualistic behaviors are omnipresent precisely because they elegantly make sense of the cacophony of psychological responses to death-related stimuli. The fear of death itself has no role to play here, except insofar as there is a fear of dead things and the diseases they potentially carry.

Affective theories Among the affective approaches to understanding religiosity—in contrast to the “colder” cognitive theories we have just been considering—fear is a dominant and recurring theme. Even from classical times, philosophers have made this link, as Petronius’s oft-quoted line indicates: primus in orbe

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deos fecit timor. It was fear that fi rst made gods in the world. In perhaps the earliest systematic and naturalistic account of religion and superstition, the Epicurean philosopher Lucretius Carus (c. 99 BCE–c. 55 BCE) proposed that it is the uncertainties and perils of mortal life that lead us to believe that the gods control the natural world, providentially, punitively, or otherwise: For certainly all men are in the clutches of a dread— Beholding many things take place in heaven overhead Or here on earth whose causes they can’t fathom, they assign The explanation for these happenings to powers divine (p. 7)

Note, however, that in Lucretius, fear is also and perhaps primarily the result of belief in the gods, not just its cause. The desire to understand the invisible causes behind natural phenomena is driven at least in part by the fear of nature’s caprices, but Lucretius’s project is to lift “the weight of Superstition” (p. 5) and the “dread of [divine] punishment” (p. 6) by arguing that there are no gods who care to interfere with the world’s affairs, nor have we immortal souls to be punished by gods even if they did care to do so. At least since the Enlightenment, however, the causal direction has been fl ipped, with fear proposed primarily to motivate religious belief, which in turn brings comfort to the faithful. Recall, for example, Hume’s (1757/2008, p. 140) hypothesis that it is “the ordinary affections of human life; the anxious concern for happiness, the dread of future misery, the terror of death, the thirst of revenge, the appetite for food and other necessaries” (emphasis added) that led our ancestors to see “the fi rst obscure traces of divinity.” For Hume, unlike for Tylor, it is not just intellectual curiosity that is satisfied by religious belief, but also fear that is ameliorated by the conviction that nature can be controlled after all by “peculiar prayers or thanksgivings” to the gods that control it.

Death and religion in Feuerbach Feuerbach developed Hume’s ideas about death anxiety and religious belief more fully, particularly in his later works, such as The Essence of Religion and Lectures on the Essence of Religion. In his earlier work (The Essence of

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Christianity), Feuerbach may be characterized as an anthropomorphic theorist of religion:  he thought that gods were involuntary projections of the essential properties of human beings, particularly onto nature. This notion of projection is retained in his later work, but this time Feuerbach (1846/2004, pp. 1–2) placed the emphasis elsewhere: The feeling of dependence in man is the source of religion; but the object of this dependence, viz., that upon which man is and feels himself dependent, is originally nothing but Nature. Nature is the first original object of religion, as is sufficiently proved by the history of all religions and nations.

In The Lectures on the Essence of Religion, Feuerbach (1851/1967) elaborates that this “feeling of dependency” (p. 25) includes but goes beyond fear: “fear is merely the most widespread and obvious expression of the feeling of dependency” (pp. 25–26). Feuerbach notes that people deify fearful elements in two ways. First, among those he deems primitive or uncivilized peoples, fearful elements of nature—seas and storms, plagues and pains—are individually personified as angry gods or evil spirits to be appeased. In contrast, in monotheistic religions and other religions with high gods, fearful elements become an aspect of an otherwise benevolent deity. On this latter view, suffering and danger take on moral valence. Although he proposes that “the chief ground of religion is fear” (p.  29), he also insists that “it would be quite one-sided, indeed, unjust, to call fear the sole ground of religion” (p. 30). This is not least because the dissipation of or release from fear inspires other emotions, such as “delight, joy, love, and gratitude” (p. 29), which attach themselves to the very same object, the same deities. However, his protestations notwithstanding, it does seem that Feuerbach’s “feelings of dependency” pertains primarily, even if not exclusively, to negative emotions, though perhaps not only fear. Consider, for example, the fact that his list of “particular feelings of dependency” (p. 31)— the feelings of hunger and discomfort, the fear of death, gloom at bad weather, joy at good weather, and grief over unnecessary pain and shattered hopes—only contains one positive example, which even then appears only as a complement to gloom. Indeed, Feuerbach claims that the most acute of human beings’ feelings of finitude comes from the knowledge of our mortality, so much so that, “If man did not die, if he lived forever, if there were no

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such thing as death, there would be no religion,” and again, that “man’s tomb is the sole birthplace of the gods” (p. 33). Death is, for Feuerbach, the paradigmatic example of our finitude: “the thought of death is a religious thought, because in it I confront my finiteness” (p. 34). Feuerbach is aware that while fear—and the fear of death in particular— may be a necessary condition for religion, it is not a sufficient one. We can, as we shall see later when discussing Ernest Becker, deny or sublimate our death anxiety by engaging in perfectly secular activities. There is nothing inevitable about the belief in supernatural agents that follows just from the fear of death and other elements of nature, though Feuerbach is perhaps right to think it most natural that our “defense against death is the belief in immortality” (p. 34). On this point, Feuerbach distinguishes between nature religion, which is just the expression of human beings’ feeling of dependency on and inseparability from nature, and the belief in gods. To explain the latter, he falls back on his earlier work, positing a natural tendency toward anthropomorphism and personification. This tendency, he argues, combined with our desire to make demands on nature (on which we are dependent), leads to the belief in gods to whom we can appeal in times of need. On this view, as in Hume’s earlier and Freud’s later work, the belief in gods is a sort of primitive science motivated by fear—of life-giving and life-threatening elements, and indeed of death itself— and a desire for control; prayer and sacrifice are thus religion’s technologies.

