By Ryan McKay


January 14 


Ryan McKay is a senior lecturer in psychology at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Do we need religion in order to be moral? George Washington cautioned against “indulg[ing] the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion,” and today more than half of Americans believe morality is impossible without a belief in God.

The idea that religion is important for morality is not just widespread, but deeply ingrained. Psychologist Will Gervais has shown that even people who explicitly deny believing in God harbour the intuition that acts such as serial murder and incest are more representative of atheists than of religious people. Of course, prominent atheistic commentators resent any suggestion that the religious have some special claim on moral behavior.

In Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion he writes: “Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong.” In a month when gunmen shouted “Allahu akbar” (God is greatest) while murdering 132 school children in Pakistan, it may be easy to sympathise with this viewpoint. There is no shortage of spirited rhetoric on this emotive topic, but what does the scientific evidence reveal? Does religion promote moral behaviour? In a new paper published in Psychological Bulletin, Harvey Whitehouse and I explore this issue.

What is religion and what is morality?

The first problem is how to define “religion” and “morality.” This is no mere matter of academic hair splitting. Take religion: What does it actually mean to be religious? Does it mean that one believes in agents or forces that transcend ordinary physical laws? For example, gods, ancestors, or karma? Or that one identifies and affiliates with a certain community or tradition – by being Roman Catholic, Sunni Muslim or Buddhist, for example? Or that one attends certain services and partakes in certain ritualistic behaviors? Each of these possible definitions captures phenomena that would not ordinarily be classed as religious – a belief in Santa Claus say, or national or sporting affiliations, or rituals in military settings. What is more, each of these tendencies may be underpinned by different psychological processes, with differential effects on relevant behaviors.

The situation is, if anything, worse where morality is concerned. According to the currently influential Moral Foundations Theory, there is no single morality but rather a set of mutually incompatible and incommensurable moralities, each underpinned by a psychological system specialized for solving a particular adaptive problem. For example, the moral foundation of “fairness” generates ideas about justice and rights, and is thought to have evolved to solve the problem of how best to secure the benefits of two-way partnerships. Depending on your cultural background and political leanings, your personal moral norms may be constructed on a particular subset of these moral foundations. So while some may consider appropriate sexual behavior to be of primary moral importance (the “sanctity” foundation), for others, morality may be more a matter of charitable concern for those who are less well off (the “care” foundation).

Assuming we could all agree on what it means to be religious and what it means to be moral, how might we go about investigating the relationship between them? One common approach simply involves asking people about their beliefs and behaviors. For example, surveys indicate that those who score higher on indices of religiosity – those who report praying regularly, for example – reliably report giving more money to charity.

So does this mean religion promotes charitable behaviors? Not necessarily. There is evidence that religious individuals are more motivated than nonreligious individuals to preserve a moral reputation, so it could be that the religious are more likely to report charitable behaviors simply because they care more about making a charitable impression.

Another problem is that a correlation between religiosity and charity (self-reported or otherwise) does not merit the conclusion that religiosity promotes charitable behavior. It could be that people with community-minded dispositions are more likely to gravitate toward religion (and more inclined to donate to charity), simply by virtue of those social inclinations.

Religious primers

To circumvent these problems, a number of studies have employed “priming” methods in a bid to establish causal relationships between religious concepts and morally relevant behaviors. In these studies, which began with the seminal work of psychologists Azim Shariff and Ara Norenzayan, religion is not just measured but is “experimentally assigned” to some of the participants.

For example, in a recent study, Mark Aveyard had 88 Muslim students listen to an audio recording of a busy city street, and asked them to count the number of vehicle horns they heard. In one condition, the Islamic call to prayer could be heard on the recording. The students then took an unsupervised mathematics test on which cheating was possible. Aveyard found that participants exposed to the call to prayer cheated substantially less. This finding is consistent with the results of other priming studies, which have also found that religious priming enhances cooperation and generosity towards others.

