Does Religion Make You Nice?

Does atheism make you mean?

By Paul Bloom

Posted Friday, Nov. 7, 2008, at 7:05 AM ET

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Many Americans doubt the morality of atheists. According to a 2007
Gallup poll, a majority of Americans say that they would not vote for
an otherwise qualified atheist as president, meaning a nonbeliever
would have a harder time getting elected than a Muslim, a homosexual,
or a Jew. Many would go further and agree with conservative
commentator Laura Schlessinger that morality requires a belief in
God-otherwise, all we have is our selfish desires. In The Ten
Commandments, she approvingly quotes Dostoyevsky: "Where there is no
God, all is permitted." The opposing view, held by a small minority of
secularists, such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and
Christopher Hitchens, is that belief in God makes us worse. As
Hitchens puts it, "Religion poisons everything."

Arguments about the merits of religions are often battled out with
reference to history, by comparing the sins of theists and
atheists. (I see your Crusades and raise you Stalin!) But a more
promising approach is to look at empirical research that directly
addresses the effects of religion on how people behave.

In a review published in Science last month, psychologists Ara
Norenzayan and Azim Shariff discuss several experiments that lean
pro-Schlessinger. In one of their own studies, they primed half the
participants with a spirituality-themed word jumble (including the
words divine and God) and gave the other half the same task with
nonspiritual words. Then, they gave all the participants $10 each and
told them that they could either keep it or share their cash reward
with another (anonymous) subject. Ultimately, the spiritual-jumble
group parted with more than twice as much money as the
control. Norenzayan and Shariff suggest that this lopsided outcome is
the result of an evolutionary imperative to care about one’s
reputation. If you think about God, you believe someone is
watching. This argument is bolstered by other research that they
review showing that people are more generous and less likely to cheat
when others are around. More surprisingly, people also behave better
when exposed to posters with eyes on them.

Maybe, then, religious people are nicer because they believe that they
are never alone. If so, you would expect to find the positive
influence of religion outside the laboratory. And, indeed, there is
evidence within the United States for a correlation between religion
and what might broadly be called "niceness." In Gross National
Happiness, Arthur Brooks notes that atheists are less charitable than
their God-fearing counterparts: They donate less blood, for example,
and are less likely to offer change to homeless people on the
street. Since giving to charity makes one happy, Brooks speculates
that this could be one reason why atheists are so miserable. In a 2004
study, twice as many religious people say that they are very happy
with their lives, while the secular are twice as likely to say that
they feel like failures.

Since the United States is more religious than other Western
countries, this research suggests that Fox talk-show host Sean Hannity
was on to something when he asserted that the United States is "the
greatest, best country God has ever given man on the face of the
Earth." In general, you might expect people in less God-fearing
countries to be a lot less kind to one another than Americans are. It
is at this point that the "We need God to be good" case falls
apart. Countries worthy of consideration aren’t those like North Korea
and China, where religion is savagely repressed, but those in which
people freely choose atheism. In his new book, Society Without God,
Phil Zuckerman looks at the Danes and the Swedes-probably the most
godless people on Earth. They don’t go to church or pray in the
privacy of their own homes; they don’t believe in God or heaven or
hell. But, by any reasonable standard, they’re nice to one
another. They have a famously expansive welfare and health care
service. They have a strong commitment to social equality. And-even
without belief in a God looming over them-they murder and rape one
another significantly less frequently than Americans do.

Denmark and Sweden aren’t exceptions. A 2005 study by Gregory Paul
looking at 18 democracies found that the more atheist societies tended
to have relatively low murder and suicide rates and relatively low
incidence of abortion and teen pregnancy.

So, this is a puzzle. If you look within the United States, religion
seems to make you a better person. Yet atheist societies do very
well-better, in many ways, than devout ones.

The first step to solving this conundrum is to unpack the different
components of religion. In my own work, I have argued that all humans,
even young children, tacitly hold some supernatural beliefs, most
notably the dualistic view that bodies and minds are distinct. (Most
Americans who describe themselves as atheists, for instance,
nonetheless believe that their souls will survive the death of their
bodies.) Other aspects of religion vary across cultures and across
individuals within cultures. There are factual beliefs, such as the
idea that there exists a single god that performs miracles, and moral
beliefs, like the conviction that abortion is murder. There are
religious practices, such as the sacrament or the lighting of Sabbath
candles. And there is the community that a religion brings with it-the
people who are part of your church, synagogue, or mosque.

The positive effect of religion in the real world, to my mind, is tied
to this last, community component-rather than a belief in constant
surveillance by a higher power. Humans are social beings, and we are
happier, and better, when connected to others. This is the moral of
sociologist Robert Putnam’s work on American life. In Bowling Alone,
he argues that voluntary association with other people is integral to
a fulfilled and productive existence-it makes us "smarter, healthier,
safer, richer, and better able to govern a just and stable democracy."

The Danes and the Swedes, despite being godless, have strong
communities. In fact, Zuckerman points out that most Danes and Swedes
identify themselves as Christian. They get married in church, have
their babies baptized, give some of their income to the church, and
feel attached to their religious community-they just don’t believe in
God. Zuckerman suggests that Scandinavian Christians are a lot like
American Jews, who are also highly secularized in belief and practice,
have strong communal feelings, and tend to be well-behaved.

American atheists, by contrast, are often left out of community
life. The studies that Brooks cites in Gross National Happiness, which
find that the religious are happier and more generous then the
secular, do not define religious and secular in terms of belief. They
define it in terms of religious attendance. It is not hard to see how
being left out of one of the dominant modes of American togetherness
can have a corrosive effect on morality. As P.Z. Myers, the biologist
and prominent atheist, puts it, "[S]cattered individuals who are
excluded from communities do not receive the benefits of community,
nor do they feel willing to contribute to the communities that exclude
them."

The sorry state of American atheists, then, may have nothing to do
with their lack of religious belief. It may instead be the result of
their outsider status within a highly religious country where many of
their fellow citizens, including very vocal ones like Schlessinger,
find them immoral and unpatriotic. Religion may not poison everything,
but it deserves part of the blame for this one.

Paul Bloom is a professor of psychology at Yale University, and author
of Descartes’ Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What
Makes Us Human. He is currently writing a book about pleasure.

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