Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life (21 page)

In laying out the map of what was to come, I promised that looking in the gutter, at base topics like sex and aggression, and at the links between humans and other savage beasts, would help us understand the so-called higher reaches of human nature. In this chapter, we have seen that some of those higher aspirations—the creativity and independence of judgment that defined Maslow's self-actualized icons—are intimately connected to the same evolutionary mechanisms that underlie sex and aggression. In the next chapter, we'll consider a very different connection of this sort, exploring a link that my Catholic school nuns would have regarded as sacrilegious: evidence that even human spirituality and religious piety might sometimes be nothing more than mating strategies.

I
t's 1958. Dion and the Belmonts are doo-wopping in the background, and a working-class Italian American man walks by the corner of Forty-third Street and Thirtieth Avenue in Astoria, Queens. As he passes in front of an old Catholic church, the man makes an unmistakable sequence of gestures, waving his hand rapidly from his forehead to his chest and then from his left shoulder to his right. I am describing a scene from a movie starring Robert De Niro, but when I saw that scene, it triggered a cascade of profound memories and emotions in me. During the real 1950s, I made that same sequence of gestures as I passed that exact spot every day, mumbling automatically under my breath “name udda Fathuh, n'uv da Son, n'uv da Holy Ghost, Amen.” Every Sunday, inside that very church, bathed in light filtering through stained-glass windows, I would kneel along with elderly grandmothers who had immigrated from Italy and Ireland, stare up at a statue of the Blessed Virgin standing on the head of a snake, and listen to a priest dressed in brilliant vestments chanting, “In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spirutus Sancti . . . ,” often with a thick Irish brogue. Each weekday, I would spend seven hours in St. Joseph's school, a building attached to the church, where Dominican nuns would test my knowledge of passages from the Baltimore Catechism.

The Catechism contained a prayer called the Apostle's Creed, which we were told embodied the chief truths of the Roman Catholic Church:

As a devout young Catholic boy, I learned that if I doubted any of that, I would be branded a heretic and thus cast into the eternal fires of hell. But sometimes it was hard not to wonder about the logic of an all-loving God who would create a world peopled with starving children, who might later be subjected to eternal torture if they succumbed to logical doubts or if they happened to be born in any one of
the world's non-European countries, where almost everyone believed in a different version of God. The nuns would get annoyed when my friends and I raised these issues in class, and at least one of the good sisters complained to my mother about it. Despite the nuns' concern, though, I remained a believer during my years in St. Joseph's school. Later, though, after I had been expelled from two Catholic high schools, I was cast into a public educational system populated with Protestants, agnostics, and nonbelieving Jews. Whenever religious beliefs came up in conversation, my new friends chipped away at what I had previously regarded as a few minor logical cracks in the foundations of the Roman Catholic worldview.

As a young man, I had two alternative stories about why I stopped going to church. One focused on the time I attended Mass during my early college years and heard a priest railing against draft-card burners. Regardless of one's political opinion about Vietnam, I said to myself, it seemed the ultimate hypocrisy for a man who supposedly represented Jesus Christ to use the pulpit to support a war. So I left the church for reasons having to do with high-and-mighty moral principles. Or at least that was what I used to tell myself.

Of course, faithful Catholics watching this movie-plot version of my life might doubt my story. If I really were being logical, I could have simply dismissed this sermon as the failing of one particular priest. Hadn't the nuns at St. Joseph's taught me again and again that one of the Ten Commandments was “Thou shalt not kill”? Why should one priest's hypocrisy turn me against a set of doctrines that supported universal love and brotherhood?

I had an alternative version of my falling away from Catholicism, though, one that I would tell my friends after a couple of beers. That one went like this: If there was anything the nuns had really drummed into our heads, it was that sex was sinful. There could be exceptions to the rule against murder—if you were fighting against Hitler, for example, or defending nuns from Mau Mau terrorists—but there was
absolutely no exception to the rules against premarital sex, masturbation, and all the other temptations of the flesh. Yielding to any of these temptations was classified as a mortal sin. Likewise sinful were any willful mental meanderings—such as looking longingly at the half-naked women in the erotic magazines hanging temptingly on the rack in the neighborhood candy store. (For non-Catholics who might not know its significance, a single unconfessed mortal sin is considered a one-way ticket to hell.)

At the time I heard the war-mongering priest's sermon, I was eighteen years old and beginning my first long-term romantic relationship. I was therefore spending the majority of my waking hours having thoughts, and when lucky, engaging in actions, that qualified me for eternal damnation. So version two of my falling away from the church was this: I no longer wanted to feel guilty about sex, so I decided it was time to choose another set of beliefs.

Which is the true story? Was it philosophical and logical inconsistencies that inspired that young Catholic boy to heresy, or was it the temptations of the flesh that led my mind to recompute the relative payoffs for blind faith? Of course, that question is impossible to answer for any particular case, even one's own (or maybe particularly one's own). But my colleagues and I have since done research that reflects on the general question.

During the last few years, there has been a surge of research interest in the psychology of religion. The increased scientific interest in heavenly cognition was probably stimulated by two factors. One is the fact that religious beliefs are intimately tied to the seemingly endless conflicts in the Middle East, where massive carnage has often been couched in terms of Muslims versus Christians, Muslims versus Jews, Muslims versus Hindus, Sunnis versus Shias, and so on. The second
is the fact that in the United States, the so-called Religious Right started a new wave of lobbying against the teaching of Darwin's theory of natural selection in the public schools. Former president George W. Bush and vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, neither of whom wins high respect in scientific circles, went on record as considering “intelligent design” (aka biblical creationism) a legitimate “scientific alternative” to Darwin's theory. Supporters of creationism want more than the freedom to advocate their religious beliefs in church; they want to make it a requirement that their religious beliefs become a part of the public school curriculum. The political threat of allowing religion to dictate the teaching of science led a number of scientists to subject those religious beliefs to the same sort of critical scrutiny to which scientific claims are regularly subjected.