Muslims pray at a mosque in eastern China at the beginning of the holy month of Ramadan. (AFP/Getty Images)
So, religion may promote a love for thy neighbor (or at least neighborly behavior), but how big is the neighborhood? The positive picture revealed above is complicated by the results of other studies, which have shown that religious priming also elicits a range of aggressive and prejudicial behaviours. For example, Brad Bushman and colleagues found that participants who read a description of violent retribution commanded by God were more aggressive in a subsequent task than participants who read the same description but with the passage about God’s sanction omitted. And Megan Johnson and colleagues have found that participants primed subliminally with Christian concepts display increased covert racial prejudice and negative affect toward African Americans. Another recent study by Joanna Blogowska and colleagues revealed that self-reported religiosity predicted the helping of a needy member of the in-group but also physical aggression towards a member of a moral out-group (a gay person).

So, is religion a force for good? Ultimately there may be no easily characterizable relationship between religion and morality. Under the pluralistic approach we advocate decomposing both religion and morality into smaller units, such that the relationship between them fans out into a matrix of separate relationships between more basic elements. So some components of “religion” may promote some components of “morality” just as others suppress the same, or different, components.

In short, in discussing whether religion is a force for good we must be very clear what we mean by religion and what we mean by good. This rather nuanced conclusion may disappoint the polemicists, but – at least until this research field matures – a measure of restraint before we jump to conclusions about whether religion is inherently good or bad may not be such a bad thing.

Published: March 13

I appreciated Ruth Marcus’s March 12 op-ed column, “Going to X-tremes,” on how degraded our culture has become, especially in the debased sex of modern adolescence. Unfortunately, she doesn’t offer the solution, which is God and religion.

Ms. Marcus wrote that “bygone” rules such as not allowing members of the opposite sex in students’ dorm room are relics. Respectfully, they are not. I’m a freshman at Brigham Young University, and these relics are our rules, which I enjoy. These rules protect the dignity of each sex and also respect the powerful attraction between the genders. This attraction is perfectly acceptable and wholesome, except when it is misused. Intimacy is sacred, and I believe that it should be reserved until marriage.

Does Ms. Marcus also consider this belief a relic? It is one of the most freeing truths I know. I respect her for recognizing the degradation of society, especially in sexual mores, but a secular culture provides no framework for sexual chastity. If physical immorality is not a sin, why should our physical passions be bridled?

Our culture is degraded, but sex wasn’t the start; it is only a symptom.

Adam Stevenson, Purcellville

By Michelle Boorstein and Peyton M. Craighill

Most Catholics worldwide disagree with church teachings on divorce, abortion and contraception and are split on whether women and married men should become priests, according to a large new poll released Sunday and commissioned by the U.S. Spanish-language network Univision. On the topic of gay marriage, two-thirds of Catholics polled agree with church leaders.

Overall, however, the poll of more than 12,000 Catholics in 12 countries reveals a church dramatically divided: Between the developing world in Africa and Asia, which hews closely to doctrine on these issues, and Western countries in Europe, North America and parts of Latin America, which strongly support practices that the church teaches are immoral.

The widespread disagreement with Catholic doctrine on abortion and contraception and the hemispheric chasm lay bare the challenge for Pope Francis’s year-old papacy and the unity it has engendered.

Among the findings:

●19 percent of Catholics in the European countries and 30 percent in the Latin American countries surveyed agree with church teaching that divorcees who remarry outside the church should not receive Communion, compared with 75 percent in the most Catholic African countries.

●30 percent of Catholics in the European countries and 36 percent in the United States agree with the church ban on female priests, compared with 80 percent in Africa and 76 percent in the Philippines, the country with the largest Catholic population in Asia.

●40 percent of Catholics in the United States oppose gay marriage, compared with 99 percent in Africa.

The poll, which was done by Bendixen & Amandi International for Univision, did not include Catholics everywhere. It focused on 12 countries across the continents with some of the world’s largest Catholic populations. The countries are home to more than six of 10 Catholics globally.

