"I had no need of that hypothesis."

Over the course of the summer I wrote a series of articles about brain science and Christianity, and I promised a final installment that never came.  This is it. The series asked and--within the limits of present knowledge--answered a set of questions that fascinate students at the intersection of religion and psychology. 

How does the structure of human information processing pre-dispose us to religious thinking?  Given how our minds work, what kinds of religious beliefs are possible and what kinds are we immune to?

How do we know what we know? What gives us a feeling of certainty?  What is the relation between reason, evidence, and our sense of knowing?

How do conversion experiences work?  What makes religious conversion transformative?

 How do beliefs get transmitted from one person to another?  How does our social context influence or even control our religious beliefs?  How does religious identity develop in childhood? 

What makes beliefs resistant to change?  What causes people to lose belief?  When are people open to reexamining religious assumptions?

If you followed the series, or better yet the rabbit trails of imbedded references, you would have found that they distilled an exciting set of discoveries.  Brain science is remarkably close to offering a full naturalistic explanation of individual religious experiences, everything from certain belief to moral indignation to mystical rapture to spiritual transformation.

As theists are quick to point out, understanding the psychology of religion doesn’t tell us whether any specific set of beliefs is true.  I might believe in a pantheon of supernatural beings for all the wrong reasons (childhood credulity, hyperactive agency detection, theory of mind, group hypnotic processes, misattributed transcendence hallucination, viral transmission, cognitive dissonance reduction) and they might still might exist. Brain scientists can’t address the truth value of otherworldly assertions, only the mechanisms and patterns through which they occur in this the human mind. 

In a similar way, all scholars of religion are bound by the methods and focus of their respective fields.  Many fields can illuminate some aspect of the religious enterprise, and each has its limits.  Hard scientists are limited to addressing the testable assertions religions make about natural phenomena, such as the origins of species or the causes of epilepsy or the power of intercessory prayer.  Historians, aided by linguists and archeologists, can excavate the history of a set of ideas, but – except where theologians make historical assertions-- they too cannot answer definitively whether these ideas are factually correct.  Sociologists and anthropologists can examine the patterns and impact of belief on a collective.  They are uniquely able to assess claims that religious belief increases love and joy, or decreases crime.   It remains the domain of philosophers and ethicists to examine the rational and moral qualities of religious beliefs—to examine internal coherence or the virtue of a belief system as it relates to a set of universal ethical principles.   All of these are questions that lay outside the domain of brain science which, as I said earlier limits itself to the subjective experience of the individual and the correlates of that experience in neurological phenomena.

Despite its boundaries, cognitive science, does offer what is rapidly becoming a sufficient explanation for the supernaturalism that underlies organized religion.  If we are particularly concerned with Christianity, then we are particularly concerned with belief.  And more and more, we can explain Christian belief with the same set of principles that explain supernaturalism generally.  This is a serious blow to orthodoxy, meaning any religion based on right belief, and that includes most traditional forms of Christianity.

 In the past, one of the arguments put forward by believers was that there simply was no explanation for the born again experience, the healing power of Christianity, the vast agreement among believers, or the joy and wonder of mysticism, save that these came from God himself.  These experiences, they insisted, justified or even demanded belief in the Christian God including a personal, present resurrected Jesus. We now know this not to be the case.   Humans are capable of having transcendent, transformative experiences in the absence of any given dogma.  We are capable of sustaining elaborate systems of false belief and transmitting them to our children.  We are capable of feeling so certain about our false beliefs that we are willing to kill or die for them.

It possible, absolutely, to assert the truth of Christian beliefs even knowing that there are now other explanations for the Christian experience.  Claims about the afterlife or the spiritual realm are, after all, untestable.  They cannot be proven, and they cannot be refuted.  When it comes to beliefs about the “world to come,” literally anything goes. 

It also is quite possible to assert that the Christian experience has unique supernatural causes.  One could say, for example, that Christian joy is somehow different from the joy experienced by other religious people: It alone has both material causes (social/physiological/psychological) and a supernatural cause (e.g the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit).  But this kind of claim puts a defender of faith in an awkward position, one that is at odds with how cause and effect explanations usually work.

One general principle that has worked well for humans seeking to advance or refine knowledge is called “parsimony,” also known as Occam’s Razor.  It can be paraphrased thus:  “Usually the simplest explanation is the best one.” or “Don’t multiply entities unnecessarily.”  If we can predict storms by looking at barometric pressure and cloud formations, then there is no need to posit the existence of storm spirits or angry ancestors causing us trouble.  If we can predict that an electric light will come on when a circuit is completed, we don’t talk about the additional but undetectable flow of magic that makes the whole thing function.  When a scholar adheres to the principle of parsimony, explanatory factors get added only when they allow us to control or predict with greater accuracy.

In every field of human knowledge except theology, if we can find a sufficient explanation within nature’s matrix, we don’t look outside. We no longer, for example, posit that demons are involved in seizures or bubonic plague.  It’s not that we know for sure that the demon explanation is wrong, simply that it is unnecessary for predicting or treating seizures. 

What does all of this imply for the future of religious studies?  Simply that supernatural explanations for religious experience are becoming unnecessary.  Eighteenth Century French mathematician and astronomer, Pierre Simone Laplace, wrote a volume on the movements of the heavenly bodies.  When asked by Emperor Napoleon I why he had not mentioned God in his treatise, he replied, “je n'ai pas eu besoin de cette hypothèse.”  I had no need of that hypothesis.  Modern scholars of religion, more and more, find themselves echoing the words of Laplace.   We have no need of that hypothesis.

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If you would like to receive this series as a single Word doc or PDF, or if you would like to subscribe to weekly articles by Valerie Tarico, send your request to vt at valerietarico dot com. 

As the Right Wing base sinks to new levels of insanity taking the Republican brand with it, “going stealth”  has become the campaign strategy of choice in districts where an all-out, Teabagger Town Hall, Palin-Beck, froth-mouthed feeding frenzy would just turn stomachs.  The Right’s agenda isn’t evolving, just its tactics.  You have to give it to those frackers.  They are smart. 

They still want to drown government in a bathtub.  Never mind that we need our safety net and education system more than ever.  They still think that some hubba hubba god made women “separate but equal"—men with brains and biceps, women with vaginas.   (It’s called complementarianism).  They still think we can teach creationism in schools and expect to be competitive internationally. (Bing “Academic Freedom Bills”). They still value life until birth. They still think we can end drug use by jailing addicts. They still think that guns don’t kill people.  They still think the problem with their marriage is my brother.  And they still think that you can give the free market absolute power without it corrupting absolutely.

But in some of the best run Republican and Religious Right (Rebiblican) campaigns in the country, you’d never know it.  Here in King County, Washington, the Right even funded a charter amendment making county races nonpartisan before running a “moderate, nonpartisan” Rebiblican named Susan Hutchison.  In Virginia and New Jersey, to quote Frank Rich,

"The very conservative Republican contenders in the two big gubernatorial contests this week have frantically tried to disguise their own convictions. The candidate in Virginia, Bob McDonnell, is a graduate of Pat Robertson’s university whose career has been devoted to curbing abortion rights, gay civil rights and even birth control. But in this campaign he ditched those issues, disinvited Palin for a campaign appearance, praised Obama’s Nobel Prize, and ran a closing campaign ad trumpeting “Hope.” Chris Christie, McDonnell’s counterpart in New Jersey, posted a campaign video celebrating “Change” in which Obama’s face and most stirring campaign sound bites so dominate you’d think the president had endorsed the Republican over his Democratic opponent, Jon Corzine."

As several bloggers have warned (here, here, here), we should expect to see more of this over the next few years, especially since it worked beautifully for both McDonnell and Christie. The crowing about these two Rebiblican wins has spanned the country, in contrast to the dead silence about the Palin-Beck chow fest in upstate New York that the voters barfed up. 

What’s interesting is that the same stealth strategy failed miserably in Washington State.  Palin-wannabe Susan Hutchison was defeated by fourteen points after being ahead in the polls just weeks ago. 

What happened?  It’s very simple:  Word got out about who she is, and it made King County’s voters a bit queasy.  Reproductive rights activists took to the streets with homemade signs that made evening news. An anti-dominionist did research and then rallied colleagues at other blogs (e.g.God’s Own Party).  A public access TV host recruited guests to talk about Hutchison’s brand of politicized creationism.  A lefty blogger (Horsesass.org) defied copy-right claims to show footage Hutchison speaking to her base.  So did her opponent’s campaign.  So did local students.   A Seattle comic made his own funny low budget cartoon ad exposing Hutchison’s puppet masters.  

It is also true that the usual suspects—campaign professionals and volunteers, unions, advocacy groups and donors--played their roles and played them well.  And Susan Hutchison's opponent Dow Constantine, now King County's executive, is solid and experienced.  In the long run, that might have been enough.  But it wasn't until Hutchison got exposed relentlessly and repeatedly from all sides that the tide of voter opinion turned.  By November 3, the voting public knew who Susan Palin Hutchison is, and for a stealth campaign, that’s lethal.  Several years ago, George Lakoff said that when the Right uses our language to cover their agenda they are showing us where they are weak, where the public actually disagrees with them.  When Rebiblicans pose as moderates and change agents, they have just exposed soft tissue. 

The right has the advantage in mainstream media, in hierarchy, authority, and message discipline.  But the left has the advantage when it comes to distributed information networks, outspoken renegades, and innovation.  If we want that East Coast crowing to stop, we need to start engaging these networks and cutting them loose (with funds as needed) to do what they do best.

The most controversial check I write each year is the one that goes to a small nonprofit called Project Prevention. Project Prevention pays drug addicts and chronic alcoholics to get permanent or long term birth control. Director Barbara Harris founded the program after adopting not one or two but four drug addicted babies from the same mother. She watched them scream and writhe inconsolably, backs arched and hands clenched, and she said, "Enough."

Reproductive rights organizations that I support like Planned Parenthood and NARAL don't approve of Barbara's work. It operates in a bioethical gray zone that makes them uncomfortable, and should. Here is their reasoning: Payment has the power to manipulate people into decisions they will regret. An addict may be desperate enough for a fix that she'd sell her soul, let alone her ability to reproduce.

I think they are right. Addiction does make people that desperate, and a decision born of desperation is a decision coerced. Consequently, addiction pits two things I cherish against each other. One of them is reproductive freedom. I believe passionately that parenthood is one of the richest, most spiritual dimensions of life, and that we collectively should neither obligate nor restrict it without overwhelming cause.

I also believe is that childhood is a precious trust, and we should bring children into this world only if we are prepared to honor that trust--to give them a decent shot at flourishing. Under the wrong circumstances childhood can be a living hell. And that is far more likely to be the case when children are the unintended product of unprotected sex, with the judgment of involved parties clouded by addiction.

When our ancestors had no control over fertility, childbearing wasn't a moral decision. But now it is. I tell my children that we are responsible for what we have control over; power and responsibility are two sides of the same coin. Contraception is one of humanity's newfound powers. So it is that contraceptives bring a new dimension of moral decision making to the human race. And as someone who has influence over another person's reproductive decisions through my charitable giving, I end up having to weigh moral questions.

In my experience, we encounter moral dilemmas most often when two good things or two bad things are pitted against each other. It's easy to say that childhood health is a good thing or to say that personal freedom is a good thing. But which matters more-- the freedom of women to reproduce as they choose, or the right of children to have a healthy start in life?

As a woman, I am utterly grateful that my culture, U.S. Laws, scientific advances and financial privilege gave me a high level of reproductive freedom. I had the freedom to defer childbearing-- to go to school, travel, and heal my childhood wounds first. I had the freedom to abort an unhealthy fetus. I had the freedom, finally, to bring two chosen daughters into a solid marriage with a bounty of love and life experiences to share. When I think of my own life, I value reproductive freedom a lot: for people I love like my daughters, but also for people I've never met.

But is it the needs of women or children that go most to the core for me? Mercifully, they often are aligned. Still, how do I weigh them when they come into conflict?

One way I get insight into my own hierarchy of values is by looking at what I do. Throughout my adult life, my most compelling efforts (grad school, work, volunteering, giving, writing) have been about making room for a little more delight and a little less pain in this world. To me, more reproductive freedom and fewer addicted babies both matter because they serve this end. But if I look closely at my own history, one of these values trumps the other. The lettering I painstakingly stuck on my car as a young therapist said, "Children deserve to be planned for and chosen." Years later, I was instantly smitten with a quirky warm political co-conspirator, Patricia, who declared that she was pro-choice because, "All babies deserve to have their toes kissed."

My checks to Project Prevention fit a pattern. They tell me that over all these years, my values--in this area, at least--haven't changed. All babies do deserve to have their toes kissed, and their knees and elbows and unclenched hands. It is a bonus that, from the sound of things, most of Project Prevention's efforts--inspired by Barbara's babies--are giving women healthy (new) beginnings in life too.

Advice for candidates from a former fundie.

One thing I learned not long after finishing my Spanish degree was -- never volunteer to translate anything into a language you don't dream in. I was visiting Flores, Guatemala, and offered to help a small art collective. In response, they handed me some fliers to translate from English to Spanish. I had that four year degree, you know, so I did -- with embarrassing results. My sentences were grammatically correct, and the words even meant what I thought they meant. But no native speaker ever would have said things quite that way, and someone had to tactfully tell me so. I still wince at the memory, at my own naiveté and hubris.

Takeaway for political candidates: If you're not a Christian, don't even try to speak Evangelese. There are subtleties of sequence and jargon that are invisible to outsiders, but violating them even slightly is a dead giveaway that you are a sham. Refer to someone as "a good person," for example, and it's all over. You might as well be that poor American spy who shifted his fork to his right hand after cutting the meat.

