Why are religions so judgemental?

From New Scientist Magazine – 28^th April 2016

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Why are religions so judgemental? Ask evolution

Nicolas Baumard

The rise of moralising religions like Christianity can be explained by evolution – and so can their eventual downfall, says evolutionary psychologist Nicolas Baumard

Forgive me, father

WHEN Jesus of Nazareth died on the cross, leaving behind a few dozen followers in a remote province of the Roman Empire, few would have guessed that 350 years later Christianity would be the official religion of the Roman Empire and would go on to become the most widely practised religion in the world.

Christianity's success is often attributed to its supposedly unique message. Unlike earlier religions, it exhorted people to be good and promised to reward them for their goodness in the afterlife. That is still how most people conceptualise the Christian message: helping others, working hard, controlling one's sexuality and believing that people who don't do so will be punished. In other words, a moralising religion.

It is true that before Christianity, most religions did not place a high value on morality. The Greco-Roman religions, for example, were materialistic, mostly concerned with rituals, sacrifices and other ways of begging favours from their various divinities.

But Christ's message was not actually new. In Homer's time, the 8th century BC, the Greeks believed that when people died they all, good and bad, went to Hades. From the 5th century BC on, Greeks started to believe that the dead were judged in Hades according to their deeds during life. Judaism, too, began to incorporate beliefs about moral punishment in the afterlife.

Roman religions were materialistic rather than moralising

 Parallel developments ccurred in societal values. While the heroes of Homer's Iliad were openly polygamous and unfaithful, fidelity and monogamy started to be promoted towards the end of the 1st century BC. Where Achilles and Agamemnon were quick-tempered, sexually rapacious and arrogant, the moralists of the Roman Empire started to defend an ethics of asceticism and modesty.

Social glue

Christianity, then, was part of a wave of new religions that emerged more than 2000 years ago. What happened to make materialistic religions transform into moralising ones?

Social scientists sometimes explain this by arguing that moralising religions promote cooperation, which would have given the societies that adopted them a competitive advantage. Religion was a sort of "social glue" that bound societies together as they grew beyond the point where everyone was related and family ties stopped people from freeloading. That seems a plausible explanation – except for the fact that moralising religions did not arise until quite late in human history, long after the rise of large-scale societies in Egypt and Sumeria.

Recent research in behavioural ecology and experimental psychology suggests a different answer. This work, known as life history theory, finds that organisms are endowed with evolved programmes that modulate their behaviour according to their environment. In a harsh and unpredictable environment, when resources are scarce and mortality is high, organisms adopt a "fast life strategy". They mature and reproduce earlier, invest less in offspring and pair-bonding, and are impulsive and aggressive.

For instance, starlings placed in a highly competitive environment for a few days during their development go on to invest less in physical maintenance, with a lower body weight and reduced levels of DNA repair. They also develop a fast psychology, preferring immediate rewards over riskier but potentially more profitable investments in foraging. From an evolutionary perspective this makes sense: if you could die at any time, your best shot of passing on your genes is to grab what you can.

In contrast, in a more favourable and predictable environment, organisms switch to a slow life strategy. They mature and reproduce later, invest more in offspring and pair-bonding, and become more patient and more forgiving.

The same ability to switch also exists in humans, and an abundant stream of research shows that as the environment gets better, individuals start investing more in their family and romantic relationships, and become less impulsive and less aggressive (New Scientist, 17 July 2010, p 40). For example, women from more affluent neighbourhoods are likely to have babies at a later age. They have larger babies and breastfeed more, both of which make it more difficult to get pregnant again.

This is strikingly similar to what happened in the eastern Mediterranean 2500 years ago. Around that time, energy use per capita – a good proxy for affluence – rose from the 15,000 calories per day typically seen in Egyptian and Sumerian civilisations to more than 20,000 calories per day. And as people became more affluent and society more stable and predictable, their slow strategy kicked in.

At the same time, we see the invention and spread of moralising religions. Are the two connected?

I think so. Consider the fact that for a long time, the switch from fast to slow strategy was restricted to only the most affluent members of the population. Everybody else was still living fast and dying young, and the elite were none too happy about it.

This may be explained by a general principle of human moral cognition – people intuitively disapprove of behaviour that threatens their interests. You are clearly at a disadvantage if you follow a slow strategy when others follow a faster strategy: if you are faithful when others grab sexual opportunities, if you forgive when others avenge, if you work when others have fun. This disadvantage incentivised the elite to morally condemn fast behaviours, in part by adopting and promoting the new religions that legitimised and reinforced a slow morality and promised punishment for transgressors.

The same idea could also explain the gradual decline of moralising religion in wealthier parts of the world such as Western Europe and the northern parts of North America. As more and more people become affluent and adopt a slow strategy, the need to morally condemn fast strategies decreases, and with it the benefit of holding religious beliefs that justify doing so.

If this is true, and our environment continues to improve, then like the Greco-Roman religions before them, Christianity and other moralising religions could eventually vanish.

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This article appeared in print under the headline "Morality tale"

Nicolas Baumard is an evolutionary psychologist at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris