Even atheists must recognise the importance of a sociological study of religion
An apparent lack of interest in how religion propagates in society is odd coming from people who so deplore its prevalence
Philip Ball guardian.co.uk, Friday 10 February 2012 19.22 GMT
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The research reported last week showing that american Christians adjust their concept of Jesus to match their own sociopolitical persuasion will surprise nobody. Liberals regard Christ primarily as someone who promoted fellowship and caring, say psychologist Lee Ross of Stanford University in California and his colleagues, while conservatives see him as a firm moralist. In other words, he's like me, only more so.
Yes, it's pointing out the blindingly obvious. Yet the work offers a timely reminder of how religious thinking operates that has so far been resolutely resisted by most noisy atheists.
Many atheists prefer to regard religion as a virus that jumps from one hapless individual to another, or a misdirection of evolutionary instincts, curable only with a strong shot of reason. These epidemiological and Darwinian models have an elegant simplicity that contamination with broader social and cultural factors would spoil. Yet the result is akin to imagining that, to solve Africa's Aids crisis, there is no point in trying to understand African societies.
Thus arch-atheist Sam Harris swatted away my suggestion that we might approach religious belief as a social construct with the contemptuous comment that I was saying something "either trivially true or obscurantist". I find it equally peculiar that chemist Harry Kroto should insist that "I am not interested in why religion continues" while so devoutly wishing that it would not.
This apparent lack of interest in how religion actually manifests and propagates in society is odd coming from people who so deplore its prevalence. But I think it may not be so hard to explain.
For one thing, regarding religion as a social phenomenon would force us to see it as something real, like governments or book groups, and not just a self-propagating delusion. It is so much safer and easier to ridicule a literal belief in miracles, virgin births and other supernatural agencies than to consider religion as (among other things) one of the ways that societies have long chosen to organise their structures of authority and status, for better or worse.
It also means that one might feel compelled to abandon the heroic goal of dislodging God from his status as creator in favour of asking such questions as whether particular socioeconomic conditions tend to promote intolerant fundamentalism over liberal pluralism. It turns a Manichean conflict between truth and ignorance into a mundane question of why some people are kind or beastly towards others.
Yet to suggest that we can relax about some forms of religious belief – that they need offer no obstacle to an acceptance of scientific inquiry and discovery, and will not demand the stoning of infidels – is already, for some new atheists, to have conceded defeat.
The worst of this is that to reject an anthropological approach to religion is, in the end, unscientific. To decide to be uninterested in questions of how and why societies have religion, of why it has the many complexions that it does and how these compete, is a matter of personal taste. But to insist that these are pointless questions is to deny that this important aspect of human behaviour warrants scientific study.
The Stanford research reinforces the fact that a single holy book can provide the basis both for a permissive, inquiring and pro-scientific outlook (think tea and biscuits with Richard Coles) or for apocalyptic, bigoted ignorance (think Tea Party with Sarah Palin). Might we then, as good scientists, suspect that the real ills of religion originate not in the book itself, but elsewhere?
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