“This is a balancing act. They have to hold together two increasingly divergent constituencies. The church has lost its ability to dictate what people do,” said Ronald Inglehart, founding president of the World Values Survey, an ongoing global research project.

“Right now, the less-developed world is staying true to the old world values, but it’s gradually eroding even there. [Pope Francis] doesn’t want to lose the legitimacy of the more educated people,” he added.

After his election to the papacy 11 months ago, Francis seemed to immediately grasp the significance of the divisions among the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics. He has chosen inclusive language, has played down the importance of following the hierarchy and has warned against the church locking itself up “in small-minded rules.” The poll reflects previous ones in finding that the vast majority of Catholics appreciate his approach.

Other faiths have seen many fissures over similar questions about doctrine, including Protestant denominations and Judaism.

Pope Francis appears particularly eager to engage with divisions around sex, marriage and gender and has called a rare “extraordinary synod” this fall on “The Pastoral Challenges of the Family.” For that, he has asked bishops to survey Catholics about their views of cohabitation, same-sex parenting and contraception, among other things.

Areas of similarity

Of the seven questions pollsters asked about hot-button issues, there appeared to be the greatest global agreement on contraception (opposing church teachings) and gay marriage (supporting the church’s stance).

Seventy-eight percent of Catholics across all countries surveyed support the use of contraceptives, which violate the church’s teaching that sex should always be had with an openness toward procreation. The church teaches natural family planning, which Catholics can use to plan sex and attempt to avoid getting pregnant.

More than 90 percent of Catholics in Argentina, Colombia, Brazil, Spain and France support the use of contraception. Those less inclined to support it were in the Philippines (68 percent), Congo (44 percent) and Uganda (43 percent). In the United States, 79 percent of Catholics support using contraception.

Debate in the church over reproductive technologies is nothing new, said Jose Casanova, a leading sociologist of religion at Georgetown University. He noted that a papal commission in the 1960s recommended approving the use of birth control pills (it was later rejected) and said dramatic recent medical advances have challenged theologians.

“If you accommodate contraception, does that mean you’d allow abortion? How do you distinguish which aspects of teaching go together? Bioethics is a new frontier that forces moral thinkers and ethicists to constantly ask: What is humanity?”

Catholics have been intensely divided over the centuries over other issues, he said, from whether it was all right to evangelize native peoples to how the church could accumulate wealth while holding up the value of poverty.

However, the disagreements around sex and pregnancy have built to “a crisis in the church with women,” Casanova said. The church can neither accept “the radical secularization of sexuality” — or the idea that sex has nothing to do with religion — nor can it continue insisting on practices that are being completely ignored. “Unless they face it, the church will be in trouble.”

The poll also showed 66 percent of Catholics opposing same-sex marriage, with majorities in eight of the 12 countries surveyed agreeing with church doctrine.

The poll suggests that in his first year, Pope Francis has proved apt at navigating this diverse flock. Eighty-seven percent of Catholics around the world said the Argentine pastor is doing an excellent (41 percent) or good (46 percent) job. Catholics in Mexico were least likely to approve of his performance, at 70 percent.

Areas of disagreement

The poll showed stark divisions among Catholics over church teachings on abortion, divorce and remarriage. Catholics who don’t get an annulment or who marry again outside a Catholic Church setting aren’t eligible for Communion and are considered not in unity with the faith.

Overall, 65 percent of Catholics said abortions should be allowed: 8 percent in all cases and 57 percent in some, such as when the mother’s life is in danger. But the highest support for abortion rights is in European countries, then in Brazil and Argentina, then in the United States, where 76 percent of Catholics said it should be allowed in some or all cases. In the Philippines, 27 percent of Catholics said abortion should be allowed under certain circumstances. In Uganda, 35 percent said so.

Catholics are most evenly split over the question of whether women and married men should be priests. The dividing line, again, falls on hemispheric lines, with those in Africa and Asia more traditional and others less so.