Death and religion in Malinowski If Feuerbach represents an early attempt by a philosopher to prioritize the fear of death in his theory of religion, then Bronisław Malinowski represents the analogous move by an anthropologist. “Of all sources of religion,” he writes, “the supreme and final crisis of life—death—is of the greatest importance” (p. 47). Indeed, Malinowski asserts that most theories of religion are similarly thanatocentric, though this claim seems not to be warranted in reading his contemporaries and forebears. As we have seen, although theorists of religion have often considered human beings’ awareness and fear of mortality relevant to religion, few seem to have placed a special emphasis on death in their work. Malinowski’s theory of the role of death in religion begins, as does Boyer’s (2001), with our conflicting responses toward corpses. On one hand, we want

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to preserve the body, because it is still in some sense a person; on the other hand, we want to annihilate it completely, because we are in some sense afraid of it. As Freud also argued, taboos and rituals concerning the dead, which appear in some form in all societies, emerge out of this psychological conflict. Malinowski (1948) goes further, however, to say that human beings are “intensely afraid of death, probably as a result of some deep-seated instincts common to man and animals. He does not want to realize it as an end, he cannot face the idea of complete cessation, of annihilation” (p. 50). The belief in spirits—including human spirits that can survive death—is a convenient source of comfort, but such an idea must first be conceivable, so that it can be grasped for this purpose. On this point, Malinowski invokes Tylor:  the idea of spirits, even if not necessarily the belief in them, emerged to account for such phenomena as dreams and, indeed, the difference between the living and the dead. Malinowski argues that such ideas are coopted to mitigate against death anxiety, and are thus made compelling: “[t]he belief in spirits is the result of the belief in immortality” (p. 51), even if the idea of spirits initially arose as a way to explain other, more prosaic psychological phenomena. Religious belief and ritual are not totally distinct phenomena in Malinowski’s thinking. He argues that the belief in immortality is unstable, constantly under threat of falsification, not least because of the patent deadness of corpses. (Unlike Freud and Bering, Malinowski assumes that we have no trouble imagining what being dead entails, even if we have no phenomenological access to it.) Mortuary rituals serve as vehicles by which religious beliefs are socially and psychologically reinforced. Furthermore, such collective rituals bring members of the mourning community together, bonding them together in times of loss; Malinowski reminds us that in traditional societies made up of much smaller groups than we are now accustomed to, a single death may have a significant impact. Death, religious belief, ritual practice, and society are therefore all bound up with one another.

Psychoanalytic approaches: Freud and Becker We have touched upon Freud’s theories already, including his views on religion as wish fulfillment, as a device for moral policing, and as a by-product of the unimaginability of death. We also alluded to his work on taboos

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concerning death, which will be elaborated below. These ideas—as is the case for his theory of religion more generally—owes much to Feuerbach, though the usual Freudian themes will be unmistakable (Harvey, 1995; Rieff, 1979). It is to Freud that we owe the language of projection and transference, even if these ideas had been around before, such as in Feuerbach’s work itself, which is certainly characterizable as a projection theory. Recall that for Feuerbach, gods are projections both of human beings’ basic desires as they are faced with their finitude in the world, as well as of their own attributes. Thus, nature is personified, either as individual deities or as high gods who are capable of governing diverse aspects of nature. Similarly, for Freud, “[s]pirits and demons . . . are only projections of man’s own emotional impulses” (1913/ 2001, p.  92). Death becomes relevant at various points. In his Totem and Taboo, the emphasis is on our conflicting emotional reactions to the death of our loved ones. Not surprisingly, Freud proposes that we have unconscious hostilities against those we love, so much so that we wish for their deaths; when they die, these latent hostilities are projected onto the deceased themselves, turning their souls into hostile or even evil spirits. As Freud himself recognized, this presupposes the belief in souls, on “the peculiar dualistic views on which the animistic system is based” (p. 76). To explain why we believe in souls in the fi rst place, Freud partially endorses some version of the anthropomorphic account—“[a]nimism came to primitive man naturally and as a matter of course” (p. 91)—and refers both to Hume’s and Tylor’s thoughts on the matter. Unlike Tylor, however, Freud emphasizes the role of death over dreams, precisely because he thinks that our deaths are phenomenologically unimaginable to us. Death’s cognitive inconceivability leads us to intuitively assume immortality, but this intuition is contradicted by our knowledge that other people die. Thus, pace Tylor, Freud insists that death is not simply a puzzle to be explained by animism, driven by “pure speculative curiosity” (p.  78); instead, death needs to be denied, because there is otherwise an irreconcilable clash between our intuitions about the impossibility of death and the indubitable evidence of its inevitability. The belief in souls and afterlives are therefore solutions to intense psychological confl icts, not just answers to interesting metaphysical questions. Still, Tylor and Freud are in agreement that confrontation with death—and corpses specifically, and

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the physical changes they suffer— compels us to think of human beings as being composed of flesh and spirit, the latter of which somehow survives the death and decay of the former. Freud later—particularly in The Future of an Illusion (1927/2001)—makes much more straightforward claims about the role of death anxiety in religion. Nature, he claims, was anthropomorphized because while “[i]mpersonal forces and destinies cannot be approached,” if there are personal powers behind the vicissitudes of wild nature, then “we can try to adjure them, to appease them, to bribe them, and, by so influencing them, we may rob them of a part of their power” (p. 17). More specifically, we turn the forces of nature into father figures, with all their characteristic Freudian implications of power, fear, and love. Gods, Freud concludes, must fulfill a threefold task: “they must exorcize the terror of nature, they must reconcile men to the cruelty of Fate, particularly as it is shown in death, and they must compensate them for the sufferings and privations which a civilized life in common has imposed on them” (p. 18). The most influential post-Freudian psychoanalytic account of death and religion comes from the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker. The opening premise of his magnum opus, The Denial of Death (1973), is that the fear of death is a human psychological universal, and that our “deepest need is to be free from the anxiety of death and annihilation” (p 66). This need, according to Becker, is the primary motivation behind all human behavior; in particular, everything that human beings do in our “symbolic world is an attempt to deny and overcome [our] grotesque fate” (p. 27). Thus, what Becker offers is not a theory of religion so much as a theory of human culture of which religion is one aspect. This is not to suggest that religion was unimportant in Becker’s view, that it is merely one example among many of human activities by which we unwittingly deny our mortality, what he terms our “immortality projects” (p. XIII). To the contrary, religion, Becker thought: solves the problem of death, which no living individuals can solve, no matter how they would support us. Religion, then, gives the possibility of heroic victory in freedom and solves the problem of human dignity at its highest level . . . Finally, religion alone gives hope, because it holds open the dimension of the unknown and the unknowable, the fantastic mystery of creation that the human mind cannot even begin to approach, the