Not convinced? Listen to a real Evangelical for a few moments. Susan Hutchison is a Religious Right candidate in King County, Washington. Shortly before beginning her run, she gave the keynote at a prayer breakfast for elected officials. In it, she recounts a conversation with Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins and talks about her own faith. Any five minute segment of the talk would say convincingly to other Evangelicals, Susan isn't one of those lukewarm (aka modernist mainline) Christians. She is one of us. Take a few minutes to watch, and then ask yourself:

1. Would I have thought to invoke the frightening words "age of the activist atheists," knowing that atheists are more reviled than gays and Muslims?
2. Would I have described sharing my religious beliefs as "giving a little testimony?"
3. Would I have said Richard Dawkins reacted to "the name of Jesus" (At the Name of Jesus ever knee shall bow . . . ) rather than the whole dismaying event?
4. Would it have occurred to me that one could be a confirmed Lutheran but not be a Christian until a specific born again experience?
5. Would I have known to tell a story about God telling me or another person to do something -- with wonderful results?
6. Would I have mentioned that I was praying for my opponents like the author of Matthew recommends? "Love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you . . ." Matthew 5:44
7. Would I have honed in on belief as the center of Christianity, with doubt as something to be prayed away? "I believe, help me in my unbelief."
8. Would I have called the Bible "the Word of God"?
9. Would I have conveyed with confidence that the highest purpose of public service is as platform for winning the world to Jesus (Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel.)
10. Would I have avoided the word religion throughout my talk?

If you didn't know these were insider language and narrative templates , you're not an insider.

Susan Hutchison is the Real Deal, which is virtually impossible to fake. All the same, if you want the Evangelical/born again forty-ish percent of the public to find you appealing, there are a few turns of phrase that are worth incorporating into your campaign vocabulary. Don't try using these to establish your spiritual bona fides. (Unless you are born again, you have none. See good person, above. There is no such thing. All we like sheep have gone astray.) Instead, use evangelical or biblical turns of phrase in a secular context. They will sound appealingly familiar to a born again audience--without you pretending to be something you aren't. For example, here are a few sample phrases you might borrow from Hutchison.

1. Refer to "my heart":
a. Evangelical examples: asking Jesus into your heart, God is speaking to your heart.
b. Secular use: I feel in my heart, I know in my heart no matter how hard it may be, we need to provide basic medical care for every child in this country.
2. Say you felt "called" or were led to do something.
a. Evangelical examples: God called me to move to Seattle, to take up the ministry, to put John 3:16 on my eyeblacks. Richard Dawkins and I have been brought together.
b. Secular use: I felt called to take up the cause of health care for all.
3. Use the word "personal" liberally.
a. Evangelical example: I needed a personal faith. You aren't really a Christian until you have a personal relationship with Jesus.
b. Secular use: I have a personal relationship to the people in that nursing home.
4. Use the phrase "all the world."
a. Evangelical example: Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature.
b. Secular use: Whether we treat health care as a basic human right will have ripple effects flow into all the world.
5. Talk about events that "changed your life forever."
a. Evangelical example: Accepting Jesus as my personal savior changed my life forever.
b. Secular use: Sitting with that dying child changed my life forever.

Hutchison herself makes a mistake or two about insider/outsider language in her story about Richard Dawkins at Windsor Castle. In her version, he asks a question and she gives a little testimony about God revealing himself through Jesus. (Tangentially, Dawkins recalls the conversation being about GW, not Jesus.) In the story, Dawkins says that his books give people permission to "deny their faith." This is a very Evangelical turn of phrase. Also, Hutchison quotes Dawkins as saying she became "tawdry and base" when she said "the word Jesus". Unlikely. An atheist scientist is more likely to react negatively to her whole plug for special (biblical) revelation rather than the "name of Jesus," but in fundamentalist theology it is "the name of Jesus" that demons can't bear. Most likely, Hutchison projected an Evangelical phrase into Dawkins' mouth. Like my attempt to translate into Spanish, her attempt at translation probably was shaped by her native tongue.

It's easy go awry when you're trying to speak someone else's language, and secular folks frequently make mistakes when trying to build bridges with Evangelical believers. Here are a few examples of seemingly insider words that instead are actually negative triggers for many Evangelicals.

1. Calling Christianity a religion. It isn't. It's a relationship.
2. Referring to Jesus as a good man. He wasn't. He was God.
3. Using the word "tolerance." It's a bad word that means you are a moral relativist.
4. Mentioning priests or bishops. Way too Catholic. Evangelicals call them ministers or pastors or preachers.
5. Using the words interfaith, or spirituality. Those are words for wusses and imply spiritual weakness.

If you want to get serious about understanding Evangelical language and the role it plays in politics, I recommend David Domke's book, The God Strategy. You also can find funny or serious lists of insider language online.

But I want to make a more important point. For those of you who watched the video, take a cue from Hutchison's grace, poise, and relentless equanimity. Mean spirited jabs, visible frustration or righteous indignation rarely rallies people to your side. Susan Hutchison talks about the enemies of her God--Dan Barker, activist atheists, and Richard Dawkins-- with zero verbal edge, all the while maintaining the same smile that is there when she talks about God answering prayers. It's what made her well loved as an anchor woman, and it may very well win her an election among people who actually disagree with her core values. In the end, the biggest part of people feeling connected with you is whether you come across as likeable. That is what all of the insider/outsider language analysis really is about. If people identify with you and find you trustworthy--if thinking about you makes them feel warm and happy--they're going to put their own best spin on whatever you may say.

(Huffington Post - October 13, 2009)

Next week in King County, Washington, "nonpartisan" Susan Hutchison will be vying with Democrat Dow Constantine for the role of County Executive. The seat controls significant resources in a region that often plays a leadership role in future oriented public policy. If King County were a state, its budget size would be 13th in the country. Economically, the county lives on cutting edge science, engineering and technology: Microsoft, Boeing, Amgen, Nintendo and a host of tech/biotech startups.

What national precedents is King County likely to be setting in the next go around? That depends in part on who sits in the executive seat. Constantine has track records in brokering anti-sprawl, sustainable development and historic preservation. He's a proponent of strong, innovative carbon policies. But who is the elusive Hutchison? Seattle Times reporter Danny Westneat called Susan Hutchison a sort-of-Republican. Erica Barnett at the Stranger called her a Republican Religious Wingnut. A member of her own party called her "our Sarah Palin." Is Susan Hutchison a Palin in the making? You be the judge.

In this post, Bill Alford at Moral Politics Television, Seattle, interviewed Dr. Valerie Tarico, author, activist and former evangelical about what she perceives behind the nonpartisan veil.

Is Susan Hutchison a stealth right-winger and closet fundamentalist, as some folks are saying?
Let's start with her political leanings. Hutchison is a solid triple R: Religious Right Republican. Since 2003, her political giving supported Mike Huckabee (over John McCain), George W. Bush and Dino Rossi. She spent $3000 trying to get Rossi into office. All of her political/religious affiliations are with what I would call effective, conservative or evangelical organizations with good PR. Calling herself "nonpartisan" is a smart posture, because King County majorities probably wouldn't vote for Susan Hutchison if they were clear on her political identity. And it works. In an early interview with Seattlepi.com reporter Neil Modie, Hutchison herself said, "Our polls showed that 10 percent of the people responding thought I was extremely liberal." Her team is working to sustain that confusion.

Solidly Repubican. How about fundamentalist?
Well that depends on what you mean by fundamentalist? If you use fundamentalist to mean strident, cut-off-from- the-world and fringe, then no. Hutchison is gracious and charming and obviously right in the swirl of the Seattle's fine arts community. If you mean a fundamentalist from a theological standpoint: the Bible is literally the perfect word of god, Jesus was born to a literal virgin, Jesus was a human sacrifice, people who don't believe that are going to be tortured forever. Yes. It would appear from Susan Hutchison's own words that she's a born-again fundamentalist who thinks that politicians should use their status to promote their religious beliefs. Hutchison gave the keynote at a prayer breakfast this spring. Here is a reading she chose, which was followed by her own born again testimony and exhortation for politicians to use their bully pulpit to promote their (Christian) religion.

"It was through what his son did that God cleared a path for everything to come to him all things in heaven and in hearth . . . for Christ's death on the Cross has made peace with God for all by his blood . . . He has done this through the death on the cross of his own human body . . . The only condition is that you fully believe the truth, believe the truth, standing in it and never shifting from trusting him to save you. This is the wonderful news that came to each of you and is now spreading throughout the world. Prayer Breakfast 1:02:35 to 1:04:40

Note the emphasis on blood sacrifice, belief and spreading the good news. This is a very evangelical choice, and she follows it with stories that reinforce the message. You can hear Hutchison's message at WTV, linked above through Barnett's article. Hutchison begins around 47 minutes into the breakfast.

What exactly is the part you quoted?
Well, what she was actually reading from is something called the Living Bible. It's not a translation, so you won't find it even at Evangelical sites like www.biblegateway.com that allow you to compare Bible translations side by side. Back in the 1970's a fundamentalist preacher and writer named Kenneth Taylor decided he wanted the Bible to be more accessible, so he wrote his own version, an admitted "paraphrase." That means he put in his own words what he thought God was trying to say. I can't resist quoting George Bernard Shaw here: No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says; he is always convinced that it says what he means.

Actually, it's not unusual for Biblical literalists to pick and choose what translations or paraphrases they use to make a point, as Hutchison has done. In The Purpose Driven Life, Rick Warren uses over 15 different translations, if I remember correctly. He chooses whichever translation best suits his point for different verses he cites.

Hutchison chose not only her Bible but her text fragments carefully. She left out some parts that might have been a bit jarring. For example, early in her message she emphasized that Jesus made: "the earthly world with its rulers and authorities, its Washington State government . . . " The words "Washington State government" replaced the words, "all were made by Christ for his own use and glory". His own use? His own glory? It sounds kind of ugly. So she put in something benign that doesn't jar listeners out of the narrative flow and in fact brings it closer to home. She is a wonderful evangelical speaker. Her message quality is on par with that of Joel Olsteen or Rick Warren. In a denomination that allowed women in the pulpit, she could draw a large congregation.

But wouldn't any real Christian be comfortable with those words she wrote? Wouldn't they agree with them?
Not necessarily. Many, many Christians would chose other words to represent their faith. Remember that for Susan Hutchison to read these words -- there are layers of filtering here. As more is known about the Bible through linguistic analysis and archeological discoveries, more and more Christian theologians don't think of the Bible as the literally perfect word of God. We know that some parts were copied from Akkadian and Sumerian texts, some parts were handed down through oral traditions. The Catholic councils that decided what got into the Bible and what didn't -- they didn't have access to the same quality of information we have now, and they were responding to a specific political context. Hutchison's reading is her edited selection of a paraphrase by Ken Taylor of The Book of Colossians. But who wrote Colossians? Scholars aren't so sure any more. You can get a glimpse of the dispute even on Wikipedia.

Hutchison chose this fragment of writing by a contested author paraphrased by a fundamentalist to fit her own beliefs about blood atonement and salvation -- and her evangelistic message to electeds. This is a fundamentalist evangelical choice. People hear that Hutchison attends a Presbyterian church and they assume that she is mainstream in her community and beliefs. What they don't know is that fundamentalism as a movement actually emerged out of the Presbyterian seminaries in the early Twentieth Century, and Presbyterian churches vary widely in terms of where they fall on the continuum. Hutchison's church is not middle of the road for Presbyterians in this region. It is fairly middle of the road for evangelical churches. During the prayer breakfast message, Hutchison made another move that reflects both fundamentalist theology and her personality: She very graciously but clearly used evangelical language to dismiss other forms of Christianity.

What do you mean?
Well, part of the talk is a classic evangelical "testimony." This is a stock form of proselytizing in which the speaker shares their own born again experience. She talks about how she was raised in Christianity, knew the Bible but she wasn't a real Christian until she realized she needed a "more personal faith" and had this "thing happen to her." The word personal -- personal relationship with Jesus, personal salvation and so on -- it's a big word in Evangelical circles. She emphasizes salvation by belief in blood atonement. She repeats it several times. This is a way that Protestants, particularly Evangelicals differentiate themselves from Catholics, who believe that salvation comes through both faith and works. The message is that you are not really a Christian until you have this personal relationship, and salvation is about belief.

The real question here is: What are the implications for her likely priorities in public office?
What is the old saying? We are known by the company we keep. That is actually reasonable folk wisdom. James Wellman, University of Washington sociologist likes to say that, "Our sense of reality is socially constructed." It makes sense to assume that Hutchison's priorities are shaped by her expressed values and her associations, just like the rest of us. So, independent of her work for the Simonyi Foundation, who does Hutchison hang out with?

Her prayer breakfast talk was hosted by an organization called Washington Leadership. Their tag line is: A place where state and community leaders can come together with emerging leaders around the person of Jesus. I might expect Hutchison to be a bit fuzzy on church/state separation issues, because the evangelical mandate as I know it, and as she manifested it in her prayer breakfast talk, trumps separation. Hutchison appears to place a strong value on leveraging public exposure to spread her version of Christianity. Hutchison is on the board of Young Life international, which fits perfectly. It is a fun, smart evangelical organization that seeks to convert teenagers and get teenagers to convert each other to this fundamentalist theology we heard her reading.

Until she began her run for office, she also was on the board of the Discovery Institute, which gets evangelical funding to undermine secular "materialist" science education and replace it with a sophisticated version of creationism called Intelligent Design. They claim ID is science, but even the Templeton Foundation, an organization that funds the intersection between faith and science disagrees and won't give them money. I find it dismaying that Hutchison has been around the caliber of scientists she claims to have encountered through her work at Simonyi without developing a deeper understanding of the scientific method and why it works so well.

Hutchison spoke this month at a conservative think tank, the Washington Policy Institute that espouses free market fundamentalism and right now is promoting a film trying to deny climate science and dissuade climate action. So again you see this inclination toward undermining the scientific enterprise -- in the WPI case with an eye toward economic policy. In my mind the connection between free market fundamentalism and Christian fundamentalism is an orientation toward ideology (ie. strong narrative filters that screen out contradictory information) and perhaps consequently a weakened ability to run a recalculation on early assumptions and decisions.

Any final thoughts?
I look at Susan Hutchison, and as a former evangelical I see a woman on a mission, in that sense much like Sarah Palin, but without the weird exorcism of witches stuff. Hutchison's evangelical associations have steered her in a very specific political direction: She gave money to evangelical Republican Mike Huckabee over John McCain. She refuses to answer questions about reproductive rights. Heck, she even refuses to tell people that she's a Republican. While working for Charles Simonyi and giving away his money, she has had plenty of opportunity to become more sophisticated about the scientific method and data based decisions -- but instead I worry that she has become better at clinging to an ideology in the face of evidence to the contrary. I personally prefer having someone in the King County Exec office who bases their policy decisions on data and who is on a mission to serve the people of King County.

On October 2nd, The Seattle Times featured an AP article about the recent quake in Sumatra, along with a "how to help" list. At the top of that list was World Vision International.

What the article failed to mention, and many donors fail to realize, is that World Vision is an Evangelical Christian organization with a mission that includes "serving as a witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ." Perhaps the best known program of World Vision is their child sponsorships. As an Evangelical college student, I sponsored a child in India. I even got and sent a few letters, and it felt great knowing that thanks to me he could afford to attend a Christian school in his area.

World Vision explicitly states on their website that they "do not proselytize or work with those who insist on proselytism. Proselytism takes place whenever assistance is offered on condition that people must listen or respond to a message or as an inducement to leave one and join another part of the Christian church." The organization ascribes to Red Cross standards prohibiting conversion activities. But consider the next paragraph from their website:

"At the same time, World Vision shares the Church's commitment to disciple followers of Jesus Christ who bear witness to the Gospel by life, deed, word and sign, with the goal of encouraging people to respond to the Gospel. We do this through the life of service that we lead, the deeds of Christian love we perform, the words that we share about our faith and the signs of prayers answered as we visibly and concretely improve the lives of others." (emphasis theirs)

People in disaster zones and small children, the two primary populations served by World Vision, are both particularly vulnerable, and because of this they are particularly vulnerable to influence. It's great that World Vision doesn't take an "or else" approach to aid: listen to our message or else go hungry. Not all missionary organizations adhere to this ethical boundary. But to deny the conversion pressures of money and medical care or education is naive. Consider the plight of Hindu parents who have a choice between a bare local school or a Christian school that provides paper, pencils, and books. All over the world, vast differences in power and resources say to desperate people: Christians have what you need; Jesus is the answer. The World Vision mission, in its own understated way, acknowledges this.

Does this make World Vision a bad investment? It depends on your own values, on whether their mission of encouraging people to respond to the Gospel is also yours. Make no mistake. In evangelical circles, the word "witness" is code for seeking converts, and "Gospel" means salvation by the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ. If that is a message you want carried to the world by a competent, compassionate aid organization, World Vision may be your ticket. If it's just the competent, compassionate aid that you care about, then you're likely better off sending your money to an organization further down the list. Try Mercy Corps, for example, or Doctors without Borders or that standard bearer, the Red Cross itself.

In case you missed the announcement, ShipofFools.com has published an "authoritative" list of the ten worst verses in the Bible. At a time when atheists are posting ads on billboards and busses around the world, you might assume that the Ship is an anti-religious site. But no. Ship of Fools is a Christian website with an impeccable British sense of the absurd. True to its name, the editors go where angels (and other Christians) dare not tread. "We're here for people who prefer their religion disorganized," says Simon Jenkins. "Our aim is to help Christians be self-critical and honest about the failings of Christianity, as we believe honesty can only strengthen faith."

I wince a bit at Jenkins' confidence. As a student at Wheaton College of Billy Graham fame, I thought that the school motto was "All truth is God's truth." Later I found out it was actually, "For Christ and His Kingdom." But at the time, I figured: Ask away; faith has nothing to fear. So, ask I did, until the last vestiges of my Evangelical beliefs finally crumbled. Another former Christian said it perfectly: "My exit from Christianity consisted of a series of strategic retreats covering an ever-shrinking patch of defensible ground."

Jenkins and his teammates seem willing to take that chance. Like Christian author, John Shelby Spong (The Sins of Scripture: Exposing the Bible's Texts of Hate to Reveal the God of Love), Ship of Fools editors are unafraid of biblical criticism. They do not equate criticism of the Bible with criticism of their God. Rather, they regard the Bible as a human construction that offers glimpses of divinity seen through the dark glass of human fallibility. Beginning in July, they invited readers to submit what they consider to be the worst verse in the Bible.

You don't need to be a purple-faced atheist to notice that the Bible is a pretty mixed book. For every hymn to the loveliness of love, there's a story about God squishing someone because they worshipped the wrong god. For every wise and helpful saying, there's an incomprehensible law. For every verse Martin Luther King proclaimed in the streets of Alabama, there's one that Fred Phelps shouts outside gay funerals.

For a purple-face like myself who keeps pointing out theological - uh -complications -- from the outside, it's a pleasure to land in the virtual company of believers who have no problem saying that sexism and homophobia and slavery and genocide are Bad, no matter how well credentialed their endorsers. American Evangelicals often try to insist that the Bible is the literally perfect word of God, each word essentially dictated by God to the authors. Not only is this position ignorant --ever heard of synods or canonization?-- it has an enormous moral cost. People end up defending sexual slavery and scorched earth warfare, even a belief in dragons. Whew. Been there.

Mercifully, Christians like Spong and Jenkins offer an alternative to Orwellian contortion. To quote one of the Ship's editors, "[The Bible] doesn't have to be a textbook of infallible information and unbreakable laws to be God's book." This radical notion has big implications for Christians and non-Christians alike.

For Christians: As more and more is known about how the Bible was pieced together - what got in, what got left out, how human politics shaped the process--the notion of perfection (called "inerrancy") becomes harder and harder to defend. It requires an eyes-squeezed-shut, fingers-in-ears sort of faith. By contrast, acknowledging the Bible's human authorship and frailties allows for a faith that is flexible and open--one that is centered in worship and service rather than the defense of ancient texts. It also allows Christians to participate in the broader intellectual and moral community of humankind.

For the rest of us: Most of the evil that Christians do in the service of God is actually evil done in the service of a perfect Bible--well, that plus a few perfect follow-on dogmas. When people see the Bible for what it is, whole bunches of craziness, like anti-scientific fervor and Armageddon yearnings, go away. What's left is ordinary folks who are muddling along, living out their best hunches about what is good and what is real, rather like the rest of us. Anyone who is invested in the future of the human race might feel a surge of hope and respect upon finding themselves in the company of self-described "fools," meaning Christians whose religion is based on humble faith, open debate, and radical intellectual honesty. I certainly do.

______________________________________

All right, you're probably thinking. Enough babble. Where's the list?! At Ship of Fools, of course. Don't miss it. And thank you to Edward Babinsky for calling it to my attention.

A couple of years back, I dragged my agnostic husband, Brian, to a Calvinist megachurch.  Calvinist means God preselected a few humans for salvation and the rest for eternal torture.  We sat there for an hour, goats among the sheep.  Brian’s  reaction?  “That was the best indie rock I’ve heard in a long time!” 

 

Christians have a love-hate relationship with popular music.  I came of age during a hate phase.  Rock was diabolical.  In my generation, Alice Cooper, missionary kid, played out his parents’ fears about rock music, chopping up baby dolls and  screeching about necrophilia while dressed as a  17^th Century witch.  Having dabbled on the enemy side of a fantastical spiritual war that supposedly encompasses us all, he now attends an evangelical mega in Scottsdale, Arizona. 

 

In his youth, Alice had to choose between edgy rock and Jesus.  By contrast, my nephew (raised by the same woman who raised me on Swan Lake--my mom) spent his teen years consuming a steady diet of Christian heavy metal.  Mom’s complaints were focused on aesthetics.   Matthew’s beloved “screamers” were distasteful, but not dangerous.  Heavy metal had been co-opted.  Instead of sketching daggers and bones dripping with stylized blood like secular metal fans, Matt could draw hearts and crosses dripping with stylized blood—and that was ok.

 

In Christianity, music is cement for faith. It can put people in that otherworldly frame of mind needed for repentance and conversion.  It can call people to action and bind them to each other. It can evoke submission or ecstasy. Even the traditional interweaving of music and liturgy transforms passive observers into active worshipers. But music also is thought of as dangerous.

 

The problem for fundies is that music also can call people into the playful, sexual or political dimensions of social life.  Young Christians are enticed to be “unequally yoked” with nonChristian band members, compatriots, or even lovers.  At least that’s what a lot of parents and ministers worry about.  That’s why in the long run revival movements often co-opt pop music, whether it’s heavy metal or, in the past, the folk tunes or medieval love songs that provided melodies for now-traditional hymns. Some ministers still try to guard young people from rock or hip hop music.  But others work to “melt your face off” with a band that screams about Jesus. 

 

Either way, I think they are right about the risk of secular music.  Music can be a path out of insularity.  Not by itself, of course.  But music creates links to a whole wide world of human activities and ideas.  For former fundies, it can also help with the healing process.  When you’ve had your child-mind warped by scary songs liked “I Wish We’d all Been Ready” or when you’ve spent Sunday mornings swaying to “I’m a Pentecostal”  or you’re dulcet tones were trained on “Saved by the Blood,” it can help to start feeding your brain some alternatives.

 

During the summer I sent out email to a few friends and online ex-Christians saying I was going to put together a playlist for recovering fundies.  Seventy-three song titles came back at me—everything from Gershwin to Nine Inch Nails.    

 

“Now what do I do?”  I asked my daughter.  “They won’t all fit in an article.”

 

“Just list mine,” she said, as if the solution was perfectly obvious. 

 

So here are the top ten picks of a 14 year old (whose musical tastes, as will be apparent, were shaped by her dad more than her peers).    

 

1.       Blasphemous Rumours – Depeche Mode

2.      Losing My Religion – REM

3.      Jesus’ Brother Bob – Arrogant Worms

4.      Stairway to Heaven – Led Zeppelin

5.      One Tin Soldier - Coven

6.      Cathedral – Cosby, Stills & Nash

7.      Heaven’s Here on Earth – Tracy Chapman

8.      Freewill - Rush

9.      Everybody Knows – Leonard Cohen

10.  One of Us – Joan Osborne

 

“Oh, and of course, Imagine.”  It goes without saying. 

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I have been wanting to do an interview with an articulate and perceptive non-theist, and I have found one in Dr. Valerie Tarico, author of The Dark Side: How Evangelical Teachings Corrupt Love and Truth.

What’s the point?

 

Republicans say that Democrats fail to encourage personal responsibility.   A battle in Seattle Washington over plastic bag fees provides a perfect, if minor, example.  After the city council voted to require a twenty cent per bag fee for disposable grocery bags, CAMP, the Central Area Motivation Program joined the chemical industry in opposition.  A fee, they said, would adversely impact poor people, even if they are provided with reusable bags for free.  It’s just too much to ask that poor people remember a bag when they shop, and so they will get charged for them.  That’s the reasoning—from a “Motivation” program, which is now lending credibility to a $1.3 million dollar referendum propaganda campaign by a plastics trade group—all aimed to ensure that those fees don’t happen. 

 

Why all the money?  Well, right now the average Seattle resident uses over 500 disposable bags per year, and a similar fee in Ireland reduced disposable grocery bag use by 90%, with approximately one billion fewer bags consumed per year.  Yes, people replace some of those free grocery bags with purchased garbage bags etc, but the chemical industry’s opposition tells us loud and clear that they expect overall consumption of plastics to go down here too.  Now add the fact that the Center for American Progress heralded the Seattle fee as a model for cities across the country.  The chemical industry thinks it’s worth crushing this thing before it gains momentum. 

 

I’ll confess, it took me months to get used to bringing bags when I shop, but given a little time, even harried old dogs can master new tricks.  My own tricks all aim to get around forgetfulness:

 

1.In the bottom of my purse I keep a plastic grocery bag or two folded into little triangles as demonstrated by a Japanese friend.   (You fold it like a flag, then tuck in the little end.  Very OCD, but it ends up teeny and cool looking.)

2. A thin nylon bag that stuffs inside itself (given to me as a party favor) now clips onto my bicycle;

3. After shopping I leave my collection of canvas bags prominently in the entry way where I get annoyed enough at tripping over them that I put them in the trunk. 

4. Even so, I’ve had to locate the bag recycling bins at my grocery stores for the times I still walk in the door without one. 

My four tricks get me to about 90%, --the magic Irish number.  That would be fifty bags per Valerie per year instead of 500, a little embarrassing still, but a major accomplishment for someone with the memory of a gnat.   

 

It’s time to stop the utter condescension that says harried poor people can’t learn new tricks too and that expecting them to participate in the common good is unreasonable.   One of the fascinating differences between government programs for poor people and faith-based programs is that church communities expect people to give back.  And they do, at a much higher rate.  They volunteer in child care and food banks, and as ushers, and in Vacation Bible Schools.  By contrast, government assistance far too often treats poor or disabled people as if little to nothing can be expected of them, which is just plain degrading. 

 

Reciprocity is hard-wired into our moral instincts and it is written into the expectations of cultures around the planet.  Even chimps expect favors for favors and punish or shun cheaters.  We humans give gifts and we receive gifts back.  We do favors, and we expect favors back.  We provide mutual support.  Sometimes we are happy to say “Don’t pay it back, pay it forward.”  But we want our efforts and generosity to go somewhere instead of dead-ending. The only people who aren’t expected to engage in reciprocity are young children and those who we consider debilitated beyond hope.  And for children,  moving toward independence means participating as household and community members to their growing level of ability.  Give-back expectations go hand in hand with dignity, respect and self-respect. 