What’s distinctive today, Catholic theologian Lawrence Cunningham said, isn’t that there are disagreements but that they center on similar topics.

“Even if you look in the North American church of my youth, Polish Catholics and Irish Catholics and Italian Catholics weren’t focused on the same issues. They had their own views on family,” Cunningham said. “I don’t think [today] it’s an issue of disagreement. It’s more: ‘Whoa, we’re finding a lot of people from across the Catholic world talking about the same kinds of issues and we better face up to them.’ ”

U.S. and Latin America

Catholics in fast-developing Latin America fit somewhere in the middle, but not neatly. Thirty-nine percent of the world’s Catholics live in Latin America and the Caribbean, the biggest share in any region of the world. But Latin American Catholics’ relationship with the institutional church varies depending on many factors, including whether their government has been intertwined with church officials and whether evangelical Protestants have made recent inroads.

In the United States, Catholics are divided on some issues, including gay marriage (54 percent support it; 40 percent oppose it). Compared with Catholics worldwide, they are more liberal than Africa, Asia and some parts of Latin America but not as liberal as Spain. The poll mirrored ones that show U.S. Catholics support married priests, female priests, abortion and contraception.

Since the liberalizing and divisive Second Vatican Council, Pope Benedict XVI and Pope John Paul II appeared to approach the gap with an explicit plan: Narrow it. They emphasized doctrine and called for institutions that wanted to call themselves Catholic to follow the rules. Benedict prompted a lot of debate by saying and writing that a period of shrinkage seemed inevitable if the church was to stick to its teachings.

Francis seeks feedback

So what is Pope Francis’s plan, if he has one?

Critics say his solicitation of opinions wrongly gives the appearance that Catholicism is a democracy. Others — including the authors of this poll — say there’s no evidence that he would touch doctrine and is seeking a deeper understanding of why so many Catholics reject church teachings so as to better market them.

Casanova said it’s not clear what Francis plans to do with the research, but the approach “fits with his idea of the church going out into the world and encountering the world as it is, not expecting the world to come to it.”

Any change would be a complex undertaking, as Catholics are going in many directions, he said. He noted that Catholics in Brazil, the most populous Catholic country, widely reject some core church teachings but are seeing a surge in men becoming priests for the first time in decades. Filipino Catholics, he said, support church teachings on some social issues but have a powerfully charismatic faith that isn’t focused on being in step with church leaders.

The church “may be in a period of moral evolution,” he said. “It’s not about seeing where the wind blows, but which are signs of God and which are simply fashion? This is a very difficult theological enterprise, kind of a new way of trying to understand the situation of the church in the world.”

Former D.C. Catholic schools seeking identity as charter schools
By Michael Birnbaum
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 28, 2010; B01

St. Gabriel's Catholic Church in the District's Petworth neighborhood and the Center City Public Charter School next door share a parking lot and the shade of some trees. Until a year-and-a-half ago, they also shared a faith.

But in 2008, the Archdiocese of Washington gave up control of seven of its financially struggling inner-city schools, stripping down crucifixes and turning the facilities into secular charter schools in three months. Dozens of teachers and hundreds of students departed; 1,000 new students signed up.

The reincarnated schools walked a fine line between staying secular and capitalizing on Catholic schools' reputation for quality inner-city education. The schools made clear that God wasn't part of the picture but focused their curricula on character values and "moral virtue." And many parents flocked to the schools because they believed their children would receive a free parochial education.

"I kind of wish they did keep the prayer in the school," said Catina Butts, a parent at Center City's Trinidad campus, the former Holy Name School. "But they kept the structure, they keep the kids disciplined. They knew my son's weakest points, and they helped bring him up."

Students talk about respect, perseverance and integrity -- a focus that Center City educators say was part of the Catholic curriculum but also fit the charter school model. Every month, the schools pick a value and spend the month working on it, making students write essays and discuss how they live it.

