Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality (29 page)

Parenting still has power, through key responsibilities like protection, age-appropriate education, boundary setting and environmental enrichment. That is, you may not be able to “influence” children, but you can discover what gets them excited and interested and foster and nurture those skills and talents.

Religiosity seems to have genetic predispositions in much the same way as piano playing and baseball.
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In a groundbreaking 1990 study of identical and fraternal twins, Niles Waller et al. found that approximately 50% of the variance in religiosity was attributable to genetics. The rest was associated with the non-shared environment. Little or no influence came from the shared environment.

This is one of many studies that have found genetics to be a critical influence on religiosity and explains why two children raised in a religious home may go in entirely different directions as adults with respect to religion. One may continue in the parents’ religion, the other may leave organized religion entirely. If they are religious, the religion they mostly likely gravitate to is their parents’ religion or one very close to what they were exposed to as a child.

Some children are more susceptible to religious infection than others. If religion is in the home, those susceptible will get infected, others less so. The parental influence lies more in what religion a child adopts than in whether he or she gets religion. The same child raised in another home with a totally different religion, like Islam or Buddhism, may be just as susceptible to infection with that religion. Whatever is in the environment is what the child is most likely to catch, but only if he or she has a tendency toward religiosity.

As in our baseball and piano example, genetic influences are easily mistaken for parental influences. When the child grows up religious, the parent may claim credit for his religiosity. However, if another child resists “god’s word,” the parent may disavow her.

Religious parents desperately try to control the non-shared environment by sending their children to church, church camp, religious schools, etc. If children have no exposure to other religions or systems of belief, they can’t choose those beliefs. If they are predisposed to religiosity, they too will become devout. If they do not have such a predisposition, they may rebel.

Finally, a study published in the
Journal of Personality
examined adult male identical twins (MZ) and fraternal (DZ) twins. The authors found that difference in religiosity in adolescents was influenced by both genes and environment, but during the transition from adolescence to adulthood, genetic factors increased in importance while shared environmental factors decreased. That is, environmental factors (parenting and family life) influence a child’s religiosity, but the effects decline with the transition into adulthood. This study found that by adulthood, any influence from the shared environment largely disappeared. Genetics were far more important. Identical twins stayed about the same in religiosity over time while fraternal twins became more dissimilar.
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When two very religious parents have children, it is generally expected that their children will have a high probability of inheriting the genetic predisposition from both parents. As a result, highly religious parents are tempted to believe their religious teachings made their children faithful.
By the same token, they are tempted to see a child who did not get the religious predisposition as rebellious and ungodly. Religious parents who adopt children are frequently disappointed that their children do not remain religious as adults.

Religious parents may be disappointed when children disavow their religion and secular parents may be puzzled when a child gets religion. Many a secular parent has told me, “I never took my children to church and I tried to teach them to think for themselves. Why did they become religious?” Just like some people catch a cold and others don’t, it all depends on your natural vulnerabilities. Children who have a strong genetic predisposition toward religiosity may catch religion despite parental efforts to teach them critical thinking. As a parent, critical thinking skills are the best vaccine you can give your children, but it does not guarantee they won’t get religion.

The best you can do as a parent is to expose your children to a wide range of religions. Rather than trying to “program them” to dislike religion, give them the tools to analyze it themselves. With the conceptual tools of critical thinking and skepticism, and adequate exposure to many religions, children are very likely eventually to conclude that all religion is crazy. Nevertheless, some children are susceptible to religious infection just like they are to a cold.

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See “The 50-0-50 rule: Why parenting has virtually no effect on children” available online at
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/200809/the-50-0-50-rule-why-parenting-has-virtually-no-effect-chi
.

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Waller, N. G., Kojetin, B. A., Bouchard, T. J., Lykken, D. T., & Tellegen, A. (1990). “Genetic and environmental influences on religious interests, attitudes and values: A study of twins reared apart and together.”
Psychological Science
, 1, 138-142.

150
Koenig, L. B., McGue, M., Krueger, R. F., & Bouchard, T. J. (2005). “Genetic and environmental influences on religiousness: Findings for retrospective and current religiousness ratings.”
Journal of Personality
, 73, 471–488. An even larger study by Kenneth S. Kendler et al. found strongly confirming evidence of genetic influence on religiosity. (Vance, T., Maes, H. H., Kendler, K. S. (2010). “Genetic and environmental influences on multiple dimensions of religiosity: a twin study.”
Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease
, 198, 755-761).

Human sexuality is incredibly flexible, but we all have unique tendencies and preferences. Knowing them puts us in control of our sexuality
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Now that we can see the relative effects of the three areas of potential influence, genetics, shared environment and non-shared environment, let’s look at sex. Research over the last 20 years has shed light on the differences between men and women in terms of sexual attitudes. While we won’t go into all the arguments within evolutionary biology and other disciplines, we can say with a good deal of certainty that women are more sensitive to social and cultural pressures than men in matters of sex. In a massive review of the literature on sex and sexuality, Roy Baumeister of Florida State University found that the effects of acculturation, education, politics, religion and family life on sexual attitudes and behaviors were all more potent among women than among men. He concluded that, “... men’s sexuality revolves around physical factors, in which nature is predominant and the social and cultural dimension is secondary. For women, social and cultural factors play a much larger role.”
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Other researchers have also noted the relative flexibility of women’s sexuality. For example, in sexual preference surveys, women describe themselves as bisexual two to four times more often than men. Women also respond to a wider range of visual, tactile and auditory stimuli than men.