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possibility of a multidimensionality of spheres of existence, of heavens and possible embodiments that make a mockery of earthly logic—and in doing so it relieves the absurdity of earthly life, all the impossible limitations and frustrations of living matter. (pp. 203–204)

Now, it must be said that Becker had in mind a very specific kind of religious attitude—which he found in the work of Søren Kierkegaard, Paul Tillich, and others—and was not referring to just any system of belief in supernatural agents and their attendant rules, rituals, and social organizations. In Becker’s ideal immortality project, God is not only the guarantor of one’s immortality, but is also the basis of one’s existential freedom, who “allows man to expand and develop by himself.” God is, in this view, a transcendent being, “hidden and intangible,” and, not being an object alongside other objects in the world, “does not oppose the individual as others do, but instead provides the individual with all the powers necessary for independent self-justification.” Such a religious outlook frees us from what Becker considers to be negative forms of peer pressure or social influence, and lifts our ideals to loftier standards: “we no longer have to please those around us, but the very source of creation,” and our lives are now “measured by standards of the highest heroism, ideals truly fit to lead us on and beyond ourselves” (Becker, 1973, p. 202). Becker is fully aware that his loft y view is of religion “not as practiced but as an ideal” and that “all religions [have] in practice reinforced the regressive transference into an even more choking bind” (p. 204). Nevertheless, the point is that not all immortality projects are created equal: some are more effective buffers against death anxiety than others, and some have more negative social and psychological effects than others. Religion—at least this kind of religion done properly—is, in Becker’s view, “the ‘best’ illusion under which to live” (p. 202).1 There is another sense in which Becker prioritizes religion. As we alluded to earlier, he argues that all our entire symbolic worlds—all our cultural achievements, great and small—are constructed as a means to obscure the fact of our inevitable mortality. Thus, he obviously believes that there are secular substitutes to spiritual sources of immortality: It doesn’t matter whether the cultural hero-system is frankly magical, religious, and primitive or secular, scientific, and civilized. It is still a mythical

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hero system in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value: a temple, a cathedral, a totem pole, a sky-scraper, a family that spans three generations. The hope and belief is that the things that man creates in society are of lasting worth and meaning, that they outlive or outshine death and decay, that man and his products count. When Norman O. Brown said that Western society since Newton, no matter how scientific or secular it claims to be, is still as “religious” as any other, this is what he meant:  “civilized” society is a hopeful belief and protest that science, money and goods make man count for more than any other animals. In this sense everything that man does is religious and heroic, and yet in danger of being fictitious and fallible. (p. 5)

Note, however, that secular cultural hero-systems are religious by virtue of their being immortality projects. There is an asymmetry between religious and secular worldviews: the language of immortality belongs first and properly to religion and only by analogy and extension to other means of denying death.

Terror management theory and the cognitive science of religion Becker’s theory of culture more generally, and of religion in particular, has been adopted in the social sciences, largely in the form of Terror Management Theory (TMT; Greenberg, Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 1986), which has extracted Becker’s core insights from their original psychoanalytic context. Following Becker, TMT begins with the observation that human beings are, perhaps uniquely, aware of their mortality. This cognizance of the inevitability of death elicits crippling existential anxiety, which must be dealt with if we are to function in the world. We are therefore motivated to seek immortality, whether literal or symbolic. Unfortunately, neither Becker nor subsequent TMT researchers have offered formal definitions of “literal” or “symbolic” immortality. However, it is generally agreed that cultural worldviews offer literal immortality through afterlife concepts (e.g., immortal souls, heaven, reincarnation, nirvana) and symbolic immortality through lasting culturally valued identifications and achievements, and the increased self-esteem they engender (Dechesne et  al., 2003). Religious worldviews, at least those with comforting afterlife beliefs, manage to offer both symbolic and literal immortality, and are therefore the culturally dominant means of relieving

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existential anxiety: as Vail et al. (2010, p. 65) claim, “there may be no antidote to the human fear of death quite like religion.” It is straightforward enough to see how religious worldviews can provide literal immortality: they promise that, despite appearances, physical death is not final. Religious worldviews also provide symbolic immortality by allowing people to feel like valuable parts of something larger and more enduring than themselves: our churches and denominations will keep going long after we are dead. Furthermore, religious worldviews also often contain selfesteem-enhancing notions of cosmic significance, either at the level of the individual or that of the group. The idea that we are chosen and called by God for some special purpose is one that recurs across religious traditions. In précis then, according to TMT, people are motivated to relieve existential anxiety by seeking literal and symbolic immortality in cultural worldviews and social groups; religious worldviews are particularly effective at terror management and are therefore especially attractive. These facts converge to explain the ubiquity, if not the emergence of religion. From here, however, TMT is vaguer. Jeff rey Greenberg and colleagues (forthcoming) argue that terror management is the primary function of religion, but it is unclear what they mean by the term “function.” At the level of the individual, it may just be the motivational claim that people participate in religious beliefs and behaviors to quell their fears of death: “uniquely human concerns about death are the motivational impetus for the formation of and adherence to religious beliefs and behavior” (Greenberg et al., forthcoming). However, TMT’s functional claim might also amount to more specific cultural or biological evolutionary claims. Kenneth Vail and colleagues seem to argue for a cultural evolutionary account, asserting that “a very important reason that religious memes spread so rapidly and effectively is the protection from existential fear that they afforded to those who possessed them” (Vail et al., 2010, pp. 90–91). On the other hand, Greenberg et al.’s functional account seems to correspond more to a biological evolutionary account, in which the function of a trait is its selected function: the effect of the trait that conferred reproductive advantages in our evolutionary past, which led to its increased frequency in the population (Davies, 2000; Wright, 1973). Thus, Greenberg et al. provide a potted phylogenetic history of terror management:  at some point in hominid evolution, our