A morning meeting has replaced morning prayer; students chant a code of respect. Girls wear the same plaid jumpers they did as Catholic students, and boys wear pressed shirts and slacks. Some say the dress code is enforced more strictly than it was in the Catholic days. Students unfailingly stand when visitors enter the room in a show of old-fashioned politeness.

"We have the same uniforms," said eighth-grader Amber Sneed, who started at St. Gabriel's School when she was 4 and stayed on to go to Center City. "We have the same discussions."

But the school also made moves typical for charter schools: lengthening the school day, focusing on student performance data and hosting workshops to improve teachers' craft.

At the time the conversion was proposed, it drew fire from all sides. Some critics thought the Catholic Church was forsaking inner-city youth. Others worried that religion would remain in classrooms and that the public money going to the church in the form of rent -- $2.3 million this school year, much of which has been used to bolster the remaining D.C. Catholic schools -- was an unacceptable mixture of church and state.

Clearing the Bibles out of the library brought challenges that neither critics nor advocates expected.

"The response [to the conversion] was unbelievable," with new families streaming in to register their children, many of whom were coming from poorly performing public schools, said Maureen Holla, president of Center City, which has been running the organization since the spring after the conversion.

Holla, who has worked with charter schools and inner-city education for more than a decade but doesn't have connections to Catholic education, said the rapid changes had clearly been tough for the schools. "There are tremors that come from turning a place upside down in four weeks," she said.

Six of the seven campuses that converted remain, each with one class per grade, pre-kindergarten through eighth. The seventh school, the former St. Francis de Sales in Brentwood, closed after a year, the victim of continued low enrollment.

Initial test scores at the schools were unimpressive, something school leaders acknowledge. They blame the results on the turmoil of the conversion. Across the seven campuses that were open the first year, 38 percent of students scored proficient or above in reading on the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System tests, compared with 48.4 percent of students in traditional public schools. In math, 24.6 percent of Center City students scored proficient or above -- "abysmal," in Holla's words -- compared with 45.6 percent of D.C. public school students.

Holla noted that other promising schools have struggled with disappointing test scores in their early years. Initial internal tests this school year, especially in earlier grades, are more encouraging, she said. Students will have a second crack at the DC-CAS this spring.

In a classroom at the Petworth campus next door to St. Gabriel's one recent morning, eighth-grade teacher Niya White led her class -- two-thirds of whom have arrived since the conversion -- in a discussion about courage, one of the values the schools have focused on. Most of the talk centered on whether students had the guts to 'fess up to parents about typical 14-year-old foibles such as staying out too late and not doing homework.

Although the charter schools are a lean financial operation, they are on much better footing than they were as Catholic schools. White says she no longer has to think twice about ordering a new set of novels for her English class. Principals elsewhere express relief that they're able to hire people to help students who need special education.

At the Trinidad campus, Principal Monica Evans said she had about $2,500 per student to spend each year when she ran a Catholic school. As a charter, the school receives $8,800 to $11,400 per student from the city.

"For someone like me, who's been so used to operating on nothing," she said, "we've been able to do some incredible things with the resources." That includes hiring teacher trainers, expanding an arts program and purchasing classroom supplies.

She also said the charter has become more of a neighborhood school, drawing local students who had been intrigued when it was called Holy Name but were unable to afford the $4,500 tuition.

Though conversations about the futures of seven other D.C. Catholic schools took place this fall, a spokesman for the archdiocese said there were no plans to apply for any conversions this year.

For at least one Center City teacher, Catholicism is a guide even when it's not part of the classroom. Sister Patricia Ralph spent 14 years at Holy Name, five as principal. She stayed on at Center City. Her impeccable handwriting covers the chalkboards of her fifth-grade classroom. A small crucifix dangles around her neck.

"The conversion was hard in the beginning, but children are children, and I made sure that I was focused on that," she said. "It's been a challenge."

One solace: When the school pulled off a blackboard panel to install an electronic whiteboard as part of the conversion, Ralph saw that a cross was drawn directly onto the cement wall. The whiteboard went right over it.