 

I’m not advocating faith-based services.  Those who know me know I prefer that people receive services without a dollop of dogma on top—and I think social services often are used unethically as bait by those who think themselves heaven-sent fishers of men.  I also realize there are far more significant examples of responsibility and dignity than the question of whether poor people can be expected to bring bags to the grocery store.  But conservative complaints often contain kernels of truth that progressives should learn to heed.  If we really want to empower and motivate people, we do well to expect things of them –even small things like being resourceful enough to get the groceries home.   

5.75 Change Happens

The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue.   --Antisthenes

My parents, as I’ve said before, were three for six in terms of producing believing children.  All of us accepted Jesus as our personal savior.  We all entered the “age of accountability” as born-again Evangelicals.    But that’s not where we ended up.  For each of the three who lost faith, the path was different:  One came to see the shame of his homosexuality, not as a personal failing but as a failing of our moral ancestors – which then exposed the host of other moral failings in the Bible.  Another was confronted by a small child’s cancer which unearthed a mother lode of buried questions about God’s beneficence and then existence.  The third was simply born able to think his way out of most boxes, and he used this ability to the detriment of his salvation.

Literally thousands of testimonials at websites like ExChristian.net describe journeys out of belief, each unique.  They are written by folks who were born into Christian homes and others who joined during adolescence and even people who moved into and then out of belief during adulthood.  A surprising number of contributors to the site are former pastors or missionaries who now feel a sense of remorse about their recruiting work.  Most never expected to be where they are today.  As one former Christian put it, “Through most of my life I was sure beyond doubt that god was real and that he had bought me as one of his own through the blood of Christ. I could not have conceived that one day I would lose my faith completely and come instead to believe that god is nothing more than a human invention.” (Darrel, ExC, ADGLW, 6/4/2009)  Despite their best efforts and intentions, people change. 

With all of the ways that we resist new ideas, one might think that awakening to complicated realities is hopeless.  But there is another half of the equation.  As much as we tend to be wary of threats against our world view, we are also wired to seek truth.  Being able to determine what’s real is a crucial part of survival:  In order to thrive, we need to understand the contingencies that actually govern our wellbeing, and in order to thrive among other humans, we need means of detecting deception and even self-deception among our fellows.  Accurate knowledge is valuable stuff.  In fact, truth is so highly valued that even self-replicating ideologies extol the virtues of truth--they just assert that they have found it.

How do we change our minds?  Belief revision as a process has long been studied by philosophers.  The philosophical  approach generally assumes humans are rational beings:  Logical propositions come into conflict with each other or with evidence, and people revise their beliefs to restore coherence.  This description works pretty well to explain how we adapt to new information, when we don’t have opposing social or emotional pressures. If I have little invested in my old assumptions, it is pretty easy to correct a faulty belief in the presence of new information.  The problem arises when the community of people around us, or the community of assumptions in our own heads exerts pressure resisting change.   Family systems therapists say that when an identified patient begins getting better, family members often give unconscious “change-back” messages.  The whole system is organized around a certain dynamic or set of roles, and even positive change bumps up against a tough, resilient homeostasis.  

Consider another analogy.  In 1962, Thomas Kuhn wrote a seminal book entitled, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in which he introduced the term “paradigm shift.”  He argued that in science change rarely happens in a steady incremental way.  Rather, a generation of scholars operates out of a (tough, resilient) set of assumptions,  a paradigm, and new information gets assimilated or explained within the paradigm.  But gradually contradictory evidence accumulates until it reaches a tipping point, and what Kuhn called a “paradigm shift” occurs.  Previously ignored patterns in the contradictions abruptly becomes clear, and the community toggles to a better paradigm that will guide inquiry until evidence accumulates and these assumptions, too, get revised.  Kuhn wrote about the hard sciences, but scholars since have come to realize that a similar process can take place in other scholarly communities and even in individuals. 

An informal review of deconversion stories at ExChristian.net, suggests that, for many people, the process of faith revision happens much like Kuhn’s paradigm shift.  Contradictory evidence accumulates slowly over time.  The contradictions can be rational, moral, or emotional.  One Christian starts noticing Bible passages that are at odds with each other.  Another is troubled by a preacher’s justification of war and greed.  A third writhes when a social misfit is tormented and then ostracized by a youth group.  At first, perhaps for years, each finds ways to explain these contradictions within her existing theology.  Then in the presence of some triggering event, a pattern becomes clear, and she realizes she can no longer call herself a believer.  Julia Sweeney’s monologue, Letting Go of God, offers a tender, funny account of her efforts to reconcile faith with experience before she makes the startling discovery that she no longer believes.

Do  former Christians feel  loss or relief when they finally give up on belief and adopt another form of spiritual practice or none at all?  Do they develop psychological symptoms or lose them?  This depends on the nature of belief and social support at the time of deconversion.   After a long quest that led from Catholic Christianity through Eastern and New Age spirituality, Sweeney experienced only mild dismay and sadness when finally faced with her own disbelief.  Others have it worse.  Some former fundamentalists describe anxiety, depression, panic attacks, or even suicidal despair.  They may seek mental health services to help them deal with the loss of friends, family or core parts of their former identity.  At the other end of the spectrum are those who feel like chains have fallen away.  Freed from an exhausting, guilty battle to maintain faith, they happily take up the question posed by poet Mary Oliver, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

Just like the born again Christians who feel transformed by faith, those who feel freed from faith want to share their discovery with those they love. Many former Christians grieve the fact that their spouses, children, or dear friends are still imbedded in what now appears as an enormous cult.  But what are the options?  Attempts at conversation often fail, bringing tears and conflict, even shunning or divorce.  A couple of elderly scientists are not allowed to see their grandchildren because contact might lead the children astray.  A mother laments that a grown daughter won’t let her visit because of the mother’s loss of faith.  A college student  who has been caught reading “spiritual pornography” isn’t allowed to be with his younger siblings unattended.   What is a former believer to do?

One thing we know does not help is arguing.  Research shows that after an argument, both sides tend to be even more entrenched in their old positions.  By lining up our best arguments, we are more likely to convince ourselves that we are right than to convince anyone else.  Perhaps the best advice is to adhere to the formula that has worked well for other hidden and stigmatized minorities:  Be out.  Be yourself.  The more negative the stereotype of nonbelievers, the easier it is to challenge that stereotype simply by being a decent human being.  When it comes to explicit conversations about religion, try to arrange time to sit down and really talk through your changes rather than having the differences of opinion come up in bits and scraps.  Lay out your own thinking, and then let it be.  For those you love, either the paradigm shift will happen or it won’t.  It is not in your power to control anyone but yourself.

5.5:  How Beliefs Resist Change

The Jesuits have a saying sometimes attributed to Francis Xavier, “Give me the child until he is seven, and I will give you the man.”  The Jesuits were a tad optimistic, but ample research on identity formation shows that religious, cultural, and political identity become established by early adulthood and rarely change thereafter except in response to crisis.  In fact, even in the face of crisis, core beliefs about who we are and why we are here, can be remarkably resilient.

This is due in part to the fact that individual beliefs do not exist in isolation.  Rather, each exists as part of a whole network of other beliefs, memories, and attitudes.  The more central or important any given belief, the more it is entangled with the rest of our world view.  And the more it is tied into the tangle, the harder it is to change.  Because religious views are so central, they are particularly resistant to change. 

To make things even more complicated, each religion has what can be called an immune system.   Because traditional Christianity is centered on orthodoxy, meaning right belief, the immune system consists of a set of teachings that guard against other beliefs or loss of belief.  Christianity’s immune system includes the following teachings:

·         Doubt is a sign of weakness or temptation by Satan, the father of lies.

·         False teachers (those whose theology differs) should be cast out.

·         Believers should not be unequally yoked (partnered) with nonbelievers.

·         Nonbelievers have no basis for morality, so their motives are suspect.

·         If  Christians act badly, the flaw is in the persons, not the religion.

Given that core beliefs are naturally resilient and given the power of messages such as these, it will come as no surprise that people go to extreme lengths psychologically to defend religious dogmas. 

Cognitive dissonance theory, helps us to understand what happens when people are confronted with contradictory beliefs.  If, for example, I believe the world is fair (called a Just World Hypothesis), but a kind, generous neighbor gets assaulted and hurt, I am faced with a contradiction.  I can revise my view of the world (it isn’t so fair), the neighbor (she isn’t so good), or the harm done (it wasn’t so bad).  Surprisingly often, people resolve such contradictions in favor of a treasured belief rather than in favor of the evidence—even if this requires blaming victims for their own suffering or coming up with elaborate justifications for catastrophes.  When the catastrophe is the apparent failure of a prophecy or the moral failure of a religious leader, such justifications can be spectacular.

In Doubting Jesus Resurrection, Kris Komarnitsky offers an nice overview of cognitive dissonance concepts followed by a series of jaw dropping stories from history – each showing the extreme contradictions believers can accommodate. Small apocalyptic cults suffer the devastating failure of end-of-the-world prophecies and yet each, faced with crushing disappointment, finds some interpretation that leaves the cult belief system intact. In this light, Komarnitsky examines the pressures faced by Jesus followers when his triumphal entry into Jerusalem was followed by torture and death.

A small close-knit cult fending adjusting to the disappointment of another ordinary sunrise is just an extraordinary example of ordinary – the human tendency toward confirmatory thinking.  All of us are biased to seek information that fits what we already believe.  Confirmatory evidence jumps out at us, and we find it emotionally appealing.  It’s like our minds set up filters – with contradictory evidence stuck in gray tones on the outside and the confirmatory evidence flowing through in bright and shining color. 

Unfortunately, confirmatory thinking causes all kinds of problems.  Corporate leaders fall into group think about the best competitive strategy.  Jurors assume an accused criminal is guilty.  Politicians fabricate reasons for war—sure that the real evidence must be there somewhere.  Confirmation bias is so built into human thinking that the whole scientific endeavor is structured essentially to get around it.  The scientific method has been called, “What we know about how not to fool ourselves.”  And yet, as we know, even scientists end up embarrassing themselves from time to time by getting a little to eager to confirm their pet theories and forgetting how easy it is to fall prey to our own filters. 

Even outside our personal information filters is a set of ring defenses:  our communities.  Who forwards you email?  What magazines do you subscribe to?  What shows do you watch?  Because confirmation is so satisfying and contradiction is so uncomfortable, we surround ourselves with friends and colleagues and coreligionists who think like us.  Often, we join groups that do the filtering for us:  Democrats for America, The Nature Conservancy, Assemblies of God, The National Rifle Association.  These groups provide a steady flow of information confirming and elaborating what we think we know—and ensuring that a lot of contradictory information never makes it anywhere near our brains. They let us short-cut.  Instead of weigh the quality of arguments and evidence – we look at the source and either raise or lower a draw bridge.

In an even more impervious form of this, we form a group identity:  I’m a Catholic. I’m a Republican. I’m an American. I’m a Woman. I’m Hispanic. I’m a Calvinist.  Each of these identities creates what I call a tribal information boundary (TIB).  TIB’s are remarkable efficiency devices, allowing us to weave coherent story lines about the world around us.  But for someone seeking to understand complicated realities, they can be tremendously costly.  People inside the tribe may be most able to help us refine our insider knowledge, but it is people outside the tribe who are most able to show us new vistas.

When we actually allow ourselves to bump up against the limitations of our world view, when we acknowledge we’ve hit a wall and then find a way over or around it—that is when growth is most likely to occur.  In the 1998 comedy, “The Truman Show,” the protagonist, played by Jim Carrey, pushes past an information boundary and realizes he is living in the artificial world of a television set.  From childhood, Truman has accepted the explanations and roles offered him.  But he is confronted with small discrepancies, and one day he ignores his own fears and barriers that his community has erected, and punches through to the outside, and finds that there are familiar people there to welcome him. The movie’s message to us all:  It is possible.

Kris Komarnitsky, Doubting Jesus' Resurrection: What Happened in the Black Box?

(This article is adapted from an interview conducted by Valerie Tarico on Moral Politics Television, Seattle, June 12, 2009.   Guest Reverend Rich Lang has been preaching his way through the book of Revelation this summer. Special thanks to Producer Bill Alford.)

 

Real Christians are going to disappear abruptly someday soon.  The world is going to descend into a bloodbath while someone known as the antichrist attempts to seize control of the planet. That is what some of your neighbors think—and some of your politicians.  Many of them even relish the thought. Is  Revelation, the last book in the Bible, a set of prophecies or a set of hallucinations?  Neither, says Reverend Rich Lang of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard Washington.

 

If the Book of Revelation isn’t a blueprint that tells us what is coming in the End Times, what the heck is it?

 

Like any book in the Bible, Revelation was written from the perspective of faith for the purpose of giving faith.  It was written in the early days of the Jesus movement to a persecuted minority that was fearing worse persecution. 

 

As the Jesus movement started in Jerusalem and Jesus was crucified, and there was this experience of resurrection, at the same time, there was a simultaneous political movement within Judaism of rebellion against the Roman Empire.  It peaked in the 60’s and 70’s.  It culminated finally—horrifically-- in the Roman legions marching into the country, destroying Jerusalem and burning down the temple. These two factors – the young Jesus movement and the brutally crushed rebellion–intersect in the writings we now call Revelation

 

 But Revelation doesn’t talk about Jerusalem being destroyed.  It talks about a beast with many heads and a dragon and the four horsemen. . .

 

That poetic language which sounds so strange to us was actually familiar to ancient readers.  The author was writing a dramatic script in a form of popular media. Today we all recognize different modes or “genres” of writing—the detective novel, the love sonnet, manga. . Each has its own familiar structure and images.  The same was true in the past. 