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ancestors became aware of their inevitable fate as mortals, in response to which they adopted and embellished conceptions of reality that allowed them to deny the fi nality of death, either literally or symbolically. Those whose worldviews successfully mitigated these mortality concerns were thus able to hunt and explore more confidently—unencumbered by existential trauma—which in turn made them more successful at “propagating both their genes and their conceptions of an afterlife” (p. 12). To the extent it posits an adaptationist account, TMT explicitly denies that religion is “an irrelevant byproduct of cognitive processes that emerged to glean accurate accounts of reality” (Greenberg et al., forthcoming, p. 29). However, it recruits such by-product theories to explain how religious ideas emerged in the first place, arguing that “early humans used cognitive proclivities that evolved for other reasons to develop religious beliefs to quell existential fear” (Vail et  al., 2010, p.  90). TMT, therefore, views religion as what Gould and Vrba (1982) call an “exaptation”: a trait whose current evolutionary functions are markedly different from those that explain its emergence. Feathers are the paradigmatic example, as they originally evolved to facilitate thermoregulation, whereas they now facilitate flight. In the case of religion, the belief in gods first emerged as a by-product of various evolved social cognitive tendencies, which then conferred upon those who believed certain evolutionary benefits, in this case relief from death anxiety. Seen in this way, TMT is not unlike other exaptationist contemporary evolutionary and cognitive approaches to religion; for example, the supernatural watcher hypothesis, discussed in the previous chapter, emphasizes moral vigilance and reputation protection (Bering, 2011; Johnson & Bering, 2006), or group cohesion and cooperation (Wilson, 2002). Mitigation of death anxiety is just one among many ways in which religion contributes to human beings’ evolutionary fitness.

Evaluating thanatocentric theories of religion As we have just seen in this chapter, the connection between death anxiety and religion is one that recurs over and over again in anthropological and psychological theories of religion. While theorists disagree about whether

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or not religion’s psychological benefits translate into evolutionary adaptive ones, they seem to agree that (1)  human beings have a basic fear of death; (2) this fear of death motivates people to believe in supernatural agents, and (3) these beliefs in supernatural agents mitigate death anxiety. None of these three hypotheses are obviously true. The first claim—that human beings fear death—has long been contested. Most recently, evolutionary psychologists have argued that the fear of death per se is an unlikely candidate for a basic human motivation because a domain-general survival instinct of this kind is both superfluous and potentially evolutionary maladaptive:  nature would have selected out such individuals who were obsessed with survival and chronically terrified of death, such that they needed costly cultural resources like religion to calm them down (Kirkpatrick & Navarette, 2006; Navarette & Fessler, 2005). Going back further, Alfred Radcliffe-Brown (1939, 1952) argued directly against Malinowski’s position, discussed above, instead asserting that anxieties are caused and shaped by societal expectations. That is, the fear of death is not innate, but culturally constructed. Indeed, like Lucretius, Radcliffe-Brown proposes that far from mitigating anxiety, religious beliefs may well promote such fears: “While one anthropological theory is that magic and religion give men confidence, comfort and a sense of security, it could equally well be argued that they give men fears and anxieties of which they could otherwise be free—the fear of black magic or of spirits, fear of God, of the Devil, of Hell” (p. 40). This brings us to the second common objection to thanatocentric theories of religion, this time against the latter two hypotheses: as anthropologists have been quick to point out, many religious traditions contain beliefs about gods and afterlives that are far from comforting, if they contain beliefs about afterlives at all. Mythical worlds are populated with malevolent as well as benevolent deities (Lambert, Triandis, & Wolf, 1959); gods are often ambivalent or capricious in their dealings with human beings. Even in the JudeoChristian traditions, with their emphasis on divine omnibenevolence, the God portrayed in the Bible is anything but straightforwardly good (Matthews & Gibson, 2005; Penchansky, 1999). Moreover, not all religious belief systems come with afterlife beliefs: the Amazonian Pirahã (Everett, 2008) and Baka Pygmies (Woodburn, 1982) are prominent examples from the ethnographic records, but biblical scholars have also puzzled over the Hebrew Bible’s

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relative silence on the matter (Friedman & Overton, 2001). Furthermore, many traditions that do feature afterlife beliefs posit gloomy graves, horrific hells, or other unappealing postmortem existences. According to their epic poetry, Homeric Greeks anticipated a dreary afterlife, at least for undistinguished civilians consigned to the meadow of asphodel. Thus, The Odyssey has Achilles telling Odysseus not to make light of death as he “would rather work the soil as a serf on hire to some landless impoverished peasant than be King of all these lifeless dead.” The underworld, for the Homeric Greeks, is “where the dead live on as mindless disembodied ghosts” (Homer, 2003, 11.475–476, p. 152). Worse still, according to The Netherworld Vision of an Assyrian Crown Prince, ancient Mesopotamians expected to be cast into a terrifying netherworld populated by monsters, or a despairing one in which “dust is their food, clay their bread” and “they see no light, they dwell in darkness . . . over the door and the bolt, dust has settled” (cf. The Descent of Ishtar to the Netherworld; Dalley, 1998, p. 155). The belief in reincarnation provides no real solace either, as there is—at least in Buddhist and Hindu versions of the teaching—at best a tenuous connection between our successive lives, at the end of which our ātman is dissolved into the Brahman-ātman, the world-soul. Furthermore, Buddhism brought to China, not only the doctrine of reincarnation, but also “ten heavens and many hells” (Yü, 1987, p. 381). Similarly, hell concepts are arguably more dominant and influential than positive afterlife concepts in Japanese Buddhism (Umehara, 1996). Eternal torment in hell is even a live possibility for contemporary Christians, despite Christianity’s reputation for having sanguine views on such matters, at least for the faithful. In fact, many fundamentalist Christians report experiencing intense fear of divine punishment, even after leaving fundamentalist Christianity (Hartz & Everett, 1989). These anthropological and other data present a challenge to thanatocentric theories of religion that posit religion as a source of comfort against the certainty of death. At the very least, they seem to call into question the universality and priority of death-anxiety reduction as a motivating factor for religious belief. Still, there is always a gap between the official teachings of a religious tradition, such as they are, and the actual, lived beliefs of individual adherents. Th is so-called tragedy of the theologian is a well-documented phenomenon (Boyer, 2001; McCauley, 2011; Slone,

