When religious people do bad things in the name of religion... [View all]

[Htom Sirveaux]

should we stop at "because of religion" as the explanatory level? If so, why?

As is often pointed out, religious people frequently disagree over whether a particular action is justified in the name of their religion. Christians disagree over whether loving Jesus means hating gays, Jews disagree over whether settling the occupied territories is a religious duty, Muslims disagree over violence. Ending the inquiry at "religion is to blame" for this or that incident seems too casual, too quick, because it cannot explain these differences of opinion without begging the question through declaring that one party is just "more religious" than the other party. This declaration pre-decides what truly reflects the essential nature of religion, when that is exactly what is under dispute between the two parties.

Other religious phenomena aren't treated this way. When people report seeing visions, people wishing to explain this don't stop with an explanation based purely in "because they are religious". They look into biological mechanisms and evolutionary explanations, and these explanations are non-religious in character. So is it out-of-bounds to look for the same kinds of non-religious explanations for bad religious behavior? If so, that inconsistency requires justification.

The following study is one example of non-religious explanation for religious behavior that seems promising:

Check out the map of tightness to diagnose where your state is. Tighter states—those with stronger rules and greater punishment for deviance—are located primarily in the South and the Midwest, while looser states are located in the North East, the West Coast, and some of the Mountain States. We calculated state tightness with a composite index, compiling multiple variables. This includes items that reflect the strength of punishments in states, including the legality of corporal punishment in schools, the percentage of students hit/punished in schools, the rate of executions from 1976 to 2011, and the severity of punishment for violating laws, as well as the degree of permissiveness or deviance tolerance in states, which includes the ratio of dry to total counties per state and the legality of same-sex civil unions. The index also captures the strength of institutions that constrain behavior and enforce moral order in states, including state-level religiosity and the percentage of the total state population that is foreign, an indicator of diversity and cosmopolitanism.

Like our international study, our research on the 50 states shows that some striking similarities in why states vary in the strength of their social norms: Tight states have more threatening ecological conditions, including a higher incidence of natural disasters, poorer environmental health, greater disease prevalence, and fewer natural resources. Tight states were also found to have greater perceptions of external threat, reflected in the desire for more national defense spending and greater rates of military recruitment. This may have a historical basis, as states with a large amount of slave-owning families in 1860—those states that were “occupied” by the North and lost the backbone of their slave-based economy following the Civil War—are tighter. In all, we argue that ecological and historically based threats necessitate greater coordinated action to promote collective survival. One might use this construct to predict, for example, that states that increasingly have natural disasters, resource threats, or even terrorism threats might start to become tighter.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tightness-and-looseness-a-new-way-to-understand-differences-across-the-50-united-states/

This suggests, though not yet conclusively, that bad religious behavior results from feeling more threatened, whether by lack of resources, ecological disaster, disease, invaders, etc.. Blaming "religion" in general or a particular religion would then miss the point.