 

The book of Revelation belongs to a then popular genre of literature called apocalyptic.  The term apocalypse means “unveiling.” There were lots of apocalypses, each a graphic poetic vision of some radically transformed future in which the good guys win.  This genre began around 200 BC and went out of style around 150 AD.  The book of Revelation is also called the Apocalypse of John, and it is one of several explicitly Christian apocalypses that still exist today. In each, metaphoric language was used to communicate something that, experientially, felt too big for words. It was a way of trying to speak the unspeakable—and to inspire endurance and hope. 

 

So what was the author of Revelation unveiling?

Revelation was written about twenty years after the fall of Jerusalem. The author, who we know only as John, had lived during the horrors that accompanied fall of the city.  Imagine:  the Roman Empire is surrounding Jerusalem.  At the same time, civil war is raging within the walls.  People are literally starving to death.  As the siege continues, the Romans capture 20,000 Jews and crucify them on the walls of the city—while the city still is under siege.

 

20,000!  We think of the crucifixion being unique. 

No.  Crucifixions happened all the time. There were thousands and thousands of crucifixions.  The Jews wanted freedom.  To them it was a blasphemy to have the Romans in their land.  Many of them rebelled, and they lost.  Eventually, the city fell, and the people were slaughtered.  Many remaining were expelled from the land.  This is part of the Diaspora—the scattering of the Jews, who became dispersed around the Mediterranean—Asia Minor, Greece, Northern Africa and Europe. 

 

But the author, John, is a Christian. 

Remember, the earliest members of the Jesus movement were Jews, and so early Christians scattered with the rest of the Jewish people. Over time, thanks to this scattering and missionary activity, Christianity began to be adopted more widely by gentiles and at that point it began to grow rapidly throughout the Mediterranean.  John is writing to Pauline (gentile) churches, but they are very rooted in Judaism and the Hebrew scriptures.

 

At the time Revelation is written, about twenty years after the devastating events of The Great Revolt, the young scattered Christian movement is being persecuted.  They are treated like Blacks in the South during the ‘30s and ‘40s.  A Christian carpenter might not be able to get work.  Some are lynched.  John, himself, is writing from exile, so whatever he was preaching was viewed by the Roman Empire as a threat to law and order. 

 

Why was the message so threatening? 

Clearly, part of his message was “Stop participating in the imperial cult.  Stop participating in the patriotic way of life of the Roman Empire which requires paying homage to the gods of the Empire and in particular the emperor as an incarnation of God.”  The Early Christian movement was an alternative to the way of empire. You know, Jesus is called “Lord and Savior”.  If you ask where did that language came from, that language came from Caesar.  Caesar was “Lord and Savior.”  Christians celebrate the birthday of Jesus on December 25, which was when Roman celebrated the birthday of the Unconquered Sun.  The pagans believed that if they didn’t take care of the gods, the gods wouldn’t take care of them.  By forbidding the cult of the gods, the Christians threatened this balance. 

 

One thing confuses me.  Is John writing about events in his past or events in his future?

First of all, he is writing from a lived experience of what Empire can do.  That is the key to understanding his perspective.  He is writing a book that combines familiar political images.  The dragons, for example, are much like our political cartoons.  When you see an eagle and a bear you know it means the United States and the Soviet Union.  For him, he is using images largely out of Hebrew scripture to convey what the Roman Empire is, and what he believes will happen to the early Christian movement.  John’s primary message comes in Chapter 18:  Empire will fall.  Rome cannot last.  This power structure that seems so big and is so crushing of the people will crumble, and God will re-create out of the ruins a new Jerusalem. John continually counsels the movement to hold fast:  Those who endure to the end will be saved.  This is a book of hope: The empire is going to fall.  God is going to make a way where there is no way.

 

But had he—lost it?  With all of the bizarre images, I’ve heard Revelation called  “John on Acid.”

No.  Almost all the imagery in the book of Revelation is rooted in the Hebrew scriptures, and some comes from Greek myths.  In Chapter 12, you have the woman clothed in the sun and Satan falls out of the sky and there is this dragon that chases the woman.  Well, that is the birth of Apollo.  Dominion, who is the emperor at that time, he likens himself to Apollo.  He is the sun god.  So John is taking this known story and writing a counter-myth.  He is saying that Dominion is not so important as he thinks. The birth of the child, Jesus, that’s the real big story. 

 

The images of Jesus himself are rooted in Hebrew stories.  They simply cannot be understood unless you know that they are coming from the book of Daniel and Ezekiel and Zachariah.  The narrative, the story line is rooted in the Exodus story in which God liberates the Jews from Pharaoh’s empire – walks them through the Red Sea and the wilderness and sends them to a promised land.  Revelation is a recapitulation, a re-telling of the same story.  God is the god who frees us from empire, whether Pharaoh or Dominion.   We will come out of this into a land flowing with milk and honey.  One of the big exhortations of the book is:  “Come out of her.”—Come out of Roman Empire (as the Jews came out of Egypt).

 

What you are saying helps me to understand  why people who are immersed in this theology are so fearful of empire – the League of Nations, the Soviet Union, the United Nations—any form of internationalism. Among the “Left Behind” crowd, people who are bridge builders or peacemakers are seen as evil and to be mistrusted.  That is what John was talking about, that was his experience, even if people take it out of context. 

 

From the very beginnings, part of the Christian message was the notion of an end time.  God is going to clean up the world –which is a messy awful a place with a lot of violence and evil.  After all, the central hero of the Christian story is tortured and crucified-- put to death by an empire!  How is God going to clean up the world?  Jesus is going to come back and rule the world and shepherd the nations.

 

The Hebrew understanding of history is that it is going somewhere.  It is linear, not cyclical, which is a break with the agriculture-based earth religions.  Christianity, which is a child of Judaism, picks up the Hebrew storyline:  History is linear.  But –and this is really important-- in the Bible the end is never the end of the physical world.  It is the end of an age.  It’s the end, for example, of the Roman empire, and then what happens is not that everyone is whisked off to heaven but that on earth there is a renewal , a renewal of the earth itself, of culture, of the nations ,peace and justice, everyone has their own vineyard and fig tree.

 

So, where did the notion of everyone being lifted out of their clothes and cars and cockpits come from?

That comes from the 19^th Century.  An Anglo-Irish  theologian called John Darby created a new interpretive lens for the Bible.  It’s called Dispensationalism, because in this system, history is divided into seven “dispensations” or ages within an age. In this system, the Rapture leads to the Millennium when Jesus reigns on Earth for 1000 years but before the Millennium is the reign of the antichrist.  At different historical junctures different bad buys are picked as the antichrist.  In the 1970’s, thanks to Hal Lindsey’s book, The Late Great Planet Earth, it was all about Russia. And the ten nations, the European Union would become part of the Beast.  Today dire warnings about Barack Obama being the antichrist are scattered about the internet. Or Osama Bin Ladin.

 

Believe me—I’ve seen plenty of both—even Chavez and Bono.   But come back, for a moment, to the Rapture itself.  What about that verse in Thessalonians  (1 Thess. 4:16).  There’s the Lord descending with a trumpet, and the dead in Christ rising and then “we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them to meet the Lord in the air.”

That is wonderful graphical mythical language which, when written, had very little to do with the plot of Left Behind.

 

Thessalonians is Paul talking with an early church in southern Europe, and he faces a specific challenge: Christians have died.  We had expected Jesus to come back before that happened. Now what do we do?  Paul thought he was living at the end of an age.  He thought he would see the day that God would come back, clean up the earth and restore Paradise.  But it hasn’t happened within the timeframe he expected, so he offers an explanation that integrates the existing facts—instead of Christ returning before any Christians have died, the dead and the living are united with Jesus together. 

 

Flash forward a little bit.  When you study very early church history, if you study the art of the early church you don’t see a lot of images of the crucifix or scenes of the crucifixion; you see images of paradise.   And there was a proclamation of the early church that had an optimistic view – that where we were headed --on earth as in heaven, was a paradise.  This was the expectation of many in the early Jesus movement. 

 

There was a historical process, and over time this expectation changed for some.  This process, which I don’t have time to go into, was wrapped around when Constantine became emperor and absorbed Christianity as the state religion.  Rather than being a minority faith it became the dominant faith.. Once it became the dominant faith Christianity radically changed because it became about politics and power and control of the nations.

 

You have this book that is all about how evil empires can be because he has this horrifying experience and now all of a sudden Christianity is in power; empire is on the side of Christianity. That’s a little awkward.

Yes.  And, the book of Revelation was dormant for many many years because of this. In our time the book of Revelation has come back with a vengeance because the imagery is made to order for wild interpretation.  You’ve got an entire generation of children being raised in these fundamentalist end-times churches, being told they are the last generation. 

 

You obviously think this is a bad thing.

Well, thankfully these families don’t live as if what they say is true is really true.  They  are still stashing away money to send their kids to college and for their own retirement.  If they really believed you would see a hardening of the faith.  There is a far right segment of Christian in which you do see this hardening—churches focused on “spiritual warfare” building walls rather than bridges, organizing services to celebrate gun rights, praying public prayers for the death of abortion providers or Barack Obama or judges.  This kind of far right hardening comes out of the misuse of apocalyptic literature. Christianity gets translated into a quest for purity and righteousness that will bring these prophesies to fruition. 

 

You said earlier that there were lots of apocalypses.  It was a popular medium. How did this particular book get into the Bible?

 

Well, there was controversy about that.  Many Christians didn’t want it in the Bible, and even Martin Luther questioned the decision of the Catholic councils to include it.  Revelation got into the Bible because the church fathers chose to believe that the same John who knew Jesus in person was the author of this and several other texts.  Their primary criterion was “apostolic authority.”  What we now know – this is just the evolution of our own knowledge—is that the authors who wrote the Gospel of John, the 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd Letters of John, and the Apocalypse of John, were not the same person.  The script is very different.  The same phrases are not used.  One is written by a highly educated Greek author, the other written by a person whose primary language is Semitic. 

 

These books that the Catholic counsels thought were written by John, the companion of Jesus, they were written by two or three people? 

The people who actually knew Jesus, the twelve, none of them left writings for us.  All of these writings are written well after the death of Jesus.  The Church was looking for authority, and so they tried to choose writings that fit a hierarchical form of Christianity and that traced their lineage through the apostles back to Jesus.  The Bible is the book for the church and it was compiled by the Church for the purpose of helping the Church advance faith.  The books didn’t become finalized as scripture till 300 years after Jesus lived and died. 

 

I was taught as a child that the Bible was essentially dictated by God to the authors.  I was never taught about which books were chosen and how.  But I would assume that Catholics believe God gave perfect insight to the councils that made the decisions? 

I would assume so.  And that is a wonderful mask for authority.  When religion becomes a pursuit of power—a system to keep people in control, you are always going to have those games that are being played.  Against religion, you have the message of Jesus, which is a spiritual message – a message of freedom.

 

Part of what this comes down to is:  What is the Bible?  When you are dealing with an end times fundamentalist Christian, you are dealing with a person who believes that the Bible was written by God– God writes it and there is a secret code and if you are in the know you will know the code and the elect will know the code.  The Bible itself becomes a magical book, a secret script.  If you just know how to read the script, you’ll know where the world is going. And so people begin to live this script as if they live in the end times.

 

We’re so into that secret knowledge thing, aren’t we? You see it many places: Gnosticism, the Knights Templar, Freemasonry, the Mormon temple, childhood clubs, Skull and Bones . . . .

Yes, and I think you see it in all religions.   I think that part of the religious impulse easily gets perverted into a quest for secret knowledge because it makes me more than you.  I am special, I am elect, I am closer to God, I know the truth.  The reality is that we are all schmucks trying to muddle through as best we can.

 

How Viral Ideas Hook Us

Did you know that Temple Baptist Church was built on land that sold for 57 cents, the amount saved by a little girl that had been turned away from their Sunday school?   Did you hear about the guy who died in his sleep, killed by his own farts?  Can you believe?! Elvis Presley said: "The only thing a nigger can do for me is buy my records and shine my shoes." And guess what --Scholars at the Smithsonian have uncovered writings of Nostradamus that relate to Barack Obama!

The above statements are false.  But that hasn’t kept them from circulating the internet for years.  Each of them is heart of a viral email, which means each has some quality that makes people forward it, over and over and over.  The first is a kind of message commonly known as “glurge,” too-sweet-to-be-true stories that nevertheless give many of us a warm feeling or even chills.  The second makes us laugh and piques our sense of curiosity.  The third plays with our contradictory fascination with celebrities, which includes a desire to tear them down.  The fourth appeals to our yearning for magic.  These stories all are drawn from the urban legends fact-finding site, Snopes.com.  What is the common theme?  Emotional arousal. 

Comparing religion to chain mail seems crass, but the kinship is real.  And as Francis Bacon said, “The eye of the understanding is like the eye of the sense; for as you may see great objects through small crannies or holes, so you may see great axioms of nature through small and contemptible instances.”

Viral email has a variety of reproductive strategies.  Like computer viruses, many chain mail messages contain explicit “copy-me commands.”  Some promise us good luck if we forward the message to ten people before the day is up – or a week of happiness, or even prosperity.  Some threatens us with bad luck if we don’t.  Some tries to shame us:  “If you care about your friends, you’ll send this information about cervical cancer/visa fraud/brown recluse spiders . . .”   But most viral mails simply contain something that makes us want to pass them on.  They may make us laugh or feel validated and righteous.  Many delight us.  A few tap our sense of magic or mystery or transcendence.

The term “viral marketing” has itself gone viral recently, popularized by books like Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, or Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath. Corporations have discovered that their best sales staff are satisfied customers, and they’ve been experimenting:  Can we figure out the formula for starting a fad?  Can we seed the virus with a few hired hands who create buzz?  The Heath brothers offer communications professionals a simple formula that they call the “Six Principles for SUCCESs:”  SIMPLE UNEXPECTED CONCRETE CREDIBLE EMOTIONAL STORIES.[i]  Look at the formula.  Now think back about what I said regarding the boundaries of supernaturalism and the born again experience.  The fit is remarkably tight. 

