The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture (25 page)

Religions that promise salvation from eternal damnation may tend to more easily hook fearful or worrying types of people. People who reject fear-based tactics may find new age religions or the Quakers. Reincarnation or becoming “one with god” are attractive hooks to people who are looking for positive affirmation. Fundamentalist churches seem to attract people who have a strong need for right/wrong, good/bad, black/white approaches, with little tolerance for ambiguity.

While some characteristics like fearfulness or need for affirmation may provide a hook for the virus, the “hook” is not the same as the personality. It is only one part of an otherwise complete person. Unlike intelligence, with a few dimensions, personality has many dimensions. With many personality characteristics, there are more and different opportunities to infect. In over 50 years of research, no clear relationship has been shown between personality and religiosity but there are interesting tendencies. Several studies found a
positive correlation between religiosity and lie-scale scores. Others have found that a sense of guilt is most associated with three types of religiosity.
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This approach to measuring susceptibility to religiosity may be off the mark. Using our viral metaphor, religion is the infection of the mind by a religious idea. It may have less to do with personality and more with what you were exposed to as a child and what personality hooks were available to the religion.

A couple of examples might illustrate this. A child raised in a Chinese environment will become proficient in Chinese, regardless of her personality. Personality has nothing to do with language acquisition. By the same token, a child brought up in a family that plays lots of board games might have an affinity for board games for the rest of her life. A child raised in a religious family is likely to be infected with the family religion. It is less about personality and more about what kind of virus the child is exposed to in the immediate environment while maturing. That is not to say that guilt or anxiety might not contribute to religiosity, they probably do, but only tangentially. Non-religious people can be guilty and anxious as well.

A god virus may be able to penetrate and propagate in one person but not in another. It may be as simple as one person being much more intelligent and able to spot the contradictions and manipulations, or it may be that a specific god virus is best at infecting people who have been trained early in life to feel guilt. Another virus may infect people who have a high need for approval.

The question is not “what personality characteristics make a person religious?” Rather, the question is, “What types of virus are present in the environment and how do they interact with personality characteristics of the people in the environment?” In biological terms, you cannot catch a cold
if the cold virus is not present. You also cannot catch a cold from someone else if the virus he or she carries cannot unlock your cells and propagate efficiently.

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Peter Hills, Leslie J. Francis, Michael Argyle and Chris J. Jackson, “Primary personality trait correlates of religious practice and orientation,”
Personality and Individual Differences
Volume 36, Issue 1 (January 2004): 61-73.

You cannot catch the Jehovah’s Witnesses virus if you are never exposed to it or if you are given the intellectual tools to resist it. In the western world, people are exposed to a wide variety of god viruses. Most catch only one in an entire lifetime – the one they were taught as a child.

So to answer the question, “What role does personality play in religious infection?” it appears that personality only plays a role when the virus has the right key to unlocking a particular person. To understand religion's power, the better question might be, “What keys does religion use to unlock a person?” Biological viruses evolved keys to unlock and infect cells. Similarly, religions use emotional keys to unlock and infect people. Just as we can learn the infection pathways of the small pox virus, viewing religion as a virus allows us to focus on religious infection pathways. Understanding small pox infection pathways allows for treatment or prevention methods. Understanding religious infection pathways does the same. It takes the focus off of personality and places it onto infection strategies.

Dogs are genetically programmed to follow the pack leader – the alpha male. That is what makes dogs such good pets: Once you establish yourself as the pack leader with your dog, it will follow and obey you. While humans are not the same as dogs, we have a strong inclination to follow the leader. This inclination has served humans well for thousands of years. It helps us organize hunting parties, develop group defenses and attack strategies and create entire corporate organizations and governments.

Part of the desire to follow the leader comes from the need for security and safety. To the degree that we cooperate under a leader, we can ensure greater security than standing alone. This tendency can be seen as the default program for a large majority of humans, as demonstrated by the experiments of Stanley Milgram in the 1960s. Milgram set about demonstrating that normal adults can and will engage in harmful, if not destructive, behaviors under the influence of an authority figure. His most famous experiment involved an authority figure in a white coat giving instructions to a subject. The instructions included administering a strong electric shock to another person. We won’t recount the details of Milgram’s famous experiments
except to say that he found 60% of all adults tested obeyed orders from the authority figure. They were asked to do such things as administer a 450-volt shock to another person despite screams and cries from the victim to stop. His book
Obedience to Authority
gives more insight into the dynamics of leader-follower than almost any research before or since.
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It demonstrates that many people respond to authority with little critical analysis.

Religious vectors are experts at playing the authority figure. Their pronouncements are made with strong conviction and accompanied with all the trappings of power. Whether the vector is a Catholic priest with robes, incense and symbols or an evangelical preacher in a mega church with thousands of people and rousing songs, the result is a sense of security and power against the hostile world.

Regardless of a person’s personality characteristics, fear and need for security are key areas the virus uses to infect. That is why fear of damnation, hell, Satan and evil are all used to greater or lesser extents by successful vectors. If the vector can evoke a sufficient fear response in the potential host, infection is made possible. Logic and reason are suspended. The fear response and need for security pushes the person to seek the relief and protection that the preacher offers.

