Columnist John Tierney asks in the Science section of today’s New York Times,
If I’m serious about keeping my New Year’s resolutions in 2009, should I add another one? Should the to-do list include, “Start going to church”?
Tierney, who describes himself as “a heathen,” almost seems to be making this into a serious question. And well he might, because there’s serious research suggesting that church is good for us. Michael McCullough and Brian Willoughby, both of the University of Miami, “have reviewed eight decades of research and concluded that religious belief and piety promote self-control.” Now, this could lead to some unsettling implications. Tierney himself sounds briefly worried: “This sounded to me uncomfortably similar to the conclusion of the nuns who taught me in grade school.” Perish the thought–especially on a science page!
Quickly, though, the writer reassures us. “Dr. McCullough has no evangelical motives,” he says. The researcher’s “professional interest [in religion] arose from a desire to understand why religion evolved and why it seems to help so many people.”
It doesn’t seem to have occurred to the researcher or to the columnist that religion might actually be connected to truth in some way. Could such a question even be relevant? The strictly-scientific (a la scientism) perspective rules it out, since it can’t be subsumed under natural law. The typical postmodern perspective considers questions of truth out of bounds for other reasons. Yet what if it really were the casee that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, who lived and died and rose again to reconcile us to God? Such information, if it were true—and only prejudice could rule out it out a priori—would surely explain where Christian religion came from (not “evolved” from) and why it helps people.
The Times column nowhere mentions whether there was a different self-control effect found for different religions. This seems like a significant oversight, for, as noted below, it’s apparently not just one’s practice but the content of one’s belief that affects self-control. The original research report (pdf) does, however, speak to this. For example:
Although most of the research on this topic has been conducted on samples from North America and Western Europe (which implies that most people in those studies were affiliated with some form of Christianity), the basic associations have been replicated in Israeli and Muslim samples as well (Francis & Katz, 1992; Wilde & Joseph, 1997) and with a variety of measures of religiousness and traits relevant to self-control.
In fact, as the report elsewhere states, much of the research quite expressly involved Christian believers. Virtually all of it had to do with adherents of the three major monotheistic religions. I commend the report to you for its literature survey alone: over 1,250 words summarized by the authors thus:
Indeed, the range of health-related, behavioral, and social outcomes with which religiousness is associated is both provocative and puzzling.
The purpose of the present study was to contribute toward a solution to that provocative puzzle, in light of the impossibility of regarding any religious beliefs actually to be true. Returning to Tierney’s Times column, we learn,
There are remarkably consistent findings that religiosity correlates with higher self-control…. But which came first, the religious devotion or the self-control? It takes self-discipline to sit through Sunday school or services at a temple or mosque, so people who start out with low self-control are presumably less likely to keep attending. But even after taking that self-selection bias into account, Dr. McCullough said there is still reason to believe that religion has a strong influence.
Content and practice of beliefs both seem important.
In one personality study, strongly religious people were compared with people who subscribed to more general spiritual notions, like the idea that their lives were “directed by a spiritual force greater than any human being” or that they felt “a spiritual connection to other people.” The religious people scored relatively high in conscientiousness and self-control, whereas the spiritual people tended to score relatively low…. “Thinking about the oneness of humanity and the unity of nature doesn’t seem to be related to self-control,” Dr. McCullough said. “The self-control effect seems to come from being engaged in religious institutions and behaviors.”
The original research report interprets this information more broadly:
These results lend credence to the idea that something about religious beliefs, behaviors, institutions, and rituals themselves (irrespective of the feelings of spiritual connectedness that religion often fosters) may be responsible for the links between religion and self-control.
And it goes on to note that from a sociological perspective, the reasons for this difference between “spirituality” and religion are quite unknown. It’s either that (a) religion prescribes rules based on some deity, (b) persons believe a deity is watching over them, (c) that it takes self-discipline to be a religious person, or (d) something else. Could (d) be that there’s really a God at work in persons’ lives? For some strange reason that possibility never gets mentioned.
Anyway, what’s a secularist to do with information like this? This is where things get really interesting. Tierney notes that
personality studies have identified a difference between true believers and others who attend services for extrinsic reasons, like wanting to impress people or make social connections. The intrinsically religious people have higher self-control, but the extrinsically religious do not.
Apparently faking it doesn’t work (surprised?). What else might a heathen do, then? (That’s Tierney’s term for himself, remember.)
Dr. McCullough’s advice is to try replicating some of the religious mechanisms that seem to improve self-control, like private meditation or public involvement with an organization that has strong ideals…. “People can have sacred values that aren’t religious values,” he said. “Self-reliance might be a sacred value to you that’s relevant to saving money. Concern for others might be a sacred value that’s relevant to taking time to do volunteer work.”
Which sounds to me almost like faking it in a different way. After all, what does “sacred” really mean in that context? McCullough, the researcher, seems to consider it a neat little mental trick:
“The belief that God has preferences for how you behave and the goals you set for yourself has to be the granddaddy of all psychological devices for encouraging people to follow through with their goals. That may help to explain why belief in God has been so persistent through the ages.”
It’s a “psychological device,” he says. It’s false, but hey, at least it’s adaptive, helpful in its own pathetically self-deceived way. (This could lead to a fascinating digression on implications for the evolutionary argument against naturalism, but I’ll refrain.) Earlier (see the prior quote) he referred to “religious mechanisms.” Could you ask for a more blatantly stated materialist prejudice than that?
Now, I’m not denying there is false religious belief out there. That’s obvious from the mere fact that religions disagree, and that they disagree at the very core: the nature of God and ultimate reality, the nature of humanity and our problems, the solutions to our problems, the nature of the ultimate good, and the destiny of all things. They can’t all be right; in fact, most of them, by logical necessity, must be mostly wrong. But generally speaking they agree at least that there’s something to reality beyond what we can see—more than what Tierney might know how to report on his science page. In that one limited but extremely crucial respect, it’s actually possible they’re all correct. The monotheistic religions in this study agree on more than that, of course.
At any rate, this study adds to our continuing collection of news reports on the positive life outcomes associated with spirituality (please see the usual disclaimers at the bottom of that page).
So should our columnist start going to church? I’d certainly recommend it—but not for the sake of developing better self-control in his life. His question really wasn’t really serious in the first place, of course: you get a strong sense that he’s snickering about the whole thing. I’d recommend church to him for the sake of considering whether there might be some truth to Christianity. He could visit a church like Redeemer Presbyterian in New York, where they place a strong value on helping people explore that kind of question, or Times Square Church, the Brooklyn Tabernacle, or any of a number of other great churches there.
I’m just a blogger, he’s a New York Times columnist. But I can’t help thinking it might not be such a bad thing for him to try church. He might learn something even more valuable than self-control.
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