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Why Gods Should Matter in Social Science (RODNEY STARK, Chronicle of Higher Education)

Two conclusions follow from this discussion. First, the effects of religiousness on individual morality are contingent on images of Gods as conscious, morally concerned beings; religiousness based on impersonal or amoral Gods will not influence moral choices. Second, participation in religious rites and rituals will have little or no independent effect on morality.

Recently, I conducted an elaborate research study to test those conclusions, based on data for the United States and 33 other nations. The results were consistent and overwhelmingly supportive. In each of 27 nations within Christendom, the greater the importance people placed on God, the less likely they were to approve of buying goods they knew to be stolen, of someone failing to report that they had accidentally damaged an auto in a parking lot, or of smoking marijuana. The correlations were as high in Protestant as in Roman Catholic nations and where average levels of church attendance were high or low. Indeed, participation in Sunday services (a measure of ritual activity) was only weakly related to moral attitudes, and those correlations disappeared or became very small when the God "effects" were removed through regression analysis. That is, God matters; ritual doesn't.

The findings are similar for Muslim nations, where the importance placed on Allah is very strongly correlated with morality, but mosque attendance is of no significance. In India, too, concern for the Gods matters, but temple attendance has no detectable effect on morality. But in Japan, where the Gods are conceived of as many, small, and not particularly interested in human moral behavior, religion is irrelevant to moral outlooks -- concern about the God(s), visits to temples, prayer and meditation, all are without any moral effects.

Nor are there God or temple effects on morality in China. However, in China prayer does matter, but in the wrong direction! That is, the more often they pray, the more tolerant the Chinese are of immorality. I suggest that result is due to the fact that, in China, "prayer" seldom implies a longstanding, deeply felt relationship with a God, but merely involves requests for favors from various divinities of small scope. As such, praying tends to reflect a quite self-centered and self-serving activity, consistent with rapidly shifting from one God to another on the basis of results, or even taking a stick to the statue of a God who fails. Seen in that light, a question about prayer is likely to select those somewhat lacking in terms of a social conscience.

My results show that, in and of themselves, rites and rituals have little or no impact on the major effect universally attributed to religion -- conformity to the moral order. Thus, it seems necessary to amend the "law" linking religion and morality as follows: Images of Gods as conscious, powerful, morally concerned beings function to sustain the moral order.

Clearly, Durkheim made a major error when he dismissed Gods as mere religious epiphenomena. Unfortunately, his error had severe, widespread, and long-lasting consequences, for it quickly became the exclusive sociological view that religion consists of rites and ritual, and that those exist only because their latent function is to integrate societies and to thereby lend sacred sanctions to the norms. In retrospect, it seems remarkable that such a notion gained such rapid acceptance and went unchallenged for so long. Stripped of its functionalist jargon, the basic argument seems to have been that, since "we" know there are no Gods, they can't be the real object of religion -- the truism that things are real to the extent that people define them as real failed to make any headway in this area of social science.

So then, let us finally be done with the claim that religion is all about ritual. Gods are the fundamental feature of religions. That holds even for Godless religions, their lack of Gods explaining the inability of such faiths to attract substantial followings. Moreover, it was not the "wisdom of the East" that gave rise to science, nor did Zen meditation turn people's hearts against slavery. By the same token, science was not the work of Western secularists or even deists; it was entirely the work of devout believers in an active, conscious, creator God. And it was faith in the goodness of that same God and in the mission of Jesus that led other devout Christians to end slavery, first in medieval Europe and then again in the New World.

In those ways at least, Western civilization really was God-given.

The corollary of this would seem to be that the very reason that the social sciences focus on ritual, to the exclusion of God(s), is the necessity for denying that science, as most of Western culture, is a product of faith. There's a famous story from the Soviet Union, that secular rationalist utopia, about how owners of the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia were, in 1954, sent an insert with further information about the Bering Straits and instructions to replace and destroy several pages of the "B" volume. The replaced pages were the biography of Lavrentia Beria who had been disappeared. Death did not suffice, the history had to be expunged. So too with God in the West. Posted by Orrin Judd at June 6, 2003 03:44 PM