Most people are unaware of their response to this kind of manipulation; they only feel the insecurity, terror and fear that is evoked by the minister and the sense of relief when told that Jesus or Allah can save them. Again, watch almost any popular evangelical preacher. He evokes the authority of a god over and again as if he had a direct line. He invokes the language of fear and sometimes terror. Finally, he offers the security of salvation BUT only within his particular virus. Muslims, Mormons, Baptists, Catholics and most other successful viruses use the same formula.

As discussed in Chapter 1, some biological viruses and parasites can modify the brain or gut of the host and direct behavior that benefits the parasite more than the host. The god virus has this power as well. Regardless of a person’s personality characteristics, once he is infected, the virus sets about making his mind a friendly place for a particular religion. It systematically shuts off areas of potential threat and enhances ideas and behaviors that support the religion. Rituals, songs, repeated Scripture verses, prayers, listening to gospel music and physical positions such as kneeling in prayer or genuflecting, all create a behavioral feedback loop that makes the host feel good about his infection and creates a safe place for the virus.

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Stanley Milgram,
Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View
(Harpercollins, 1974).

To better understand this, ask a Catholic to pray on a mat, face down, Muslim fashion, or ask a Muslim to pray the “Our Father” while kneeling. Ask a Baptist to cross himself before entering her church. We could go on, the point is that these rituals are designed to reinforce a particular viral form. None of these people would be comfortable with any of these requests because their own religion does not use these rituals.

How does the god virus unlock a person in the first place? I have watched youth ministers, preachers, Sunday School teachers and camp counselors work on a particularly “resistant” child or teenager. The “resistant” child is often thinking quite clearly and is, therefore, able to deflect a lot of religious arguments from the infected adult. Now observe this interaction from the perspective of a virus trying to break into a cell.

The youth minister (vector) watches, listens and asks probing questions. The line of questioning is often designed to create emotional upset and turmoil about something important in the child’s life. The vector probes the child here and there with questions until he finds a weakness. At that point, he drops all other lines of questioning and explores the weakness. An example might be, “I can see you are very upset about the way your mother has been treating you. Maybe we could pray about that and Jesus could help you to see what you can do next?” With enough probing, the vector will find a weak spot and offer his religion as hope. An upset child who is coaxed into calming down and praying will naturally feel much better. It is nothing more than the relaxation response any good meditative technique will create.
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Through association, the child will interpret the new feeling of relaxation and relief as a sign that Jesus really can help him.

The virus now has an entry point. The next step is to get the child to use rituals like prayer and singing, within an infected group, to repeat this feelgood response and reinforce the notion that Jesus is the one who is making
him feel better. Eventually, an otherwise clearheaded, intelligent child no longer resists. Soon, the rational and logical arguments the child initially used no longer seem relevant. Logic gives way to a feeling of transcendence and relief, but at the price of critical thinking and an infection that will impede judgment, drain resources and inhibit questioning for a lifetime.

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For further reading see Herbert Benson, MD,
The Relaxation Response
(HarperTorch, 2000). Benson’s insight into the mechanisms of the relaxation response can go a long way in explaining the power of prayer to create a sense of well-being and relief.

The infection process is similar with all vectors, whether a Scientologist, Catholic priest, Pentecostal preacher or Lutheran youth leader. They all seek emotionally charged weaknesses and offer their god virus as hope. The psychological techniques generally bring relief and a change in emotional state. If these same techniques were used in a school counselor’s office, without reference to religion, the child might experience the same response with no attribution to Jesus – just relief and some idea of how to proceed.

It would be unfair to characterize most ministers and priests as uncaring and manipulative. The vast majority are caring people with a strong desire to help. At one point in my career, I conducted training classes for pastors and army chaplains in pastoral counseling techniques. Most of the participants were deeply interested in helping people. They spent a good deal of their time counseling and listening to problems, but we must ask, “What does a minister bring to the table that a secular counselor, psychologist or good friend does not?” The only unique thing clergy contribute is the god virus. Everything else could be done entirely by a secular counselor. For this reason, the counsel of a minister, priest or chaplain should be scrutinized because emotional turmoil or distress are prime times for infection or strengthening the god virus. A pastor may have the skills of a secular counselor, but his paycheck comes from the god virus and he is foremost a vector.

Pastoral counselors see the hand of a god in people’s lives, rather than the essential elements of a problem. Their help goes through the circus mirrors of religion, distorting reality and creating feelings and ideas that complicate emotional and interpersonal problem resolution. Pastors are the most infected and well trained to infect. They inevitably find a weakness in the person they are counseling. How can they be expected to pass up an opportunity to infect? Will they be able to separate what is best for the person vs. best for the god virus?

Imagine this scenario: A young man enters the pastor or priest’s office to talk about a problem. The man’s concern is that he cheated a business
partner and is feeling guilty. It would not occur to most clergy that, “This is not a religious issue; it is an interpersonal problem, and a solution can be found without reference to any deity.” All the training of the clergy tells him to use the guilt that the young man feels as an opportunity to involve the god virus so that any relief can be attributed to the god. While there are well-trained religious counselors who might resist this temptation, very few clergy have the training or inclination to avoid involving the god virus.