"Y'all thought you took Jesus out of here, but in my heart I know it's there," she said.

Please see the Post's new Higher Education page at http://washingtonpost.com/higher-ed.

God vs. Science Isn't the Issue Seldom do we act as if life has no moral component.

• By WILLIAM MCGURN
• When the poet Matthew Arnold wrote of faith's "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar," the thought was that scientific inquiry had forever undermined claims to certitude. In hindsight we see Arnold was only half right. In place of Genesis we now have scientism—the idea that science alone can speak truth about man and his world.
  

In contrast to the majority of scientists whose wondrous discoveries seem to inspire humility, today's advocates of scientism can be every bit as dogmatic as the William Jennings Bryans of yesteryear. We saw an example a week ago, when the New York Times reported that many scientists view "outspoken religious commitment as a sign of mild dementia."
The reporter was Gardiner Harris, and the object of his snark was Francis Collins—the new director of the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Collins is perhaps best noted for his leadership on the Human Genome Project, an effort to map the genetic makeup of man. But he is also well known for his unapologetic talk about his Christian faith and how he came to it.

Mr. Harris's aside about dementia, of course, is less a proposition open to debate than the kind of putdown you tell at a private cocktail party where you know everyone in the room shares your orthodoxies. In this room, there are those who hold that God cannot be reconciled with what science has discovered about the human body, the origin of the species, and the beginnings of the universe. The more honest ones do not flinch before the implications of their materialist principles on our understanding of human dignity and human rights and human freedom—as well as on religion.

In 1997, for example, an International Academy of Humanism statement in defense of human cloning—whose signatories included scientists such as E.O. Wilson, Francis Crick and Richard Dawkins—went out of its way to attack the special dignity of human beings. "Humanity's rich repertoire of thoughts, feelings, aspirations, and hopes seems to arise from electrochemical brain processes, not from an immaterial soul that operates in ways no instrument can discover." They concluded "it would be a tragedy if ancient theological scruples should lead to a Luddite rejection of cloning."

Here's the problem: Almost no one really believes this. Not, at least, when it comes to how we behave. And the dichotomy between scientific theory and human action may itself have something to tell us about truth.

That's not to deny electrochemical brain processes and the like. It is to say that much as we may assent to the idea that we are but matter in motion, seldom do we act that way. We love. We fight. We distinguish between the good and noble and the bad and base. More than just religion, our literature and our politics and our music resonate precisely because they speak to these things.

Remember Peter Singer? Mr. Singer is the Princeton utilitarian who accepts scientism's view that human beings are not fundamentally different from animals, just more complex. In his thinking, those who cannot reason for themselves or have lost their self-awareness have no real claim to life. Yet when Alzheimer's struck his mother, he paid for care to prolong and sustain her life. The irony is that an act that does him credit as a son must discredit him among those whose principles about life he claims to share.

To put it another way, while we talk about the clash between God and science, in practice it often comes down to disagreements about man and morals. The boundaries are not always neat. Many Americans who are indifferent to faith will confess they find themselves challenged as they try to raise good and decent children without the religious confidence their parents had. The result may not be a return to religion but a healthy agnosticism about agnosticism itself.

I once had the opportunity to interview one of my heroes, Sidney Hook. This was a man whose commitment to his atheism and secular humanism was beyond question. One example: A doctor saved Mr. Hook's life by going ahead with an operation against Mr. Hook's wishes. Mr. Hook recovered—and promptly published an op-ed taking his doc to task.

It is possible, of course, to imagine a good society in the absence of a belief that man's dignity comes from his being fashioned in God's image. Something of the sort would have been Mr. Hook's ideal. Yet in his writings, the Almighty in whom Mr. Hook did not believe makes an extraordinary, one might say miraculous, number of appearances. When I asked him why he was not more dismissive, Mr. Hook replied that he was never comfortable with the dogmatism of the village atheist.

Perhaps he thought it "a mild form of dementia."