Evolutionarily oriented psychologists, biologists, and anthropologists interested in religion have focused mostly on questions about the genesis of religious beliefs. Psychological anthropologist Pascal Boyer has suggested that several different mental modules might underlie different aspects of religious belief. For example, religious rituals might be governed by the same regions of the brain involved in compulsive avoidance of filth and disease, which, when overactive, can result in obsessive-compulsive neuroses. Anthropologist Scott Atran has joined social psychologist Ara Norenzayan to consider how the mental inclination to seek causes for natural events might underlie religious beliefs in invisible causes (for example, when Mom comes home and finds a broken dish, she assumes someone is responsible even though she did not witness the act; likewise, when a natural disaster knocks out a village, maybe some unseen being was angry at the villagers). Psychologist Lee Kirkpatrick has suggested that religious beliefs about powerful fathers and loving families might be by-products of brain mechanisms involved in forming attachments between parents and children.

Another approach asks not about the origins of religious beliefs but about the possible adaptive functions of belonging to a religious
group. For example, biologist David Sloan Wilson analyzed religious groups as a tool for group selection, arguing that groups that can mobilize their members to share with one another and that can band together to protect themselves against other groups are more likely to persist than aggregations of self-centered individualists. And other researchers, including Azim Sharif, Ara Norenzayan, and Dominic Johnson have combined the two approaches, asking how belief in an omniscient God might inspire people to follow a group's rules and act generously when no one is watching.

Jason Weeden, Adam Cohen, and I approached religion from another adaptationist angle. Rather than searching for the causes of heavenly beliefs inside people's heads, we started the search inside their bodies, investigating how religious participation might directly serve some people's reproductive strategies.

Adam Cohen and Jason Weeden both came to ASU in 2006. They both had Ph.D.'s in social psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, and they both had interests in evolutionary psychology. Despite those similarities, they could not have been much more different. Cohen is from Philadelphia, and his central self-defining characteristic is his Jewish identity. Not only does Adam have a program of research on the psychological differences that distinguish Jews from Protestants and Catholics, but he carries on a continuous Henny-Youngman-meets-Woody-Allen comedy routine and peppers his sentences with Yiddish words like “schtupping,” “schmuck,” and “schicksa.” Weeden, on the other hand, speaks with a slight middle-Texas drawl and claims to have rarely been inside any house of worship. Jason also has a law degree from the University of Texas, and when he finished his Ph.D. in psychology, he was offered a job as a corporate lawyer. After three years of wearing a suit and tie, Jason
made enough money to take some time off and pursue his interest in evolutionary social psychology.

Weeden was fascinated with the psychology of religion and politics, and he had a very intriguing idea he wanted to investigate. He believed that much of the fighting between America's Religious Right and Liberal Left was based not in a disagreement about high-minded philosophical ideals but in something much simpler and far less noble: The two camps are playing out fundamentally different mating strategies. And they do not like each other because the people playing one mating strategy are actively getting in the way of those playing the other mating strategy. Because I had done research on mating strategies and Adam had done research on the psychology of religion, Jason recruited us to work with him to test this idea.

Weeden pointed out that the United States is often viewed as a highly religious nation, at least in comparison to other Western countries. But Jason loved to play with giant survey databases, and he pointed out that the U.S. population is in fact remarkably divided in its religiosity. According to data he gathered from the 2006 wave of the U.S. General Social Survey, 40 percent attend services several times a month, but 42 percent of American adults hardly ever attend religious services. What are the causes and consequences of the rift between the hyperreligious and the irreligious? Jason proposed what we later came to call the
reproductive religiosity model
. On this view, a primary function of religious groups in the contemporary United States is to bolster a monogamous reproductive strategy, characterized by low promiscuity, exclusive heterosexuality, and a high value on marriage and fertility. Religious groups bolster this reproductive strategy in two ways: On the negative side, they enforce a set of strict moral norms (treating sexual promiscuity as sinful); on the positive side, they provide various forms of support for families that live according to those rules.

Treating premarital sex as sinful provides an incentive to marry early. And treating abortion and birth control as sinful encourages people to have children. According to Weeden, this helps explain why the rank-and-file members of the Religious Right tend to be less well educated than their counterparts on the Liberal Left. Taking care of a family makes it difficult to stay in school to pursue an advanced degree in philosophy or neuroscience. This is one of the trade-offs involved in adopting the monogamous, long-term, high-fertility strategy. From a purely reproductive perspective, this strategy also has costs as well as benefits. For monogamous family-oriented men, the high level of investment in their wives and children means forgoing other mating opportunities. Because a man can never be completely sure that he is the father of his wife's children, the strict religious rules against promiscuity help him too, by reducing the risks of paternal uncertainty. Monogamous, family-oriented women strike a complementary bargain: The strictly enforced norms help keep their husbands from running around, but they also reduce the woman's opportunities to run around with a charming unrestricted guy who could provide sexier genes for her children. (Researchers including Steve Gangestad, Randy Thornhill, and Martie Haselton have found that when women in relationships are ovulating, they become more attracted to guys who look like Vince Vaughn and George Clooney, especially when the women are married to average-looking guys.)