I remember belting out the words to this song at my Evangelical college along with hundreds of other students. “You and I were made to worship.” But is it true? At the time, it sure felt like it was.
Since then, I’ve heard over and over that studies show belonging to a religion—pretty much any religion—leads to increased happiness. So, I decided to look into it. Does religion really make people happier?
My searches of DuckDuckGo, Google, and what I could access of Google Scholar indicated that there is at least a correlation between religion and being happy (Graham, C., & Crown, S., 2014) (Marshall, 2019). My next question was why, and furthermore, whether positive aspects of religion could be replicated in the life of an apostate. That is what this post will be about.
For obvious reasons, it’s hard to find articles that comment on this topic that aren’t seriously biased either for or against religion. I was able, however, to find a two-part series from BBC Future that was written by a Christian but provided what seemed to me to be a balanced perspective. I don’t like when one author constantly quotes another author, and leaves me wondering why I couldn’t have just read the original source. So I’m putting the original source here for your reading pleasure. 🙂 I’m going to write the rest of this post with the assumption that you were able to read it, much as I often do with embedded YouTube videos.
Part one: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190418-how-and-why-did-religion-evolve
Part two: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190529-do-humans-have-a-religion-instinct
From what I found in the articles, it makes sense that religion would make us happy. Humans and religion co-evolved and we rely on it to meet many of our needs. The needs I found in the articles were:
- Connection to the past/to the deceased
- Self-transcendence
- Full-access agent(s)
- Connection to our emotions
- Awe/wonder
- Ritual
- Community
- Shared meals
- Shared experience
- Social norms
- Restoring social equilibrium
I feel that some other needs that are often met by religion (at least in my experience) are:
- Control over the uncontrollable
- External memory
- Feeling set apart
- Answers to big questions
Connection to the Past and to the Deceased
The church’s one Foundation
Is Jesus Christ her Lord;
She is his new creation
By water and the Word:
From heav’n he came and sought her
To be his holy bride;
With his own blood he bought her,
And for her life he died.…
Yet she on earth hath union
(Trinity Hymnal, 1961, Hymn #270, emphasis mine)
With the God the Three in One,
And mystic sweet communion
With those whose rest is won:
O happy ones and holy!
Lord, give us grace that we,
Like them, the meek and lowly,
On high may dwell with thee.
In the church I grew up in, we sang both of the above songs regularly. Ambrosino starts the first BBC Future article (which of course you read) by describing the sacrament of communion. In both instances, participants feel an intense connection to their shared past and to the deceased. It was the commonly-held belief in all my circles that God was outside of time, so by being at one with God and the supernatural realm, we were even connected to our shared future.
Time and mortality are scary things. To feel that we are in an alliance with a god who can control them makes them less scary. But, there are also some serious drawbacks at least to the Christian approach to them, most obviously the fact that most of the deceased are usually believed to be damned. This would have been a serious issue for me if I had still been a Christian when my grandparents died. Perhaps, instead of coming up with a belief system that really, really works sometimes and fails abysmally most of the time, another solution would be something a bit less satisfying but much more consistent. For me, I think about my DNA. I think about all the ancestors who passed their DNA down to me, both human and pre-human. Parts of their essence are literally encoded in every cell in my body. Then, their lived experiences shaped the world that I live in, and that I shape as well. My paternal grandmother used to talk about “the interconnectedness of all life.” For good or for ill, there is no life that will ever pass away without leaving a permanent mark on this world. So why would we want “the things of earth [to] grow strangely dim”? I honestly don’t know if there’s a supernatural or an afterlife, but I do know that I have this life, so I prefer to focus on that.
Self-Transcendence
Religious experiences, he tells me in his Pennsylvania-area office, satisfy two basic functions of the brain: self-maintenance (“How do we survive as individuals and as a species?”) and self-transcendence (“How do we continue to evolve and change ourselves as people?”).
(Ambrosino, May 29, 2019)
Ambrosino goes on to describe changes that happen in the brain during religious ritual activities. To me, there are certainly more effective ways of finding self-transcendence. Just connecting to a cause larger than ourselves can bring about personal evolution and change. For example, exposing the dark sides of Christianity is one thing that makes me feel like I’m growing in my ability to make a positive contribution to the world. But it doesn’t have to be that. Someone could achieve self-transcendence by learning to play a musical instrument. It’s a very personal thing and while religion may work for some people, it is by no means the only way.
