The Vancouver Sun (British Columbia)
November 26, 2004 Friday
Final Edition

Faith, death and violence: A researcher seeks to determine why some
people turn to hatred

Douglas Todd, Vancouver Sun

University of B.C. psychology professor Ara Norenzayan grew up in
Beirut, Lebanon, during a savage religion-fuelled war between
Christians and Muslims. As an altar boy in the Armenian Orthodox
Church, he sensed the power of religion for good and evil.

He also became familiar with death.

Now, 15 years after emigrating to North America at the peak of
Lebanon’s bloody conflict, Norenzayan is returning to his roots to
research the relationship between faith, thoughts of death and
violence.

The soft-spoken social psychologist has received a $105,000,
three-year grant from Canada’s national research council to deepen
his exploration into why people become religious and some turn to
hatred.

Devising unique psychological experiments, Norenzayan has already
discovered that the more people are exposed to the reality of death,
the more likely they are to believe in “supernatural agents,” like
God, angels or ancestral spirits.

He’s also concluded prominent scientists, such as Richard Dawkins,
are off track when they argue belief in God is, along with the atomic
bomb, the greatest danger to world peace.

Norenzayan’s studies suggest antagonism toward outsiders is not a
result of belief in God. It’s the byproduct of people finding a sense
of identity in a religious group.

To find out if there is a link between thoughts of death and belief
in the supernatural, Norenzayan devised two series of tests, one
involving hundreds of students at UBC and another involving subjects
in Malaysia.

He asked one group to write essays about death, reflect on pain in
the context of mortality and read a short story about a boy who dies.
He asked the control group to think about pain in relation to
visiting a dentist and read a story about a boy who doesn’t die.

Norenzayan and his team found subjects asked to contemplate death
were much more likely than those who weren’t to report they strongly
believe in supernatural agents.

Norenzayan says his experiments are the first to provide “solid
empirical evidence” to back up theories by Soren Kierkegaard and
Ernest Becker that humans become religious because they’re capable of
recognizing they will die.

“One of the definitions of religion is it’s a way of dealing with
anxiety-provoking thoughts,” Norenzayan says in his tidy third-floor
office overlooking the forest and ocean surrounding UBC, as quiet
classical music plays.

“All religions say death is not literally death, that mortality is
not the end of our being.”

Norenzayan — who maintains he’s not a “strict” religious believer,
despite maintaining ties to the Armenian Orthodox Church — says it’s
shocking how little research psychologists have done into the origins
and effects of spirituality.

“Most academics are blind to the power of religion.”

A typical psychology textbook, he says, contains virtually no mention
of religion, despite the 19th-century American founder of psychology,
William James, devoting a great deal of energy to the subject.

“Most psychologists have no idea why two people who are probably
equally religious — the Dalai Lama and Osama bin Laden — could end
up being so different, with one teaching peace and one preaching
violence.”

– – –

With his grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council, Norenzayan plans to make his first trip to Lebanon since he
left at age 18.

He’ll explore more deeply the impression he developed as a young man
in the war-torn country that spiritual beliefs can be exploited by
leaders to foment aggression against outsiders.

And he’ll continue his experiments into why religion can breed both
peace-loving tolerance and intolerant fury, in the Middle East and
North America.

Norenzayan recognizes religion isn’t the only cause of violence, but
he also believes it “is at the top of the list of ideologies that can
kill.”

How exactly does religion lead to mayhem?

Norenzayan and his graduate student, Ian Hansen, have discovered it’s
not spiritual devotion that causes violence.

Norenzayan’s work builds on studies of Palestinian Muslims by his
alma mater, the University of Michigan, where researchers found the
more often Palestinian Muslims attended mosque, the more they
supported suicide terrorism. There was no link, however, between
Palestinians’ support for violence and how often they prayed at home.

The goal of one of Norenzayan’s experiments was to test North
Americans on their tolerance of religious pluralism. In effect, he
wanted to explore how subjects would respond to someone like the main
character in Yann Martel’s book, The Life of Pi, who claims he’s a
Hindu, a Muslim and a Christian.

Norenzayan’s team discovered Buddhists were most tolerant of
followers of other religions. Christians were less tolerant and
Muslims were the least tolerant.

Norenzayan believes that may be because Christianity and Islam
provide more group cohesion, leading to a belief there’s only one
true religion.

So how does thinking about death relate to religious tolerance?

For one thing, Norenzayan found study participants who were reminded
frequently about death were more likely to believe in supernatural
agents from not only their own religion, but from other religions.

In other words, a Christian contemplating death would become more
open to the Asian idea of revering ancestors.

“There’s an old saying: ‘In a storm, voyagers will believe in any god
to rescue them.’ To some extent, it’s hopeful that people facing
death will consider addressing other supernatural agents,” says
Norenzayan.

But his research also led him to a more negative side-effect tied to
when people think often about death: They become less accepting of
people who don’t belong to their culture.

Many Christians, for instance, became less tolerant of Jews and less
tolerant of prostitutes. More intense thoughts about death “seemed to
make people draw stronger cultural boundaries.”

Norenzayan is also wondering what the ramifications of his research
are for North America since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001,
which made a lot more North Americans anxious about their mortality.

He believes the terrorist attacks created a unique experimental
condition for a study of how increasing consciousness of death
affects religious tolerance.

“Sept. 11,” he says, “was one humongous manipulation of North
Americans’ thoughts about death.”

dtodd@png.canwest.com

GRAPHIC: Color Photo: Glenn Baglo, Vancouver Sun; Ara Norenzayan:
‘Most psychologists have no idea why two people who are probably
equally religious — the Dalai Lama and Osama bin Laden — could end
up being so different, with one teaching peace and one preaching
violence.’