In the field of medicine, epidemiologists study patterns of contagion.  They might track, for example, how an influenza virus spread across one region and how it jumped from country to country in the bodies of specific carriers.  Based on the way infections fan out, they may even be able to identify the “epicenter” of a disease.  Some of the tools of epidemiology are now being applied to study the spread of viral ideas. But whereas diseases spread passively, meaning people rarely try to infect each other, viral ideas, also known as “memes” spread by harnessing the human desire to share what we know and to learn from each other. Memes get transmitted through established social networks.  They spread horizontally within a generation, and vertically from generation to generation.  That is why specific religions are concentrated in one part of the world or another and children tend to have the same religion as their parents.

For developmental reasons, children are particularly susceptible to simply accepting the ideas of their parents and community.  If a parent says stoves burn you, cars can squish you, and bathing keeps you from getting itchy, kids tend to do best if they simply trust what their parents say.  Nature has designed children to be “credulous.”  This allows them to learn from the mistakes of their elders.  It makes them more efficient in acquiring valuable information and adapting to cultural norms. It is also why evangelical parents are encouraged to convert their children.   Research on identity development shows that if children can be contained within an enveloping religious community through their transition into young adulthood, few will ever leave.  Bring up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it. (Proverbs 22:6)

A successful religion needs to have the qualities of a successful virus.  In a changing environment, this means it must have the ability to mutate and adapt. In the past, religions spread largely by edict and conquest.  This is how Christianity spread throughout the Roman Empire and into the Americas.  Today, though, religion is perceived as an individual choice and religions must gain share by attracting adherents.  This is why, today, the religions that are gaining mindshare are those that have good marketing, high birthrates, and what economists call “appealing club goods”. In the current environment, Christianity has been able to produce offshoots that need no edict or conquest.

Significantly, the religions that are growing right now are ones with strong copy-me commands.  Evangelical Christianity is centered on what Christians call the Great Commission:  “Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature, baptizing them in the name of the Father the Son and the Holy Ghost.”  In addition, just as the Roman church latched onto the strategy of competitive breeding (keep women home, sanctify a high birth rate), so Evangelicals have begun to explicitly add this form of copy-me command to the mix. By contrast, modernist Christianity is more often centered on what Christians call the Great Commandment:  “Love the Lord your god with all your heart, soul and mind, and . . . love your neighbor as yourself.”  In a straight up competition, the copy-me command wins out, and in fact, evangelicals are gaining mindshare, while modernists are losing it. 

One of the fastest changing aspects of our world is the growth of information.  As knowledge grows, some varieties Christianity accept new scientific or historical findings and reinterpret their sacred texts and traditions in light of our best understanding of the world around us. Tangentially, this is the approach taken by Tibetan Buddhism. The 14^th Dalai Lama  has said: 

"If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change. In my view, science and Buddhism share a search for the truth and for understanding reality. By learning from science about aspects of reality where its understanding may be more advanced, I believe that Buddhism enriches its own worldview.” 

This kind of adaptation is common for forms of Christianity that, like Buddhism, are more centered in praxis (practice) than belief.  For those that are centered in belief, adapting to new knowledge is more difficult, and the survival strategy more often is a sort of fundamentalist retrenchment.  Karen Armstrong’s book, The Battle for God, describes this retrenchment in the Abrahamic religions. 

The need to adapt may seem at odds with the recent success of fundamentalism, but in actual fact, fundamentalism is an adaptation to a changing world.  Rather than revising dogmas, fundamentalists develop stronger defenses against external threats to a traditional homeostasis.  An extreme example of this can be seen in the case of the Amish or Hassidic Jews:  the belief system sustains itself relatively unchanged by engaging people to re-create an ancestral environment in which the belief system emerged.

But most theological fundamentalists have a more hybrid approach.  They protect their children from external influence by home schooling or parochial schools, but don’t mind accessing creationist materials from interactive websites.  They provide in-house social services that include pop psychology.  They promote hierarchy and sexism but are willing to have women and children as spokespersons for these views. They play up the risks of inquiry and doubt and yet use scientific findings to make their arguments convincing. Fundamentalist populations resist ideological change, but they have learned to exploit popular culture, best business practices, new technologies, and even scholarship itself to maintain the survival of their beliefs. 

Since a virus and host fit together like a lock and key, understanding viral ideas helps us to understand the human mind, and vice versa. Retro-viruses and influenza mutate rapidly, which makes it hard to develop immunizations against them.  On the spectrum of religions, Christianity shows a similar flexibility, regularly spinning off new sects, denominations, and even non-denominational renegades.  Christianity has adapted to a broad range of human minds and cultures, a strategy that has resulted in success beyond the wildest visions of the patriarchs.

Learn More:

“Memetic Lexicon” http://www.lucifer.com/virus/memlex.html#MEME

Richard Brodie. - Virus of the Mind

Chip Heath & Dan Heath, Made to Stick:Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (New York: Random House, 2007), 253-257.

The Born-Again Experience

“. . . I prayed harder and just then I felt like everything I was saying was being sucked into a vacuum.  When I stood up, I felt like thin air; I had to brace myself.  I felt this energy, it was a kind of an ecstasy.” --Cathy  “Something began to flow in me—a kind of energy . . . Then came the strange sensation that water was not only running down my cheeks, but surging through my body as well, cleansing and cooling as it went.” --Colson   “It was a beautiful feeling of well-being, warmth and loving . . . I went home and all night long these warm feelings kept coming up in my body.” --Jean    “I felt something real warm overwhelming me.  It was in just a moment, yet it was like an eternity. . . . a joy, such a joy hit me with such a tremendous force that I jumped . . . and ran.” --Helen.  (from Conway & Siegelman, Snapping, pp. 24, 32, 12, 31)

For many Christians, being born again is unlike anything they have ever known.  A sense of personal conviction, yielding or release followed by indescribable peace and joy – this is the stuff of spiritual transformation.  Once experienced it is unforgettable, and many people can recall small details years later.  In the aftermath of such a moment, an alcoholic may stop drinking or a criminal fugitive may hand himself in to the authorities.  A housewife may sail through her tasks for weeks, flooded by a sense of God’s love flowing through her to her children.  A normally introverted programmer may begin inviting his co-workers to church.  

This experience, more than any other, creates a sense of certainty about Christian belief and so makes belief impervious to rational argumentation.  A believer knows what he or she has experienced and seen.  Even converts who don’t feel radically transformed after praying “the sinner’s prayer” may feel overwhelmed by God’s presence during subsequent prayer or worship.  Evangelical and Pentecostal forms of Christianity that are gaining ground around the world particularly emphasize emotional peaks such as faith healing or speaking in tongues.  Worshipers may get caught up in exuberant singing, shouting, dancing and tears of joy. 

What most Christians don’t know is that these experiences are not unique to Christianity.  In fact, the quotations that you just read come from two born again Christians, a Moonie, and an encounter group participant.  Their words are similar, because the born again experience doesn’t require a specific set of beliefs.  It requires a specific social/emotional process, and the dogmas or explanations are secondary. 

Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman have written an accessible overview of what they call sudden personality change, or “snapping.”  The first edition of their book, Snapping focused on small countercultural cults and self-help groups that sprang up in the 1960’s and 1970’s such as Hare Krishna, Transcendental Meditation, EST, Mind Dynamics, Unification Church, Scientology, and others.  When asked about whether Evangelical Christianity might fit the pattern, Conway and Siegelman were reluctant to say yes.  Today they admit, “In America today, increasingly, that line [between a cult and a legitimate religion] cannot be categorically drawn. . . . Our research raised serious questions concerning the techniques used to bring about conversion in many evangelical groups.”(37).

Conversion is a process that begins with social influence.  As sociologists like to say, our sense of reality is socially constructed.  We will come back to this later.  Suffice for now to say that missionary work typically begins with simple offers of friendship or conversations about shared interests.  As a prospective converts are drawn in, a group may envelope them in warmth, good will, thoughtful conversations and playful activities, always with gentle pressure toward the group reality.

In revival meetings or retreats, semi-hypnotic processes draw a potential convert closer to the toggle point.  These include including repetition of words, repetition of rhythms, evocative music, and Barnum statements (messages that seem personal but apply to almost everyone-- like horoscopes).  Because of the positive energy created by the group, potential converts become unwitting participants in the influence process, actively seeking to make the group’s ideas fit with their own life history and knowledge.  Factors that can strengthen the effect include sleep deprivation or isolation from a person’s normal social environment.  An example would be a late night campfire gathering with an inspirational story-teller and altar call at Child Evangelism’s “Camp Good News.”

These powerful social experiences culminate in conversion, a peak experience in which the new converts experience a flood of relief.  Until that moment they have been consciously or unconsciously at odds with the group center of gravity.  Now, they may feel that their darkest secrets are known and forgiven.   They may experience the kind of joy or transcendence normally reserved for mystics.  And they are likely to be bathed in love and approval from the surrounding group, which mirrors their experience of God.

The otherworldly mental state that I refer to as the domain of mystics is known in clinical situations as a "transcendence hallucination,” but this term fails to reflect how normal and profound the experience can be as a part of human spirituality.  The transcendence hallucination is an acute sense of connection with a reality that lies beyond and behind this natural plane.  It typically lasts for just a few seconds or minutes but may leave profound impression that lasts a lifetime.  For Christians it may be interpreted as an encounter with a supernatural person -- Jesus, or an angel.  (A seeker of the paranormal might be convinced of an encounter with aliens or spirits.)  More often, a person gets a disembodied sense of connection accompanied by intense feelings of joy, wonder, peacefulness or alternately terror, depending on the context. 

Transcendence hallucination can be triggered by neurological events like a seizure, stroke, or migraine aura; or by a drug such as psilocybin, but it also can be triggered by over or under-stimulation of the brain.  Some mystics from the past have described or even drawn these events with such impressive detail that a diagnostic hypothesis is possible.  Hildegard of Bingen, a medieval mystic, wrote of the intense pain accompanying her visions and created scores of drawings that show the visual field distorted in keeping with a migraine aura. 

In modern times, author Karen Armstrong describes the seizures that she first thought to be triggered spiritually. In discussing an altered state known as Kundalini awakening, one migraine sufferer commented, “I usually don't follow any of the mystic/esoteric stuff, but I must say it is kind of strange to see all my symptoms lined up like that outside of a western/medical context."  Let me emphasize, though, that these altered states don’t depend on some kind of neurological damage or pathology.  They can be unforgettable, peak experiences for normal people, long sought and hard won by those who care about the spiritual dimension of life.  Sensory deprivation, fasting, meditation, rhythmic drumming, or crowd dynamics have all been used systematically to elicit altered states in normal people. 

Since we humans are meaning-makers to the core, such a powerful experience demands an explanation.  But for most of human history, naturalistic explanations simply were unavailable.  “Lacking understanding and with no reliable method for investigating the phenomenon, people through the ages have grappled imaginatively with their experiences, looking to some higher order and ascribing these abrupt changes in awareness to a source outside the body.  They have been explained as messages from beyond or gifts of revelation and enlightenment, personal communications that could only be delivered by a universal being of infinite dimensions, a cosmic force that comprehends all space, time and earthly matter.”(Conway & Seligman, 30) Needless to say, some supernatural hypotheses are more compatible with what we know about ourselves and the world around us than others.  

In an evangelical conversion context like a revival meeting or missionary work, religious interpretations of the snapping experience are provided both before and after it occurs. These explanations become the foundation stones on which whole castles of beliefs later will be constructed.  The authorities who triggered the otherworldly experience are trusted implicitly, which gives them the power to now transform the convert’s world view in accordance with their own theology.  Conversion activities can be harmful because all too often authorities use this power to promote a kind of tribalism that is built around exclusive truth claims and Iron Age moral priorities.  The unforgettable born again experience gets used to justify beliefs that may be factually or morally bankrupt.

The conversion process as I have described it sounds sinister, as if manipulative groups and hypnotic leaders deliberately ply their trade to suck in the unsuspecting and take over their minds.  I don’t believe this is usually the case.  Rather, natural selection is at play.  Over millennia of human history, religious leaders have hit on social/emotional techniques that work to win converts, just as individual believers have hit on spiritual practices they find satisfying and belief systems that fit how we process information.  Techniques that don’t trigger powerful spiritual experiences simply die out.  Those that do get used, refined, and handed down.

With few exceptions the evangelists, from mega-church ministers to “friendship missionaries,” are unaware of the powerful psychological tools they wield.  They are persuasive in part because they genuinely believe they are doing good.  After all, they have their own born again experiences to convince them that they are promoting the Real Thing.  Consider, for example, the Apostle Paul, whose Damascus Road event (possibly a temporal lobe seizure) transformed his moral priorities and sustained a lifetime of missionary devotion. What decent person wouldn't want to share the secret to healing and happiness? The challenge is trying to figure out exactly what that secret is.  As I say to my daughters, it is not enough to be well intentioned—even joyfully, generously so.  We also have to be right.

Essentials:
Flo Conway & Jim Siegelman, Snapping: America's Epidemic of Personality Change

Iona Miller, “Fear and Loathing in the Temporal Lobes” http://neurotheology.50megs.com/whats_new_9.html (excellent bibliography)

Sharon Begley. “Your Brain on Religion” Newsweek May 7, 2001. http://www.cognitiveliberty.org/neuro/neuronewswk.htm

On a warm afternoon in June, two men have appointments with a psychiatrist.  The first has been dragged to the office by his wife, much to his irritation.  He is a biologist who suffers from schizophrenia, and the wife insists that his meds are not working.  “No,” says the biologist, “I’m actually fine.  It’s just that because of what I’m working on right now the CIA has been bugging my calls and reading my email.”   Despite his wife’s skepticism and his understanding of his own illness, he insists calmly that he is sure, and he lines up evidence to support his claim.   The other man has come on his own because he is feeling exhausted and desperate.  He shows the psychiatrist his hands, which are raw to the point of bleeding.  No matter how many times he washes them (up to a hundred in a day) or what he uses (soap, alcohol, bleach or scouring pads) he never feels confident that they are clean. 