Full-Access Agent(s)
Closely related to the idea of agency is what Dennett refers to as a cards-up phenomenon. Agency detection carries with it certain risks: do you know about that bad thing I did? How can I be sure you know, and how can I be sure about what you think about me because of it? These are complex questions and human beings aren’t good at managing all the options. What’s needed for learning how to navigate these muddy waters is for everyone to be taught the rules of the game by placing all of our cards face up on the table. The teacher, then, is something of a full-access agent: they see everything and can instruct us accordingly.
The original full-access agents, says Dennett, were our dead ancestors. But eventually, the seeds of this idea became more formalised in various theologies.
“Humans are not very good at behaving just because you punish them for not behaving,” says evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, “otherwise we would all be driving well under 70 on the motorway.” The real problem isn’t how bad the punishment is, but how risky it is to be caught. If the risk is low, he says, we’re prepared for the punishment.
This would have been a major issue in prehistory. As hunter-gatherer groups grow, they need to be able enforce a punishment mechanism – but the greater the size of the group, the less chance there is of being found out.
Enter full-access agents: “We don’t see what you do on Saturday night, but there is somebody who does, so beware,” as Dunbar puts it.
(Ambrosino, May 29, 2019)
This ties in with the divine command theory, which I feel was described well in this video:
Basically, people live more harmoniously in communities when we have some basic rules that we all recognize. One way to enforce these rules is to get people to believe that God is watching. But what if we cut God out of it? Once a culture has rules, which every single culture must, people seem to be pretty good at policing ourselves. And if someone truly, in their heart of hearts, believes that something is wrong but secretly does it anyway because they decided that God wasn’t really watching, wouldn’t that person have figured out a way to rationalize their behavior even if they had believed in an omniscient god? An alternative approach to ethics and morality is too big a topic for this entry, but I definitely would argue that there are better systems that don’t involve any full-access agents.
Connections to our emotions
Ambrosino suggests that religion helps us connect to our emotions, especially awe and wonder, and that a main way it does that is through ritual. First, here is the clip of the waterfall displays that he references:
In about 2012 or 2013, I remember our Sunday morning Bible study at my Evangelical Presbyterian church watched a DVD called Collision: Christopher Hitchens vs Douglas Wilson. The purpose was to deepen our faith, and I leapt at the prospect. In the short term, it worked. In the long term, Hitchens planted seeds that had the sleeper effect of transforming me into the apostate I am today. This is a clip on awe that stuck with me:
Ritual does connect many people with a sense of awe. On May 11, 2021, Seth Andrews put up a whole video on this subject in which he interviewed Sasha Sagan about her book, For Small Creatures Such As We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in our Unlikely World (available here: https://youtu.be/Vb6OQAWlsI8 ). I watched the first half of it a while ago and it felt appropriate to briefly mention it, but I didn’t even finish the video because I personally hate ritual. Due to severe hereditary OCD that everybody was in denial about, there was so much ritual in my family growing up that entire conversations were memorized and repeated verbatim. Every single year for well over a decade, my sister has gotten the same meal from the same take-out restaurant on her birthday. In its rigidity, it was like the agoraphobic, ultra-isolationist household’s dystopian version of this:
I actually have a trauma reaction to every single holiday because they were the most rigid, and I was always the one who didn’t want to follow the ritual, and my family reacted as one might expect in a cult when one person doesn’t toe the line. I managed to enjoy certain religious traditions for longer, but at this point, I’m done with all of it for now. Maybe someday there will be a ritual that I’ll like, but in the meantime, bowing out of a lot of rituals is a nice side-effect of apostasy.
Awe and wonder, though? I still enjoy that, and I agree with Hitchens that contemplating the natural universe creates more awe in me than contemplating the supernatural ever could.
Community
One ritual Dunbar says was involved in shamanistic religions – the earliest types of doctrine-less religion – was trance dance, which Dunbar says was about restoring social equilibrium.