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2004): religious experts and lay believers seem to disagree more than they agree. Fortunately, modern social psychology—and recent methodological advances in the measurement of beliefs, attitudes, and emotions therein— provide tools for evaluating the three central thanatocentric hypotheses scientifically. In the next chapter, we fi rst examine these tools more closely, paying particular attention to means of assessing people’s fear of death and religious beliefs. Chapters 4 through 6 then proceed to evaluate the three central thanatocentric hypotheses outlined above, that (1) human beings fear death; (2) the fear of death motivates people to believe in supernatural agents, and (3)  these beliefs in supernatural agents mitigate death anxiety. Chapter 4 deals with the fi rst of these, looking closely at attempts to measure individuals’ and populations’ levels of death anxiety. Chapters 5 and 6 then evaluate the evidence concerning the latter two hypotheses: in Chapter  5, we examine the evidence for relationships between trait levels of death anxiety and religious belief, whereas in Chapter 6, we review the experimental research that will help to clarify the causal connections between death anxiety and religiosity.

3

Measuring Faith and Fear

Having set out this book’s central questions—are people afraid of death? Does death anxiety motivate religious belief? Does religious belief mitigate death anxiety?—the next step is to figure out how to answer them, what methods in the social scientist’s arsenal can be brought to bear. There are many possibilities, and we have already encountered some of them. Archaeologists examine artifacts and sites, including graves and grave goods. Historians examine texts, either formal texts like scriptures or more personal ones like letters or journal entries. Social anthropologists systematically review ethnographies or conduct their own. However, religious beliefs and anxieties about death are psychological constructs; they exist inside people’s heads, and to examine them we will have to get inside with them. For that, we need the conceptual and methodological tools of experimental social psychology. The first challenge is to determine how “religiosity” and “death anxiety” are to be operationalized and measured. These questions are not unrelated to the issue of definition, which we have already considered with regard to religiosity in Chapter 1. Indeed, measurement presupposes definition: it will not do just to define our psychological constructs just as whatever it is that our instruments happen to measure. In this chapter, we therefore return to the question of defining “religion” as well as “death anxiety,” this time with issues of measurement in mind. Furthermore, we will consider the strengths and limitations of various widely used measures of religiosity and death anxiety, before turning to the approaches that we have developed and adopted ourselves.

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Defining and measuring religious belief In Chapter 1, we defined “religion” as the belief in supernatural agents and the phenomena associated with those beliefs, such as rituals, social structures, and emotional and perceptual experiences. Supernatural agents, in turn, are those whose attributes violate our intuitive or automatic (i.e., natural), categorybased expectations. This is admittedly a broad category, including as it does not only gods and ghosts, but also fictional characters like superheroes and science fiction monsters. Obviously, our interests lie in the former rather than the latter. This is not because superheroes are uninteresting or, indeed, unrelated to religious supernatural agents (though this connection is probably best left as a topic for another book) but simply because superheroes are not generally the objects widespread of belief and devotion. We want to know why people believe what they believe, and so our measures should capture the tendency to believe in the sorts of supernatural agents that actually feature as objects of belief and devotion across cultures. A valid and useful measure of religiosity should therefore not be too broad. Conversely, however, our measure of religiosity also ought not be so narrow as to be parochial. We must avoid Thwackum’s error in Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones (1749/1992, p. 74) who says, “When I mention religion, I  mean the Christian religion; and not only the Christian religion, but the Protestant religion; and not only the Protestant religion, but the Church of England.” Indeed, until quite recently, the academic discipline of the psychology of religion was largely just the psychology of American Protestantism (though, to be fair, not just Episcopalianism, the American branch of Thwackum’s Church of England), and our most popular measurement instruments still reflect this focus. Now that our research remit has expanded, however, available measurement instruments should catch up and aim to be applicable to as broad a population as is practical, without sacrificing comprehensibility. Our assertion that religiosity is the tendency to believe in certain sorts of entities is not an entirely uncontroversial one. A cursory survey of the available measures of religiosity will reveal a much greater diversity than our focus on supernatural belief implies. For example, Hill and Hood’s (1999) influential compendium of measures of religiosity includes 17 different

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categories with 126 scales in total, including scales about attitudes toward religion (mostly Christianity), religious orientation, religious and spiritual experiences, religious and spiritual wellbeing, god concepts, and even moral values associated with religion (e.g., forgiveness). Since Hill and Hood’s overview was published, over a hundred more scales have been published to measure ever more specific domains of religiosity. This is reflected in Hill’s (2013) revised taxonomy, which is streamlined into 13 categories, but also features new domains, such as religious attachment, spiritual history, and religious coping. This wide range of measurement instruments is not necessarily a bad thing, so long as we do not suppose that they are all measuring the same thing, some underlying psychological construct that we might call “religiosity” or “general religiosity”: rather, the multiplicity of measures reflects the plurality of psychological constructs related to religion.

Single-item indices of religiosity Despite the availability of a diverse set of measures, the most commonly used measures of religiosity and spirituality—not just in research on death anxiety, but also in other areas, such as health and coping (Hill & Pargament, 2003)—are still simple single-item measures, most commonly questions about religious service attendance (e.g., “How often do you go to church?”), or religious/spiritual self-identification (e.g., “How religious are you?”; “How spiritual are you?”). Although these simple measures are convenient and are often correlated with other measures of religiosity, it is nevertheless the case that individuals’ religious identities, behaviors, and beliefs are conceptually and empirically dissociable (Boyer, 2011; Jong, Bluemke, & Halberstadt, 2013; Saroglou, 2011). Death anxiety—and, for that matter, any other variable— may correlate with some aspects of religiosity, and not others (Gorsuch, 1984). Measures of religious identity and behavior also suffer other shortcomings, particularly when viewed from a cross-cultural perspective. The problem with the overt use of terms like “religious” and “spiritual” in questionnaires is that they carry different connotations in different cultural and religious contexts. In some contexts, such as the secular West, but also among American Christian evangelical Protestants, the term “religious” has negative connotations, implying alignment with organized religion in the former

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case, or legalistic and unreflective practice in the latter case. Conversely, the term “spiritual”—especially as it is associated with the people’s frequent self-description as “spiritual, but not religious” (Fuller, 2001)—is viewed negatively in some contexts, where spirituality is viewed with suspicion as heterodox and undisciplined. This does not necessarily mean that “religiosity” and “spirituality” are never useful social scientific concepts, but it is clear that these terms can be problematic when used unqualified in questionnaire research. The common use of religious service attendance as a global index of religiosity is similarly problematic, in part because the norms regarding religious service attendance, not to mention what counts as a “religious service,” vary from one religious tradition to another. An Anglican who prays twice a day—once in the morning and once in the evening, as the Book of Common Prayer prescribes—will be considered devout, and yet a Muslim who does so falls short of the expectation to pray five times daily. It is, in principle, possible to control for these interreligious differences, but this is complicated and therefore rare in practice.