In both of these cases, after brain biochemistry is rebalanced, the patient’s sense of certainty falls back in line with the evidence.  The first man becomes less sure about the CIA thing and gradually loses interest in the idea.  The second man begins feeling confident that his hands are clean after a normal round of soap and water, and the cracks begin healing. 

How do we know what is real?  How do we know what we know?  We don’t, entirely.  Research on psychiatric disorders and brain injuries shows that humans have a feeling or sense of knowing that can get activated by reason and evidence but can get activated in other ways as well.  Conversely, when certain brain malfunctions occur, it may be impossible to experience a sense of knowing no matter how much evidence piles up.  V. S. Ramachandran describes a brain injured patient who sees his mother and says, “This looks like my mother in every way, but she is an imposter.”  The connection between his visual cortex and his limbic system has been severed, and even though he sees his mother perfectly well, he has no sense of rightness or knowing so he offers the only explanation he can find (Capgras Delusion). 

From malfunctions like these, we gain an understanding of normal brain function and how it shapes our day to day experience, including the experience of religion.  Neurologist Robert Burton explains it this way: “Despite how certainty feels, it is neither a conscious choice nor even a thought process.  Certainty and similar states of knowing what we know arise out of involuntary brain mechanisms that, like love or anger, function independently of reason.”(OBC, xi) This “knowing what we know” mechanism is good enough for getting around in the world, but not perfect.  For the most part, it lets us explain, predict, and influence people or objects or events, and we use that knowledge to advantage.  But as the above scenarios show, our ability to tell what is real also can get thrown off. 

Burton says that the feeling of knowing (rightness, correctness, certainty, conviction) should be thought of as one of our primary emotions, like anger, pleasure, or fear.  Like these other feelings, it can be triggered by a seizure or a drug or direct electrical stimulation of the brain.  Research after the Korean War (e.g. R Lifton) suggested that the feeling of knowing or not knowing also can be produced by what are called brainwashing techniques:  repetition, sleep deprivation, and social/emotional manipulation.  Once triggered for any reason, the feeling that something is right or real can be incredibly powerful--so powerful that when it goes head to head with logic or evidence the feeling wins.  Our brains make up reasons to justify our feeling of knowing/ rather than following logic to its logical conclusion. 

For many reasons, religious beliefs are usually undergirded by a strong feeling of knowing.  Set aside for the moment the question of whether those beliefs tap some underlying realities.  Conversion experiences can be intense, hypnotic, and transformative.  Worship practices, music and religious architecture have been optimized over time to evoke right brain sensations of transcendence and euphoria.  Social insularity protects a community consensus. Repetition of ideas reinforces a sense of conviction or certainty. Forms of Christianity that emphasize right belief have built in safeguards against contrary evidence, doubt, and the assertions of other religions. Many a freethinker has sparred a smart, educated fundamentalist into a corner only to have the believer utter some form of “I just know.” 

Does this mean that rational argumentation about religion is useless?  The answer may be disappointing.  Religious belief is not bound to regular standards of evidence and logic.  It is not about logic but about something more intuitive and primal.  Arguments with believers start from a false premise—that the believer is bound by the rules of debate rather than being bound by the belief itself.  The freethinker assumes that the believer is free to concede; but this is rarely true.  At best the bits of logic or evidence put forth in an argument go into the hopper with a whole host of other factors.  And yet each of us who is a former believer (we number in the millions) reached some point in our lives when we simply couldn’t sustain our old certainties.  Our sense of knowing either eroded over time or abruptly disappeared.  So sometimes those hoppers do fill up.

Given what I’ve said about knowing, how can anybody claim to know anything? 

We can’t, with certainty.  Those of us who are not religious could do with a little more humility on this point.  We all see “through a glass darkly” and there is a realm in which all any of us can do is to make our own best guesses about what is real and important.  This doesn’t imply that all ideas are created equal, or that our traditional understanding of “knowledge” is useless.  As I said before, our sense of knowing allows us to navigate this world pretty well—to detect regularities, anticipate events and make things happen.  In the concrete domain of everyday life, acting on what we think we know works pretty well for us.  Nonetheless, it is a healthy mistrust for our sense of knowing that has allowed scientists to detect, predict, and produce desired outcomes with ever greater precision.

 The scientific method has been called “institutionalized doubt” because it forces us to question our assumptions.  Scientists stake their hopes not on a specific set of answers but on a specific way of asking questions.  Core to this process is “falsification” – narrowing down what might be true by ruling out what can’t be true.  And to date, that approach has had enormous pay-offs.  It is what has made the difference between the nature of human life in the Middle Ages and the 21^st Century.  But knowledge in science is provisional; at any given point in time, the sum of scientific knowledge is really just a progress report.  

When we overstate our ability to know, we play into the fundamentalist fallacy that certainty is possible.  Burton calls this “the all-knowing rational mind myth.”  As scientists learn more about how our brains work, certitude is coming to be seen as a vice rather than a virtue.  Certainty is a confession of ignorance about our ability to be passionately mistaken.   Humans will always argue passionately about things that we do not know and cannot know, but with a little more self-knowledge and humility we may get to the point that those arguments are less often lethal. 

Essentials:  Robert A. Burton, On Being Certain
                    V. S. Ramachandran  (on Ted.com), A Journey to the Center of Your Mind

More: Robert Jay Lifton. (1989) Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of "Brainwashing" in China  University of North Carolina Press.

Ronald Burks 2002.  "Cognitive Impairment in Thought Reform Environments"  http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~rb267689/  

George Tiller--physician, abortion provider, Lutheran, husband, father, grandfather--was shot and killed yesterday in the lobby of his church.  He was killed after years of harassment and threats, bombing of his clinic, even being shot in both arms.  And yet he continued doing what he did because he believed it was right.

 

 They say that the walls of Dr. Tiller’s clinic are lined with letters from grateful families.  I can understand that gratitude.  Whenever tirades against abortion catch my attention, I look at our elder daughter with wonder and gratitude.  Without abortion she wouldn’t exist, and if I knew where to find the warm Canadian-trained Singaporean physician who gave us the gift of Brynn, I would send her one of those letters, too.

 

Five years into our marriage, my husband and I kept a promise we had made to ourselves during our first months together.  He quit his job and I closed my psychology practice, and we put on our backpacks for a year of Lonely Planet travel.  We swam in travertine pools in Mexico, crewed on a sail boat in Costa Rica, and hiked in the dark to watch the sun rise over a crater.  We rode standing-room-only buses with chickens at our elbows, and “luxury” buses where violent lurid Hollywood movies made the kilometers seem eternal, and narrow gauge trains with lace-edged linens in the hard sleepers.  We stayed sometimes in sweet guest houses, but more often in bare cement rooms with spiders or mice, and once slept on the dirt floor of a kind Cancun worker who picked up two foreign hitchhikers in his decrepit Ford truck.

 

Without my work to focus on, my biological alarm clock went off, and scarcely a month into the trip I announced that it was time for us to get pregnant.  Brian was a bit surprised, but (in contrast to me) he’d always known he wanted to be a parent.  Besides which, he’s an adaptable person and he recognized a window of opportunity, so he set to work wrapping his mind around the idea.  We were in southern Costa Rica at the time, about to crew our way through the Panama Canal to a new continent and, I figured, a new phase of life. 

 

Then we got news that my father had died in a climbing accident.  We flew back to the States for a month, where I comforted myself by putting our garden back in order – pruning and weeding, only mildly annoyed by the neighborhood cats who thought I was loosening the soil so it would be easier for them to bury their business.  It was while we were at home that I got pregnant.  Somehow in my mind, the new life that was growing inside me made it seem like Dad wasn’t completely gone.  His death, my pregnancy, the tenacious weeds eddied together in a soothing reminder of the flow of life. 

 

We hit the road again, this time flying east to Jakarta, and after more three months of bumpy bus rides where fake snuff films fused with all-day-long "morning sickness," I was so ready to have that baby.  (If I barf right next to the video screen, will those little boys in the front of the bus be spared from a lifetime association between sex and violence?) 

 

We landed in Singapore at the trailing edge of first trimester and got a gorgeous ultrasound picture of the fetus we had nicknamed “Gecko.”  To celebrate, we splurged at a little French bistro with crusty bread and gorgonzola pasta and a wee bit of wine, with the picture on the table between us.   And then, the next day, we got test results showing that I had acute toxoplasmosis. Probably not a big deal, right?  We trucked ourselves over to the university library to find out.  Turns out acute toxoplasmosis means possible blindness and brain lesions.

 

It seemed like a nightmare.  We both wanted a baby.  But it also felt irresponsible to gamble.  Not only would we would be taking a chance on the quality of life of our first child, but potentially committing any future children to a life of caretaking that they had no option to choose or reject.  We would be risking our own ability to give to the community around us – and possibly creating a situation in which our family needed to suck more out of society than we could put back into it.  As painful as the decision felt, our moral values were clear, and we scheduled to terminate the pregnancy.   

 

The loss felt enormous, in part because that pregnancy was so tied up with my father’s death.   I was still letting him go—dreaming that I was in Switzerland rather than Costa Rica when he fell, kneeling and scooping the bright red snow while a helicopter flew his body away. Or talking to him at his desk and telling I wouldn’t see him again.  Or reliving my mother’s middle-of-the night screams when, not knowing what to do with the blood-soaked clothes that the Swiss government had mistakenly shipped to Arizona, she put them in the washing machine and a piece of Dad’s skull fell out of the wet heap.    

 

(George Tiller’s wife screamed, when she saw him there in the church lobby; I wonder what kind of dreams his children and grandchildren will be having.) 

 

But it wasn’t just about Dad.  To this day, I marvel at how quickly my mind and emotions oriented to the idea that we were going to have a child.  Even after I got pregnant again a few months later, I remember crying—I wanted Gecko.  It wasn’t until Brynn was born beautiful and whole, and I looked into her ancient newborn blue eyes and fell in love—it wasn’t until then that the loss healed completely.  How could I grieve a potential child know that this tangible, silky sweet-smelling child in front of me couldn’t exist if that one did.

 

Instead of a child who spends a (short or long) lifetime struggling to be and do the things we cherish most, we have a daughter who is loving and generous and playful and strong and way smarter and more disciplined than her mama will ever be.  That is the gift that a doctor like George Tiller gave to me and my husband and our younger daughter and our community—to everyone Brynn will touch.

 

In the case of my daughter, the trade-off is very clear:  A bundle of risks, or the thriving life-lover who writes poetry about her chickens and races after a soccer ball as if, in that moment, it were the only thing that existed.  There never was an option on both; Brynn was conceived before Gecko would have come to term.   In less obvious ways, many many children exist in this world only because of abortion.  We rarely talk of them – the chosen children who wouldn’t be here if their mothers hadn’t first chosen abortion when the timing or conditions were wrong.  Most of the women I know who have had abortions now have chosen children, kids who are flourishing because they were born into flourishing families, born to parents who waited to stack the odds in their favor.   Would my little friends Annie, Tommy and Hannah exist if their mothers had been forced to carry those early unintended pregnancies?   Their moms say no.  Thanks to contraception and abortion, these children do exist.  We seldom talk about this part of choosing life. 

 

Who do you know who wouldn’t be here if a brave doctor hadn’t made a moral commitment like the one that cost George Tiller his life?  What do those fundamentalists think keeps someone like  Dr. George Tiller working behind bullet proof glass after being shot in both arms?  The gifts of life given by an abortion provider are hard to measure, but I think that Dr. Tiller knew.   I hope they publish those letters in a book. 

Why God has a human mind.

Jesus was a human, fathered by a god and born to a virgin. He died for three days and was resurrected.  His death was a sacrifice, an offering or propitiation.  It brings favor for humans. He lives now in a realm where other supernatural beings interact with each other and sometimes intervene in human affairs.

Gradually the mainstream of the American public is becoming aware that none of these elements is unique to Christianity.  Symbologists or scholars who specialize in understanding ancient symbols, tell us that the orthodox Jesus story, as it appears in our gospels, follows a specific sacred or mythic template that existed in the Ancient Near East long before Christianity or even Judaism.  In part this is due to the flow of history.  Religions emerge out of ancestor religions.  Though the characters and details merge and morph, elements get carried through that allow us to track the lineage.   The Gilgamesh and Noah flood-hero stories are similar because the Hebrew story descended from the Sumerian story .  The same can be said of the Sumerian “Descent of Inana” and the Christian resurrection story.  Even religions that exist side by side borrow elements from each other -- a process called syncretism.

But another reason for similarities among religious stories is that all of them are carried by human minds.  To quote cognitive scientist, Pascal Boyer, “Evolution by natural selection gave us a particular kind of mind so that only particular kinds of religious notions can be acquired. (p. 4) . . . All human beings can easily acquire a certain range of religious notions and communicate them to others” (Religion Explained, p. 3)  Our supernatural notions are shaped by the built-in structures that let us acquire, sort, and access information efficiently, especially information about other people. 

You may have heard the old adage:  If dogs had a god, God would be a dog; if horses had a god, God would be a horse . . . .  Humans are more inventive than dogs and horses, and not all human gods or magical beings have human bodies.  They do, however, have human psyches—minds with quirks and limitations that are peculiar to our species.  Philosopher John Locke believed that the human mind was a tabula rasa, a blank slate.  We now know this not to be the case.  (Leda, Principle 4).   Because we need to learn so much so fast, certain assumptions are actually built in.  This allows us to generalize from a few bits of data to a big fund of knowledge.  It lets us know more than we have actually experienced or been told.