“It works specifically as social bonding,” he says. “They do it as things are getting tough, until they annoy each other enough, and then they say, ‘Let’s do a trance dance.’”
In effect, he says, the same pharmacological effect of grooming is achieved: many individuals feel powerfully bonded together, at the same time.
(Ambrosino, May 29, 2019)
I may never have participated in a trance dance, but I certainly participated in a lot of church services that produced nothing short of communal dissociation. This indeed bonded me with the other participants, but I question whether the blurring of personal boundaries is desirable. I feel like if we created a new type of social gathering from the ground up, we could probably do a better job than we could by following the “that’s the way we’ve always done it” model.
I will absolutely admit that finding community has been the most challenging part of my leaving religion, and I’ve heard other apostates say the same thing. A lot of us left church and imagined that there would be other groups we could join, only to be sorely disappointed. First there are very few groups, and second, the groups that do exist are way less tightly-knit than church. Imagine trying to meet friends in a knitting group. People go to knitting group as a side hobby and maybe get to know some acquaintances while they’re there. People go to church for community and their deepest relationships. Right now, there really is no substitute, at least that I’ve found, for church with regard to social connections. What I will say, though, is this: religion evolved in large part in order to make social groups possible, so it makes sense that we have not yet evolved many alternative ways to form tight social groups. It doesn’t mean that we never will, or that we shouldn’t try. That’s a lot of why I’ve been writing this blog. When there is no current substitute for something that religion provides, it’s time for us to come together and make a substitute. I can’t outline exactly how we would achieve everything that religion does because if I did, it would defeat its own purpose. By definition, communities have to be created socially, not dreamed up by one individual. My imagining a secular community would make me like the bossy kid who nobody wanted to play house with because they told everybody what to do and say. But if several of us got together and decided to form a community with intention, maybe we could do an even better job than church!
Control over the Uncontrollable
Now we’re getting into things that I used to find in religion that weren’t even explicitly in the articles. One thing that I used to find was a sense of agency over things that I couldn’t control. I found this through prayer. If I could pray for a situation, I felt a bit less helpless than I do now. This comes with several problems, though, and I’ll name two of them. First, it gave me a sense of control when I didn’t really have control. This made me feel responsible to fix problems that I couldn’t do anything about. Becoming an apostate has helped me to accept when I can’t do anything, and thus am not responsible for solving a problem. The second problem with prayer as a tool to feel agency over situations is that sometimes, people definitely could do something about a problem, but praying about it makes them feel like they’ve done enough. For example, people who pray for an end to gun violence are less likely to take any other action to stop it. There are certainly Christians who pray about situations and then feel more motivated to fix them, such as Christians who pray for the homeless, then bring meals to the homeless. But all too often, prayer becomes an excuse for inaction.
It’s ironic to me that the serenity prayer is a prayer. I would re-write it as, “I commit to doing my best to accept the things I cannot change, to change the things I can, and to learn to tell the difference.” It may not sound quite as poetic, but it places the whole thing in the “can-change” category.
External Memory
This is a hard one. Due to my C-PTSD, I have a terrible memory. People always respond with, “Just wait until you get to be my age!” but this shows that they don’t understand my condition. I’ve also been either alone for most of my life, or with totally different groups of people. My life has been choppy and if I can’t remember it and if there’s no one else who’s been with me all the time, I feel like I’ve lost most of it. Having a god who I believed had recorded every detail of my life brought me great comfort, and it really hurt to lose it. I don’t know that I’ll ever have anything quite as good, but writing kind of has the same effect.
Feeling “Set Apart”
But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.
1 Peter 2:9 NIV, qtd in https://biblia.com/bible/niv2011/1Pe2.9
Feeling “set apart” is nice. It bonds groups and probably helped us evolve by helping us convince ourselves that we and people with similar DNA were exceptional. But I think we can all agree that it has serious drawbacks and really isn’t an actual need. Finding identity as sentient life rather than as adherents to a belief system will help us to outgrow the need to be chosen people.
Answers to Big Questions
I used to think I had the answers to everything. Now, I know that I absolutely do not. Nobody does. Everything I just wrote could have been wrong. YHWH could be the one true god. Or, some indigenous tribe on an island somewhere could have The Truth. Maybe there is no Truth. All I know is that I’m learning to embrace uncertainty about the nature of the universe. It’s not easy, but it’s all I can do.