Multidimensional measures of religion Besides the overreliance on single-item measures that ostensibly measure general religiosity, there has also been a cottage industry producing multidimensional measures of religiosity that attempt to capture both the various aspects of religion and spirituality, as well as whatever underlying factors may exist. Hill and Hood (1999) included 15 multidimensional measures in their collection—the second largest number in any category—and treat Glock and Stark’s (1966) Dimensions of Religious Commitment as their prototype. The scale was originally designed to measure four dimensions of religiosity— belief, ritual, experience, and knowledge—but the first two subscales can be broken down further into distinct indices of belief (central religious beliefs, beliefs about salvation, and beliefs about ethics) and two indices of ritual participation (personal and public). Glock and Stark’s is an admittedly ambitious attempt to correct researchers’ mistaken assumptions that religiosity is one, monolithic phenomenon, but we should not assume that even this scale, at over 50 items, captures religiosity exhaustively (Burwell, 1999), particularly once we leave the American Christian context. One further benefit of Glock

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and Stark’s measure, however, is that the distinct indices may be treated and used separately; indeed, they ought to be when researchers have specific hypotheses about specific dimensions. Since Glock and Stark’s seminal work, others have attempted to construct multidimensional scales of religiosity, with varying conscientiousness and success. For example, De Jong, Faulkner, and Warland’s (1976) 38-item CrossCultural Dimensions of Religiosity Scale measures belief, experience, practice, moral consequences, knowledge, and social consequences. (Incidentally, “cross-cultural” here refers to their use of American and German participants, not to an examination of different religious traditions.) Similarly, Rohrbaugh and Jessor’s (1975) 8-item Religiosity Measure attempts to concisely capture Glock’s (1959) four original dimensions: ritual, consequential, ideological, and experiential. However, it has generally been used as a unidimensional measure of general religiosity indicating “one’s cognitive orientation concerning a transcendent reality” (Boivin, 1999, p. 307). More recently, the Fetzer Institute, in collaboration with the U.S. National Institute on Aging Working Group (1999), assembled their Brief Multidimensional Measure of Religiousness/Spirituality (BMMRS), which was designed for research on religion and health and to be used either in its entirety or as distinct subscales. Theoretically, BMMRS subscales include daily spiritual experiences, meaning, values/beliefs, forgiveness, private religious practices, religious and spiritual coping, religious support, religious/spiritual history, commitment, organizational religiousness, religious preference, and overall self-ranking. However, subsequent factor analyses have produced different accounts of the scale’s structure (Johnstone, Yoon, Franklin, Schopp, & Hinkebein, 2009; Masters et al., 2009). Measuring multiple dimensions of religiosity can be appropriate and useful, so long as two assumptions are avoided. First, once again, we cannot assume that there is necessarily a single construct—general religiosity— that underlies the multiple dimensions of religiosity. Even Gorsuch (1984, p. 234), in his seminal article, warned against the use of composite “hodgepodge” scales that mixed the different dimensions to form a single index of religiosity. Despite the fact that there are undoubtedly correlations among the different aspects of religious believing, behaving, belonging, and so forth, these are still distinct social psychological traits that may thus have

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different causes and consequences. Second, we cannot assume that it is desirable to measure as many dimensions of religiosity as possible in any given study. The blind deployment of multidimensional measures comes with statistical risks: as is well known, the more statistical tests one performs, the more likely it is that any given fi nding is just a statistical artifact. Rather, our decision about which specific dimension(s) of religiosity to measure should be theoretically driven.

Measures of religious orientation As we shall see in Chapter 5, a significant proportion of the studies that have looked at the relationship between death anxiety and religiosity concern themselves with “religious orientation”: an individual’s motivation for and way of being religious (Batson & Ventis, 1982). This is also true in the psychology of religion more generally (Kirkpatrick & Hood, 1990). Allport and Ross’s (1967) Religious Orientation Scale (ROS), which distinguishes between extrinsic and intrinsic religiosity, is perhaps the most familiar and frequently used, though variations on the theme are also available (Feagin, 1964; Hoge, 1972). According to Allport and Ross (p. 434), the extrinsically religious individual “uses his religion,” whereas the intrinsically religious individual “lives [it].” That is, the extrinsic orientation is a disposition to “use religion for [one’s] own ends”; religious beliefs are thus “lightly held or else selectively shaped” in an “instrumental and utilitarian” fashion. Items on the extrinsic subscale thus include “Although I believe in my religion, I feel there are many more important things in my life”; “What religion offers me most is comfort when sorrows and misfortune strike”; and “A primary reason for my interest in religion is that my church is a congenial social activity.” In contrast, the intrinsic orientation is a disposition to treat one’s religion as ultimate, with all other concerns deprioritized; religious belief is embraced, and the individual “endeavors to internalize it and follow it fully.” Items on the intrinsic subscale thus include, “I try hard to carry my religion over into all my other dealings in life”; “My religious beliefs are really what lie behind my whole approach to life”; and “Religion is especially important because it answers many questions about the meaning of life.” The ROS—as well as its descendants (Gorsuch & McPherson, 1989; Gorsuch & Venable, 1983), and other measures of religious orientation, such