Let me give you an example that will illustrate the point.  If I tell you that my "guarg," Annie, just made a baby by laying an egg and sitting on it, your brain says:  Guargs (not just Valerie’s guarg) are non-human animals that reproduce by laying eggs.  You have different categories in your brain for animal reproductive systems, and putting one guarg in the egg laying category puts them all there.  To oversimplify, we have a built in filing system.  Most of the labels actually start out blank, but some of them don’t.   The preprinted labels appear to include:  human, non-human animal, plant, man-made object, natural object.

A large percentage of our mental architecture is specialized “domain specific” structures for processing information about other humans.  We homo sapiens sapiens are social information specialists; that is our specialized niche in this world.  Our survival and wellbeing depend mostly on smarts rather than teeth, claws, stealth or an innate sense of direction, and most of the information we need to survive and flourish comes from other humans.  Our greatest threats also come from our own species--people who seek to out-compete, exploit or kill us.   For this reason, our brains are optimized to process information from and about other humans. 

How does all of this affect religion? 

Here is a concrete example.  Our brains have a specialized facial recognition module.  Studies of infants and brain injuries have taught us much of what is known about the inborn structures of our minds, and we know about the facial recognition module from both.  Shortly after birth, babies are uniquely attracted to two round circles with a slash beneath them.  Later on, brain injury or developmental anomalies can produce a disorder in which people cannot recognize faces, including their own(!)—even though other kinds of visual processing are perfectly intact.  This is called prosopagnosia.   Most of the time, though, our facial recognition module overfunctions rather than underfunctioning.  In ambiguous situations—looking at clouds, rocks, lumps of clay, or ink blots--we have a tendency to see faces.  Our brains automatically activate the facial recognition machinery even though it doesn’t really apply.  Through history people have seen gods, demons, ghosts looking at them.  Christians, whose interpretation of hazy shapes  is further shaped by belief in specific supernatural persons see  Jesus, the Virgin Mary, an angel, a demon, or even Satan. 

This illustrates a broader point that cannot be overemphasized in understanding the psychology of religion:  when faced with unknowns and ambiguities, our brains activate inborn information modules even when they don’t really apply.  We take unfamiliar situations and even random data and perceive patterns that are inherent, not in the external world, but in our own minds.  Furthermore, our pattern recognition systems err on the side of being overactive rather than underactive.  This is called apophenia.  It is alarming to look at a face and not see it immediately as a face; it is quite common to see a face in an array of leaves or shadows.

When we look at the world around us, we instinctively see more than faces.  We also “see” kindred conscious beings.  Humans (and some intelligent animals) have developed a capacity called “theory of mind.”  We not only have minds, we imagine that others have them, and we think about what they might be thinking.  To guess what someone else might do (or to influence what they might do) it is tremendously helpful to think about what they want and what they intend.  Theory of mind is so important in navigating our way through society that we can think about it several steps removed:  I can imagine what Brian is thinking about how Grace intends to respond to Janet’s preferences.    Furthermore, because our brains process information about minds differently than information about bodies, we can imagine human minds inside of all kinds of bodies (think stuffed animals, pet rocks or cartoon characters) or without any body at all, (think evil spirits, poltergeists or God). 

Because our theory of mind is so rich, we tend to over-attribute events to conscious beings.  Scientists call this hyperactive agency detection.  What does that mean?  It means that when good things happen somebody gets credit and when bad things happen we look for someone to blame.  We expect important events to be done by, for and to persons, and are averse to the idea that stuff just happens.  We also tend to over-assume conscious intent, that if something consequential happened, someone did it on purpose. 

This set of default assumptions explains why the ancients thought that volcanoes and plagues must be the actions of gods.  Even in modern times, we are not immune from this kind of attribution:  Hurricane Katrina happened because God was angry about abortions and gays; the Asian tsunami happened because he was disgusted with nude Australian sunbathers.  If gods are tweaking natural events, then we want to curry their favor.  Around the world, people make their special requests known to gods or spirits by talking to them and giving them gifts. Athletes huddle in prayer before a game, just in case those random bounces aren’t random.   After a good day at the casino, a thank-you tip may go into the offering basket.  Or it may be that the offering goes into the basket beforehand. 

All of this builds on the idea that gods or other supernatural beings are akin to us psychologically.  They have emotions and preferences.  They take action in response to things they like and dislike.  They experience righteous indignation and crave retribution.  They like some people better than others.  They respond to our loyalty by being loyal to us.  They can be placated or cajoled.  They like praise, affirmation, and gratitude.  They track favors and good-will in a kind of tit-for-tat reciprocity.  

Abstract theologies are a fairly recent invention in the history of human religion, and they tend not to govern religious behavior.  Even people who describe their god as omniscient or who insist that everything is predestined actually behave as if they need to communicate their desires and can influence future events by doing so.  The god of Christian theology and the god that ordinary Christians worship are two different creatures. 

If the structure of our minds predisposes us to certain kinds of religious beliefs, it also precludes others.    Nowhere in the world is there a supernatural being who exists only on alternate Tuesdays, or who sees everything but forgets it all in ten minutes, or who rewards us for ignoring and disobeying him.  Nowhere is there a god who knows the future, but only the next hour, or a god who starves people to death whenever he is pleased with them, or who is exactly like an ordinary person in every way.  Some ideas are simply not interesting to us.  They may be counter-intuitive in ways that make them forgettable instead of “sticky.” Maybe they don’t make good stories or maybe we don’t have good places to file them in our catalogue of memories.

According to Pascal Boyer, a good religious concept must strike a balance between being interesting and expected.  It must activate an existing ontological category (let’s say “river”), add some counterintuitive tag (when dark and bubbling river turns to blood and heals people), and retain the default assumptions of the category except those that are otherwise specified (river is wet, flows, is longer than it is wide, has a bottom, etc.)   We start with a familiar class of being or object then tweak it to pique our interest but leave intact our other basic assumptions about that kind of object or being.  If the supernatural thing we are discussing is a conscious being, it also needs to have a basically human mind.  Only under these conditions will it stick and get passed from one person to another.    

Christian beliefs are highly successful at getting retained and transmitted.  They fit our information processing structures and yet are counterintuitive in intriguing ways.  They capitalize on our tendency to attribute events to human-like causal agents who have minds much like our own. They allow us to take machinery that is designed for processing social information and apply it to the problems of understanding inanimate objects and natural phenomena.  They leverage our tendency to see patterns in ambiguous or random events.   Consequently they are intuitive and broadly applicable and are easily remembered.   

But if our brains allow for a wide range of religious concepts, how come so many people believe exactly the same thing?  And what makes them so sure that those ideas are not only interesting—they are true.  As we shall see in future articles Christian beliefs don’t just fit our mental categories.  They also leverage powerful emotions and social relationships so as to become the core reality for those who believe. 

Essentials:  Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained.  
            Andy Thomson, Why We Believe in Gods; American Atheists, 2009.

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Why Cognitive Science is Essential to Understanding Christianity.

My father died in a climbing accident when he was 59 and I was in my mid thirties.  In one of our last deep conversations before his 1000 meter misstep, he expressed his abiding hope that I would “get right with God.”  Dad was the son of Italian immigrants, all Catholics, who got converted by door-to-door Pentecostals some years after their arrival in Chicago.  His mother lived out her life in the Assemblies of God denomination that had recruited them all, while Dad settled into a closely allied form of Evangelical fundamentalism without the speaking-in-tongues bit.  As far as I know, he never questioned his belief that the Bible was the literally perfect word of God and that Jesus died for his sins.  And yet of his six children three of us, by Evangelical standards, are now slated for eternal torture. We are on the wrong side of a battle being waged on a spiritual plane, a battle in which those who are not on the side of God are agents of evil.  If Dad were alive, our lack of belief would grieve him.

Religious belief is one of the most powerful forces in our world.  Believers think that it has the power to save us all.  Increasingly, doubters fear that the opposite may be true:  a tribal mindset, unaccountable to ordinary standards of reason and evidence but armed with state of the art weapons may hasten our extinction.  In the United States, religious affiliation is the best predictor of political party alliance.  Almost half of Americans insist that humans were created in their present form sometime within the last 10,000 years because the Bible says so.  In the Middle East, Sunnis and Shia split over theological differences that seem trivial to the rest of us but that in their minds create tribal boundaries worthy of lethal conflict. 

Why is belief so wide-spread and powerful?  The traditional Christian answer is:  because it’s true, and people who haven’t hardened their hearts against God recognize this when God’s plan of salvation is presented to them. 

But recent explosion of knowledge in cognitive science offers a new way to look at this question, not from a moral or theological standpoint but from a practical standpoint.  What is the mental machinery that lets us form beliefs? What does evidence and reason have to do with it? How is it that six devoted Christian kids can turn into three devoted Christian adults and three agnostics?

The more we learn about the hardware and operating systems of the human brain--the more we understand about human information processing--the more we glean bits of insight into the religious mind. 

This article is the first in a series of six.  Each takes a look some part of cognitive or social psychology, how it relates to our tendency toward religious belief.  The articles will focus on the following questions:

·         How does the structure of human information processing pre-dispose us to religious thinking?  Given how our minds work, what kinds of religious beliefs are possible and what kinds are we immune to?

·         How do we know what we know?  What gives us a feeling of certainty?  What is the relation between reason, evidence, and our sense of knowing?

·         How do conversion experiences work?  What makes religious conversion transformative?

·         How does our social group influence or even control our religious beliefs?  How do beliefs get transmitted from one person to another?

·         Why do missionaries target children?  How does religious identity develop in childhood?  How is belief in childhood different from belief acquired as an adult?

·         What makes beliefs resistant to change?  What causes people to lose belief?  When are people open to reexamining religious assumptions?

Before looking at these questions, it is helpful to understand why belief is so important in Christianity.  For traditional Christians— belief is the heart of the Christian religion.  In the final analysis, believing that Jesus Christ died as a “propitiation” for your sins matters enormously to God. It is the toggle that sends people to heaven or hell.  No matter how kind and loving your life may be, no matter that you strive to love your neighbor as yourself, no matter what great things you may accomplish in the service of humanity or the world at large – if you believe wrong you are doomed.  Only if you believe correctly do virtue and service become relevant. The creedal councils, canonization of scripture, inquisitions, purges and centuries of conversion activities can be understood only in this context. 

This focus on belief is not characteristic of all religions.  In the Ancient Near East, the birthplace of Christianity, pagan religions placed little emphasis on belief.  The existence of a supernatural world was broadly assumed because there seemed to be little other way to explain the good and bad things that happen to people or natural events like storms, earthquakes, illness, birth and death.  But the point of religion wasn’t belief; it was to take care of the gods so that they would take care of you and your community.  The word “cult” (Latin cultus, literally care) is related to the word “cultivation.”  We talk now about cultivating ground so that it will bear fruit.  Nonprofits talk about “cultivating donors.”  That was what the gods cared about, and so it was the heart of religious practice. 

From the beginning, Christianity was different.  Jesus worshipers cared tremendously about right belief, also known as orthodoxy.  Bart Ehrman’s book, Lost Christianities, offers a fascinating window into the struggles that went on during the first and second centuries as groups with different beliefs about Jesus criticized and competed with each other, and one of them won out.  Some of groups (e.g. Ebionites) believed that Jesus was a fully human Jewish messiah and that Jesus worshipers must follow the law.  Others (e.g. Marcionites) believed that Jesus was a being from the spirit world who only took on human likeness.  Still others (Gnostics) believed that the human Jesus was inhabited by a divine “Eon” during the years of his ministry—revealing to his followers secret knowledge that would let them escape this corrupt mortal plane.  Others, now known as proto-orthodox or Roman, had ideas about Jesus that lead to the views of Christians today.  (“Roman Catholic” means Roman universal.)  What all of these groups agreed on was that it was tremendously important to believe the right thing about who Jesus was and what Christianity should be. 

This emphasis on right belief was and is unique to monotheism.  It existed in a rudimentary form in Judaism, but even today Judaism is more concerned with living right than believing right.  Christianity’s exclusive truth claims and emphasis on right belief helped it to out-compete other religions in the Roman Empire.  Polytheists often are quite agreeable to adding another god to their pantheon.  Christians could persuade pagans to add the Jesus-god and then could wean them off of the others.  Today, in India, for example, Evangelical missionaries are much more likely to target Hindus than Sikhs or Muslims who would have to immediately abandon their primary religion in order to embrace the idea of Jesus as a god. 

Eastern religions don’t share Christianity’s concern with belief.  The emphasis is more on practice or “praxis” –spiritual living, self-renunciation, insight or enlightenment-- and among ordinary people, a sort of cult or caretaking of the gods like that practiced by ancient pagans.  Right belief isn’t what lets you move up through cycles of reincarnation or attain nirvana.  Nor is it what gets you the favor of gods. 

Just as biological organisms have many different adaptive or reproductive strategies, so religions compete for human mind-share in different ways. An emphasis on propagating belief (ie. evangelism) and purity of belief (ie. orthodoxy) is only one of those. 

In the late 19^th and early 20^th Century, a movement called modernism emerged within Christianity.  Modernist theologians began reexamining traditional orthodox beliefs in light of what we now know about linguistics, archaeology, psychiatry, biology, and human history.  In this light, traditional Christian certainties looked less certain, and many modernist Christians are more like members of Eastern Religions in that their primary concern is with spiritual practice rather than belief.  But a backlash emerged in response to modernism.  People who proudly called themselves “fundamentalists” insisted that no-one was a real Christian who didn’t hold the traditional beliefs.  Evangelicals inherited the fundamentalist torch, and even some of the more inquiring denominations have reverted back toward emphasis on right belief.

This is the mindset that dominates Christianity in the public square.  It is the mindset that sends Christian missionaries out into the world seeking converts in impoverished corners of the planet.  It is the mindset that prints Bibles to be distributed in Iraq and has organized to establish control of the American military hierarchy, seeking to create an “army of Christian soldiers.”  To understand American Christianity specifically or monotheism more broadly, it is necessary to understand the psychology of belief. 

Essential Reading:  Bart Ehrman, Lost Christianities.