In practical terms, this means that a woman’s sexual map is more influenced by the social environment than a man’s. If the culture is sexually restrictive, a woman will adopt sexually restrictive attitudes and behaviors. If the environment is more open, she will be more open. While men can move from being more restrictive to more open when sexual restrictions are not present, they shift far less than women. In one of the largest studies to date, David P. Schmitt of Bradley University found strong evidence for the response of women to environment across 48 different cultures and 25 different languages. He concluded, “Overall, it appeared that when women gain more sociopolitical and relational freedom, sex differences between men and women shift from large magnitudes to more moderate magnitudes. In other words, women shift their sexual attitudes and behavior more toward that of men, though they never completely overlap.”
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This research shows that to a strong degree, sexual attitude and behavior are susceptible to social and cultural influence, especially in women. But sexual behavior also has a huge genetic component as can be seen in the behavior of almost every animal on the planet, including other primates and the other great apes. For example, Frans de Waal, in his book
Our Inner Ape
, observes that a bonobo raised among chimps is one miserable creature, given that chimps are genetically programmed toward aggression and power, whereas bonobos are genetically inclined toward matriarchy and highly sexualized interpersonal interactions.

While humans seem to have a wider, more fluid sexuality than chimps, bonobos or gorillas, there is ample evidence to suggest that our sexual behavior has genetic roots as well. For example, the urge to masturbate is genetic and present in infants and young children. Pleasuring oneself is common in all primates. The difference may be that we have more control over when and where we do it than other primates, but that is a learned behavior, as the parent of any small child will attest. Our brains are more tuned into social and cultural expectations, while apes are uninhibited in their masturbatory behavior.

While humans have a wide sexual spectrum, a given individual may be naturally more open or more conservative in his or her sexual tendencies. Just as some people are more introverted and others more extroverted, some people are sexually open while others are more closed. These tendencies have a strong genetic component independent of culture or training. We can measure the personality variables for introversion/extroversion and we can measure sexual tendencies as well.

In 1991, Simpson and Gangestad published an instrument called the Sociosexual Orientation Inventory (SOI), a seven-item (later revised to nine items) self-report questionnaire that assesses socio-sexual orientation (SSO) along a single dimension from “restricted” – indicating a tendency to have sex exclusively in emotionally closed and committed relationships – to “unrestricted” – indicating a tendency for sexual relationships with low
commitment and investment, often after short periods of acquaintance and with changing partners.
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SSO is how you view sex. People who score low on the scale tend to be restricted in their sexual expression. That is, they are more love-oriented, begin sexual activities later in life and have fewer partners. Those scoring high engage in sex at an earlier point in their relationships, engage in sex with more than one partner at a time and are involved in sexual relationships characterized by less investment, commitment, love and dependency. SSO (like most personality traits) is relatively stable over a life time. While men tend to be more unrestricted in SSO than women, the variance within each gender is much greater than the variance between the sexes. The survey has been used in over 50 studies and proven useful in understanding the behavior of men and women within and across cultures as well as in demonstrating the genetic influence on human mating preferences.

J. Michael Bailey’s
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groundbreaking study of Australian twins found strong evidence that 49% of SSO is inherited. None is influenced by shared environment, and approximately 50% is accounted for by the non-shared environment. Here are some of the highlights of the findings.

• Those scoring high in SSO were more likely to divorce.
  
• One twin’s score could predict the other twin’s probability of divorce.
  
• Divorce was more closely linked to the individual’s SSO than to whether his or her parents were divorced or not.
  
• Persons who had a low SSO were unlikely to get divorced even if their parents had divorced.
  

This shows the genetic component in our sexual map. A sexual style is not a product of either moral failure or moral rectitude but of a predisposition. Wherever a person falls on the SSO scale, he will not likely venture far from that point throughout his life. If he is sexually adventurous or conservative, that is probably what he will be at 20, 40 or 60. As the famous biologist E. O. Wilson once said, “genes hold culture on a leash.”
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Like walking a
dog, culture pulls in one direction or another, but our genetic makeup will tug us back to our “center” eventually.

Religion has a one-size-fits-all approach to sex and sexuality. The sexual rules of religion have nothing to do with biology or genetics. While SSO is the behavioral expression of your particular sexual map, religion may try to force a different map into your brain, but it rarely wins that battle. Think of how many “devout” ministers, priests or religious politicians get caught having sex with prostitutes, young boys or soliciting in bathrooms?
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Religion does not stop the sex drive or the need for variety. If it did, the most devout would have the greatest control.

The research on SSO shows that humans score across the spectrum just as they do on other personality traits. We expect to see a spread of characteristics like introversion to extroversion, dominance to non-dominance, facility for math or languages or not. It is no surprise that sexual tendencies exhibit a similar spectrum. Yet, if we applied religious rules to SSO orientation, we would see that the only option for all the major religions is a restrictive SSO, especially for women.

As one might expect, SSO also correlates with other identifiable traits. For example, unrestricted individuals tend to be more extroverted, less agreeable, more erotophilic (they like erotica), more disinhibited, more impulsive, more likely to take risks and less strongly attached to a mate. Restricted individuals, on the other hand, tend to be more introverted, more agreeable, more erotophobic, more socially constrained, less impulsive, less likely to take risks and more securely attached.
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