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as Batson and Schoenrade’s (1991a, 1991b) measure of Religion as Quest (i.e., a search for truth), and Altemeyer and Hunsberger’s (1992, 2004) Religious Fundamentalism Scale—has been rightly criticized on two fronts. First, such scales tend to assume that respondents are religious and consequently make little sense to nonreligious (e.g., atheist, agnostic, religiously apathetic or indifferent) individuals. For example, the ROS item “Although I  believe in my religion, I feel there are many more important things in my life” assumes that the respondent actually holds religious beliefs that can be judged as less important than others. Similarly, the Quest item, “For me, doubting is an important part of what it means to be religious,” assumes that the respondent holds religious beliefs to be doubted. Second, the scales may be inappropriate even for many religious participants, as they are designed for Christian audiences in ways that are not easily modifiable for more general application beyond the Abrahamic faiths. For example, Altemeyer and Hunsberger’s (2004) revised Religious Fundamentalism Scale refers to Satan by name, and assumes belief or disbelief in authoritative scriptures. Fundamentalism is thus tethered exclusively to scriptural religions with a tradition of a personified malevolent deity. Similarly, the ROS refers to “church” and “services” in ways that do not apply to many religious traditions, as well as distinctions between personal prayer and other kinds of prayer that carry different connotations across different contexts. Besides these methodological shortcomings, there is also the more fundamental question of why we should be so concerned with the way people are religious, rather than whether and the extent to which they hold religious beliefs or participate in various religious activities. As Gorsuch (1984) puts it, “Perhaps it is important not only to know whether a person is intrinsically or extrinsically oriented toward religion but also to know what type of religion the person is oriented toward.” That said, even if the psychological construct of religious orientation is orthogonal to our theoretical interests, it may nevertheless be the case that measures of religious orientation can be proxies for more relevant constructs. The intrinsic subscale in ROS, for example, may be interpreted as a measure of committed belief, at least among religious believers, since conviction and certainty about the truth of religious claims is plausibly a part of what it means to be motivated to fully live out one’s religion. This consideration will become more relevant as we sift through previous

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research on religiosity and death anxiety, much of which happens to feature measures of religious orientation.

Measures of religious belief Finally then, we turn to measures of religious belief. There is a distinction to be made between the particular, culturally determined religious beliefs that individuals happen to hold more or less strongly, and the underlying tendency to believe in the supernatural, however it is manifested in any given culture. The vast majority of measures of religious belief are measures of the former, of particular religious beliefs. Hill and Hood (1999) list 21 scales in their chapter on “Scales of religious beliefs and practices,” almost all of which are specifically tailored to Christian audiences, referring as they do to Jesus, the Holy Spirit, biblical miracles, and so forth. It is unsurprising that the popular Christian Orthodoxy Scale (Fullerton & Hunsberger, 1982)  is narrowly focused, though it might be said that its items reflect American Protestant orthodoxy rather than Christian orthodoxy more broadly. However, even the Religious Belief Scale (Martin & Nichols, 1962)  and Religious Attitude Scale (Armstrong, Larsen, & Mourer, 1962) are, despite their broad-sounding names, unusable outside of Christian contexts. More recently, there have been attempts to transcend particular religious traditions, though this sometimes has led to measures that capture nontraditional spiritual or supernatural beliefs. Among such recent endeavors to measure beliefs outside of specific religious contexts, Hill (2013) lists the Spiritual Beliefs Inventory (Holland et al., 1998), the Spiritual Beliefs Scale (Schaler, 1996), and the Beliefs and Values Scale (King et al., 2006), to which we might perhaps add the Paranormal Belief Scale (Tobacyk & Milford, 1983; Tobacyk, 2004). Holland et al.’s measure comprises 15 items, 10 of which refer to beliefs and practices. Among these ten items, only four refer to a supernatural entity of any kind: in each case, the participant responds to a statement about God (e.g., “I feel certain that God in some form exists”; “I believe God protects me from harm”). Most of the rest of the items refer to the importance of religious or spiritual practices and communities in the life of the individual. In contrast, seven of Schaler’s eight items refer to God, but they do not seem to measure the extent to which the respondent thinks that God (or any

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other supernatural entity) exists (the definition of religious belief). Rather, they are interested in God’s perceived role in their lives and wellbeing. King et al.’s and Tobacyk’s (2004; Tobacyk & Milford, 1983) scales are, in different ways, closer to measures of religious belief as we have defined it. King et al.’s 20-item Beliefs and Values Scale contains questions about beliefs in a God (e.g., “I believe there is a God”; “I believe God is a life force”), in an afterlife (e.g., “I believe that there is a heaven”; “I believe in life after death”), in a human spirit or soul (e.g., “I believe the human spirit is immortal”; “I believe I have a spirit or soul that can survive my death”), in a purpose or plan in life (e.g., “I believe life is planned out for me”; “Although I cannot always understand, I  believe everything happens for a reason”). The scale also contains items less directly relevant to supernatural belief, such as respondents’ selfidentification as religious and spiritual, the importance of religious ceremonies to them, and their previous “intense spiritual experience.” Meanwhile, Tobacyk’s widely used Paranormal Belief Scale consists of seven subscales, which capture a wide variety of supernatural concepts, including traditional religious belief (e.g., God), psi (e.g., telepathy), witchcraft (e.g., black magic), superstition (e.g., bad luck), spiritualism (e.g., astral states), extraordinary lifeforms (e.g., Loch Ness monster), and precognition (e.g., astrology). Tobacyk and Milford found that traditional beliefs were related to other forms of paranormal belief in a consistent way, being positively correlated with witchcraft and precognition, negatively correlated with spiritualism, and uncorrelated with psi, superstitions, and extraordinary life forms, although these various nontraditional beliefs were all themselves moderately positively related.

The Supernatural Belief Scale In an attempt to improve on these previous efforts, we developed our own measure of supernatural belief. The Supernatural Belief Scale (SBS) is designed to measure the respondent’s tendency to believe in the existence or reality of supernatural entities, with minimal use of jargon from specific religious traditions. Our approach differs from previous attempts to “transcend religious traditions” (Hill, 2013, p. 55) or to measure “spiritual beliefs outside of religious contexts” (p. 60, emphasis added) in that we assume that there is a psychological tendency that underlies a variety of supernatural beliefs,

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whether or not they occur in the context of world religions, new religious movements, or idiosyncratic spiritualities. That is, we do not distinguish—as Milford and Tobacyk might—between traditional religious and other forms of supernatural belief. Nor are we interested in capturing the diversity of what people believe about supernatural beings, such as what God or the gods are like, and how they may or may not be involved in human affairs. As we have discussed in Chapter 1, recent cognitive anthropological and psychological research suggests that plausible supernatural concepts are cognitively constrained, and therefore that there are themes that commonly recur across cultures and religious traditions (Atran, 2002; Barrett, 2004; Bering, 2011; Boyer 2001; Tremlin, 2006; Whitehouse, 2004; Wilson, 2002). In particular, supernatural agent concepts, including afterlife concepts (e.g., ancestral spirits) are outputs of basic social cognitive tendencies—namely agency detection and Theory of Mind—that develop naturally as part of our biological endowment (Barrett, 2004; Bering, 2011; Pyysiäinen, 2009). Furthermore, research using ethnographic databases shows that supernatural concepts vary in scope and power (e.g., high- and low-status gods) and valence (e.g., benevolent versus malevolent gods, pleasant versus painful afterlives; Moor, 2009). Accordingly, we selected ten commonly recurring types of supernatural concepts, from which ten statements were composed, each affirming their actual existence or occurrence (see Table 3.1). The items included one positive and one negative high-order supernatural agent, one positive and one negative lower-level supernatural agent, one positive and one negative afterlife-related place, two neutral afterlife-related entities, and two neutral supernatural events. The statements consisted of abstract descriptions

Table 3.1 Items in the Supernatural Belief Scale There exists an all-powerful, all-knowing, loving God. There exists an evil personal spiritual being, whom we might call the Devil. There exist good personal spiritual beings, whom we might call angels. There exist evil, personal spiritual beings, whom we might call demons. Human beings have immaterial, immortal souls. There is a spiritual realm besides the physical one. Some people will go to Heaven when they die. Some people will go to Hell when they die. Miracles—divinely caused events that have no natural explanation—can and do happen. There are individuals who are messengers of God and/or can foresee the future.

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of these common supernatural concepts as well as disambiguating examples to frame them appropriately to ensure comprehensibility. The two-part structure of each item also allows us to modify the labels for different cultural contexts, while retaining the content of the description. For example, “demons” may be replaced with “djinns” for Muslim populations, and “hell” may be replaced with “naraka” for Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh, and Jainist populations. Respondents indicate their agreement or disagreement with each proposition on a 9-point Likert scale, anchored at −4 (strongly disagree) and 4 (strongly agree). That is, the negative end of the scale is designed to indicate extreme disbelief or atheism, and the positive end confident belief or religious conviction, with the midpoint implying agnosticism or uncertainty. Originally validated in New Zealand—a moderately secular context, with a Christian cultural history—the SBS was found via exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis to be an essentially unidimensional scale, with good internal consistency (Jong, Bluemke, & Halberstadt, 2013). As expected, self-professed atheists (M = −2.35, SD = 1.45) scored lower than people who reported being nonreligious (M  =  −1.15, SD  =  1.62), who in turn scored lower than people who self-identified as Christian (M  =  1.51, SD  =  1.79). Furthermore, SBS scores predicted self-reported importance of religion to identity (r  =  .54) and religious service attendance (Spearman’s ρ  =  .60, ps < .001). Although the SBS was designed to be adaptable for cross-cultural use, it has thus far only been applied to cultural contexts in which Christianity is the dominant religious tradition (e.g., Croatia, Finland; Bluemke, Jong, Grevenstein, Mikloušić, & Halberstadt, 2016; Lindeman, Svedholm-Häkkinen, & Lipsanen, 2015). More recently, we developed a shortened and improved Supernatural Belief Scale (SBS-6; see Table 3.2), intended to increase its cross-cultural applicability. The new scale reduces the ten items into six more abstract themes—high gods, low gods, mind-body dualism, spirit-matter dualism, afterlife, supernatural intervention—thus making it more broadly applicable while still targeting the same core construct.1 Similar to the original SBS, the specific terms “God,” “angels,” “demons,” “spirit,” “soul,” and “miracles” may be replaced with more culturally appropriate terms, while the descriptions of the supernatural concepts remain constant. As we report below, the SBS-6 has now been used in several countries, including the United States, Brazil, Russia,

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Table 3.2 Items in the Supernatural Belief Scale-Revised (SBS- 6) There exists an all-powerful, all-knowing spiritual being, whom we might call God. There exist spiritual beings, who might be good or evil, such as angels or demons. Every human being has a spirit or soul that is separate from the physical body. There is some kind of life after death. There is a spiritual realm besides the physical one. Supernatural events that have no scientific explanation (e.g., miracles) can and do happen.

South Korea, the Philippines, and Japan, on culturally Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, and Shinto populations. In our first US sample—which focused on Christians (n  =  367), atheists (n = 138), agnostics (n = 142), and the religiously unaffi liated (“nones”; White, 2014; n = 92)—we found via exploratory factor analysis2 that the SBS-6 was unidimensional, with the single factor accounting for 87 percent of the variance (Cronbach’s α = .976). As with the original SBS, Christians scored higher (M = 2.43, SD = 1.63) than agnostics and the unaffi liated (respectively, M = −1.02, SD = 1.91; M = −.99, SD = 2.56), who in turn scored higher than atheists (M = −3.29, SD =1.35). SBS-6 scores also predicted a variety of religious behaviors and attitudes, even when Christians and nonreligious individuals (i.e., atheists, agnostics, nones) were analyzed separately (see Table 3.3). The second US sample focused on Muslims (n = 288; M = 2.35, SD = 1.62). Again, we found via exploratory factor analysis that SBS-6 was a unidimensional measure, with the single factor this time accounting for 61 percent of the variance (Cronbach’s α = .9). Similar to the first study, SBS-6 scores predicted the frequency with which Muslims prayed (ρ = .474), fasted (ρ = .180), went to mosque (ρ = .200), read the Qur’an (ρ = .395), and recited the tasbih (ρ = .277), as well as their self-identified religiosity (ρ = .370) and spirituality (ρ = .441), ps