Conclusion
So, were we really “made to worship”?
Wikipedia makes this claim, but doesn’t give very specific information regarding the citation (which page in which volume of The Story of Civilization?):
Will Durant, in his The Story of Civilization, explained that certain pygmy tribes found in Africa were observed to have no identifiable cults or rites. There were no totems, no deities, and no spirits. Their dead were buried without special ceremonies or accompanying items and received no further attention. They even appeared to lack simple superstitions, according to travelers’ reports.
(Wikipedia contributors, 2021)
Maybe there actually were ancient tribes in Africa that were functional atheists, and if so, they must have figured out long ago how to meet their needs without religion. But I think it’s safe to say that most societies throughout history have been religious. I don’t think that a Creator designed evolution with the express purpose of receiving our worship, but most people feel good when worshipping some higher power(s), because by doing so we meet our needs and give ourselves an evolutionary advantage. To anyone reading who is happily religious, I rejoice for you. To anyone reading who is unhappily religious or not religious at all, I feel strongly that we can meet our needs in other ways. We weren’t exactly made to worship; instead, we evolved to adapt.
References
Ambrosino, B. (2019, April 18). How and why did religion evolve? BBC. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190418-how-and-why-did-religion-evolve
Ambrosino, B. (2019, May 29). Do humans have a ‘religion instinct’? BBC. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190529-do-humans-have-a-religion-instinct
CrashCourse. (2016, October 31). Divine Command Theory: Crash Course Philosophy #33 [YouTube video]. Retrieved August 21, 2021 from https://youtu.be/wRHBwxC8b8I
Graham, C., & Crown, S. (2014). Religion and wellbeing around the world: Social purpose, social time, or social insurance? International Journal of Wellbeing, 4(1), 1–27. Retrieved August 20, 2021 from https://www.brookings.edu/research/religion-and-wellbeing-around-the-world-social-purpose-social-time-or-social-insurance/ and https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/religion-wellbeing-social-insurance-graham.pdf
guru006. (2006, December 24). Fiddler on the roof – Tradition ( with subtitles ) [YouTube video]. Retrieved on August 21, 2021 from https://youtu.be/gRdfX7ut8gw
Hitchens, C., Wilson, D., Doane, D., Hagopian, D. G., DeMar, G., Karchmer, J., Level4 (Firm), … Gorilla Poet (Firm). (2009). Collision: Christopher Hitchens vs Douglas Wilson. United States: Level 4.
Jane Goodall Institute USA. (2011, January 6). Waterfall Displays [YouTube video]. Retrieved August 20, 2021 from https://youtu.be/jjQCZClpaaY
Johnny Carrasquillo. (2016, April 4). Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus Lyrics YouTube [YouTube video]. Retrieved on August 21, 2021 from https://youtu.be/j5qc0EcNgqw
Komanapalli, J. [Jess]. (n.d.). School Themes: You have been set apart and chosen for his purpose [Pinterest post]. Pinterest. Retrieved August 20, 2021, from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/408490628697481389/
LiveWorshipSongs. (2010, December 7). Chris Tomlin – Made to Worship LIVE w/subtitles and lyrics [YouTube video]. Retrieved August 20, 2021 from https://youtu.be/u5FmNqozk6k
Marshall, J. Are religious people happier, healthier? Our new global study explores this question. (2019, January 31). Retrieved August 21, 2021, from Pewresearch.org website: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/01/31/are-religious-people-happier-healthier-our-new-global-study-explores-this-question/
Religion Debate. (2012, October 6). If you want to be awe inspired.. (Christopher Hitchens) [YouTube video]. Retrieved August 20, 2021 from https://youtu.be/AzW0dpWlTdg
Trinity Hymnal. (1961). Great Comission Publications. ISBN: B000KUCKRG. Also available from https://opc.org/hymnal.html For my comments on this source, see my other blog post at https://apostateturtle.com/?p=80
Wikipedia contributors. (2021, July 28). History of atheism. Retrieved August 21, 2021, from Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia website: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=History_of_atheism&oldid=1035921356
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