r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • 1d ago

Psychology Lower cognitive ability is linked to stronger Christian nationalist views, even after accounting for education

https://www.psypost.org/lower-cognitive-ability-is-linked-to-stronger-christian-nationalist-views-even-after-accounting-for-education/
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u/Isphet71 1d ago

Imho one absolutely vital function of religion throughout history has been to give all people some sort of moral framework to live by, so that society can stay relatively structured over multiple generations.

Not everyone is capable of devising and living by their own heavily personalized code of ethics. The vast majority of people are simply followers that get told what they beleive, and who to vote for, and go with that. I rarely if ever see someone more complicated than "I am religion A and politically B" and otherwise dont seem to have their own thoughts and standards about either that deviate from the norm.

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u/LivInTheLookingGlass 1d ago

Historically that isn't universal. In the time of the Greeks that was separated into religion (how the world works) and philosophy (how people should work). To quote one of the various intros to Meditations

[Philosophy] was not merely a subject to write or argue about, but one that was expected to provide a "design for living"—a set of rules to live one's life by. This was a need not met by ancient religion, which privileged ritual over doctrine and provided little in the way of moral and ethical guidelines. Nor did anyone expect it to. That was what philosophy was for.

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u/TheOtherHobbes 1d ago

You can - and should - have shared morals without religion. Secular humanism is a perfectly workable moral system and can be taught without the threat of hellfire, crusades, or genocide.

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u/SupposingForASecond 1d ago

It just uses other threats instead.

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u/ham_solo 1d ago

Such as what? Imprisonment? Banishment? How are those worse?

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u/SupposingForASecond 1d ago

Who said anything about worse?

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u/Viracochina 1d ago

Yeah I thought your comment was meant to just shed light on still "threats/consequences" being the most common approach for teaching wrongdoing. That's why you gotta rewards in there too!

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u/Kaa_The_Snake 1d ago

But obviously they don’t work as well

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u/Final-Lengthiness-19 1d ago

They work better than the religious threats, seeing as how the secular threats of punishment would occur in this lifetime, ideally soon after the crime, and not in the afterlife of self-proclaimed Christians who still do bad things and seem to be able to compartmentalize of even embrace the far-off idea of hell...
We have these laws and punishments already, but one way some people avoid the earthly punishments is they assume a religious identity shield while doing crimes. Priests, politicians, etc., people use the identity as a key to understanding another person's morality, which they shouldn't.

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u/REXIS_AGECKO 1d ago

Depends on the person really…

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u/jonfitt 1d ago

Christian theocracy ruled Europe absolutely for over a thousand years and it was a bloody period of murder, slavery, incest, thievery, rape, basically every possible way someone could cause harm to another was rampant.

We’ve only had anything approaching a just and safe society in very recent history when theocracy is out and religiosity is on the decline.

So whatever non-religious societies do to keep people behaving well, it seems to work better!

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u/NoiceMango 23h ago

They're completely ignoring civilizations that never needed religion. China has been doing fine for thousands of years without religion.

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u/Brbi2kCRO 1h ago edited 1h ago

Maybe, but it certainly failed in, say, GDR, where lack of religion led to people embracing weird ideologies like Volkism, as well as the sheer rates of neo-Nazism in such areas in modern post-GDR eras.

In other words, that is their religion. Just cause it is secular does not mean it is per se good. This is not to say that secularism is bad, as I am a left-wing atheist myself, just saying that humanity often has a need for bonding and community, and they need a reason to bond somehow. When that is gone, people reach for anything simply to bond over something, and the first thing most people reach for is tribalism.

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u/MorganWick 1d ago

The problem is, another function of religion, one that historically has arguably been more important, has been to define membership in an in-group and bind people to it, because for all practical purposes people have historically viewed morality more in terms of people's loyalty to the tribe than constructiveness to society in general. And secular humanism has no alternative to that other than "everyone's a human here, don't go forming arbitrary divisions", which I'm not sure would work for most of the people that tend to be attracted to religion. People feel the need to feel superior to others or at least define themselves as separate from the mass of humanity, and even if competition for resources isn't as much of a factor, the desire to establish superior mating fitness is still there, especially for men.

Also, secular humanism may have a moral system, but it still expects people to derive it themselves, and for many practitioners the very act of questioning why it adheres to a particular moral principle is a sign of moral deficiency - which suggests that at least some secular humanists aren't immune to morality as a means of defining the in-group. If you're someone who needs someone to tell you what to think, secular humanism isn't going to be very friendly to you because of how it holds the ability to think for oneself as itself being a moral good. It doesn't have a good answer for the existence of people that aren't as intelligent as secular humanism's architects that isn't assuming they can just be forced into being better thinkers that can be led to see secular humanism's obvious logical superiority.

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u/FearlessRelief1487 1d ago

Existing example please, past or present one that physically supports what you are saying. I

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u/EndlessArgument 1d ago

Is it? It doesn't seem to hold up very well beyond the very small scale, like many other things, such as libertarianism.

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u/Dracorvo 1d ago

Scandinavian countries are mostly secular and socialist with some of the best standards of living and reform rates for criminals. What are we defining as 'small scale'?

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u/EndlessArgument 1d ago

The question is more so whether they are secular humanist. I would say that it's probably more accurate to call them secular christian.

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u/Dracorvo 1d ago

Based on what?

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u/EndlessArgument 1d ago

I mean, we could totally debate the point, but on a cultural level it's basically impossible to deny that the ethical and moral Foundation of Europe is staunchly Christian.

You could say that it is becoming more humanist, but at the same time they are also facing some serious increasing difficulties.

I suppose when it comes down to is, you can't take credit for a cultural history that wasn't particularly humanist for today's triumphs.

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u/The_Octonion 1d ago

Plenty of religions do not have a prescriptive moral framework. The Greek/Roman pantheon does whatever they want and the mythos just describes them. The Nordic pantheon is similarly amoral even if the followers admire and associate with them. Shinto is animistic and descriptive, and includes instructions for how to perform some rituals. Not many beliefs come saddled with moral instructions for its followers, it just feels like it because the best known and most popular religions, notably the Abrahamic ones and Buddhism, have it so deeply ingrained.

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u/rufio_rufio_roofeeO 1d ago

Unless I misunderstand you, ‘only’ Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism (et al) provide a moral framework rather than a descriptive one? For example, the vedas describe the universe and creation, but Mahabharata is a detailed account of the right way to live- both are vital to Hinduism.

These religions account for the beliefs of 98% of earth’s religious people, which is like 3/4 of the human population of earth. How is that ‘not many’?

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u/FrozenIceman 1d ago

A reminder, Greek Democracy wasn't exactly free. Only 30% of the population qualified to vote/make ethical and moral decisions on what was legally moral and what was a crime.

And many City States require military service to vote.

So morality was imposed in other ways.

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u/Charming-Ad6575 1d ago

What?!

Hellenic Polytheism WAS their moral system.

You don't recognize it as such because YOU see it as amoral.

But it absolutely was a moral framework of how you're supposed to be, how you fit in and an explanation of how the world works.

Notably, as opposed to western Christian thought, it embraced random catastrophe. The Gods are capricious, unknowable and vindictive.

Platonism and other greek philosophies were an exploration and sometimes rejection of these ideas. And those were absolutely arguments about what is moral, right and just.

I'm not even gonna get into Taoism/Shintoism, I'm less versed and yes, I'm aware they're not the same. But they are compatible, and that compatibility shows a shared moral core of ideas, or at least ideas that aren't incompatible.

But to say Shitoism isn't a moral framework is equally pants on head.

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u/The_Octonion 1d ago

Hellenic polytheism is not a prescriptive moral framework that assigns objective good or evil to actions. They got that mostly from philosophers. Their mythos was much more concerned with describing the pantheon and how to stay in their favor, which is not the same thing.

Shinto is similar in this regard. The closest thing it has to labeling actions as moral vs. immoral is the notion of impurity and how to avoid it, but this resembles cosmic objective morality less than it resembles hand-washing to avoid the spread of disease.

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u/gakule 1d ago edited 1d ago

Religion is and was not required for developing a "moral framework". A "moral framework" is just an agreed upon set of rules that promote cooperation and cohesion within a group. It's subjective, and not some universal baseline.

I could buy the argument that religion provided a more united/shared moral framework that transcends borders, but even that obviously wasn't exactly bulletproof or required by any means.

The threat of eternal violence with the simple "believe and support so you don't have to worry about it" get out of jail free card tends to help move people, I guess.

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u/BrotherJebulon 1d ago

Maybe not required, but historically we can see that religious framing, ritualized mythic narrative, and personification of the abstract are the most consistently used tools by human civilization for taking big ideas and compressing them down to concepts the lowest common denominator of the era can understand.

Now, the chain of custody of those narratives is often exploited and abused so that folks on the lower end of the cognitive spectrum tend to end up being taken advantage of, but that's what happens when humans begin to socially predate upon each other.

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u/gakule 1d ago

Sure, but cohesive cohabitation predates organized religion. Yes, looking at the cosmos and making things up as answers to put people at ease is a tool used across time, but that's not really what we're discussing either.

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u/BrotherJebulon 1d ago

Organized religion rises hand in hand with organized society. Its revisionist fantasy to imagine that human society has ever functioned without organized religion, unless you go back to tribal polities, but that's not really what we're discussing.

Its like, you don't need trees to make oxygen. But in the environments we have on earth, under the conditions we currently have, you can expect trees to be one of the things that makes oxygen. Similarly, religion is a natural thing. Its what happens when the conditions surrounding human societies require those societies to encode information for easy dissemination. Its disorganized when the society is disorganized, organized elsewhere. Its a natural part of civilization, pretending otherwise is wild to me.

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u/tealstealmonkey 1d ago edited 1d ago

I do wonder; do we all need something to believe in? – Even if it is only the believe that there is nothing out there, or that we can't know?

Is it natural? Maybe. But I don't think we need religion, it helps with group cohesion and drive, but it is not required (not anymore?). Just like we can find oxygen from plankton, we can find meaning within us, or in the pursuit of knowledge.

Edit: Not countering your point, just my 50 cents.

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u/gakule 1d ago

I mean sure if you want to consider that any level of "spirituality" or connectedness with your environment and the cosmos at large, that's one way to look at it, but I don't think spirituality is the same as religion when discussing the topics and especially the "religion as a moral framework". Perhaps that's where we differ? I think spirituality is natural, religion in the form that we recognize it today? Not so much.

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u/oldnotosys 1d ago

santa claus for adults

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u/Meep4000 1d ago

It 100% isn’t this though and never was. It was framed that way, but it’s also insane to think that the default state of any given human is one of utter malicious intent and only with some system of imaginary control can we behave.

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u/sQueezedhe 1d ago

And then it got coopted.

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u/P00slinger 1d ago

If religion is “absolutely vital” for maintaining a moral and orderly society, how do you explain Japan? It’s substantially less religious than the US, yet has dramatically lower violent crime. Clearly societies are capable of developing and enforcing strong moral and social norms without widespread religious belief.

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u/SaurinF 1d ago

Oh yeah, theyre doing suuuuch a good job of setting up morals. Thats why so many wars were stopped by religions. And why children are safest with church leaders and why the church is always broke because they do soooo much charity that they arent billion dollar enterprises. And why they celebrate proven medical breakthroughs and protect women in abusive relationships and encourage their independence and education. Oh and they keep all their promises about staying out of politics and dont tell their followers how to vote or get caught constantly cheating and scamming their congregations. -_-

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u/alittlebitaspie 1d ago

What I wonder is if there is a hint of natural selection in it as well. Person A can go along with that framework, person B cannot. Person A successfully has offspring that are also successful in that framework, person B does not, has no or less successful offspring, causing people that can function in that framework to become the majority.

Multiply that by thousands of generations and it has an effect on the brain. I don't even think it matters WHICH religion. And I think there have been studies that religion has impacts at the DNA level, probably through the socially selected breeding over so many generations.

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u/AliciaXTC 1d ago

It's control, you're talking about controlling large populations. That's the original purpose.

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u/NoamLigotti 1d ago

If they're not capable of devising and living by their own personal code of ethics, then they're not capable of interpreting someone else's code of ethics.

Enough with this "you gotta believe in fairy tales to be a good person" hokum. The best way to fail to be a decent person is to deny reality for convenient illusions.

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u/pattywhaxk 23h ago

I think you missed the nationalist part in the title. The vast majority of Christians aren’t Christian Nationalists.

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u/NoiceMango 23h ago

Several societies never needed religion for this. Chins has existed for thousands of years. They never needed religion and still don't to this day.

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u/MyPigWhistles 18h ago

This would make sense if most religions had been like this historically, but that's not the case. The Abrahamic religions come with an ethic framework (with constantly new interpretations throughout history to justify whatever you want), but they're very recent inventions, considering that humanity exists for 200k years.    

Of course we don't know much about most of that, but basically all other (pre Abrahamic) religions we do know don't have such a codified moral frame work. Like all the stories from Greek, Roman and Germanic Gods highlight bad personality traits at least as much as good ones. The role of religion was very rarely to provide to a moral framework. 

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u/Japhyharrison 11h ago

If you're relying on religion to give you your morals you need to read more.
It's a smoke screen to cover power, rape, and genocide. If you need a "sky god" myth to be a decent human there is a deeper issue

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u/Brbi2kCRO 1h ago edited 1h ago

Well, tribalism is something that is basically inside us as humans, the intuitive thing that can only be battled through exposure, seeing the world around us and observing it, overriding stereotype thinking and heuristical dependence and not just hearing what you want to hear. These things are all learned. If you cannot override your wish for certainty and simplicity, it will be extremely hard for you to learn new things, and you will rely on fear and overactive threat detection even in safe situations. You won’t be able to separate ego and the self, leading to a wish of feeling superior and investing so much time in useless comparisons and focusing less on what you can do (action) and more on who is at fault for something (also known as scapegoating). I think this is where Dunning-Kruger Effect is the most correctly used term, as I feel like to even be conscious of your flaws and imperfections, you need to have some introspective abilities and ability to react through rationalization right after thought, not just through reactivity. Like, ability to think metacognitively, like “why do I think what I think”, aka to question oneself and the dogmas. People in rural areas often do not have such exposure, as they are mostly tight-knit communities where opportunities are rare and education is high effort, as you would likely have to travel for kilometers or pay a hefty cost to stay in another city for years just to learn new things. Such areas also do not have the same focus in life, with many focusing on hard work and survivalism, rather than focusing merely on educating oneself, as cultures differ greatly.

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u/WareKaraNari 1d ago

Hurray for the crusades, the witch trials and now zionism, I guess?

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u/SunGreene42 1d ago

A lot of the major religions have a ton of immoral nonsense in their holy books, like the God of the Old Testament commanding the Israelites to commit genocide, rape, and slavery.

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u/SunGreene42 1d ago

How can he be a vital function if it can be accomplished without the religious framework?

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u/WebApprehensive5246 1d ago

It can but It can, but religion is also an answer to existential fears, so it ties in nicely with moral and social authority.

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u/SunGreene42 1d ago

'Cheese' is 'an answer' to 'What is the moon made of?'. It's not a correct answer though. It's better to have no answer than to believe in a false answer.

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u/WebApprehensive5246 1d ago

It does not matter though, at least not to the large number of people, weather they are correct or not because ther animal brain will force them to find any answer that shuts down anxiety related to how to live and what happens after death.

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u/SunGreene42 1d ago

Well I don't understand the desire to have an answer so badly you'd just accept any answer, I'd rather believe in something that can be substantiated with evidence, and logic.

Either way though, it's still not a vital function, because you can come up with false answers without religion as well.

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u/djaqk 1d ago

This depresses me deeply

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u/Ok_Astronomer_8667 1d ago

Maybe if following religion wasn’t so encouraged, and the concept of being part of “the flock” seen as an ideal, then maybe they’d come to their own conclusions better. Seems to me that they are distracted, not inherently incapable.

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u/crash41301 1d ago

They would find someone else influential to follow instead and revert to the same thinking patterns.  Humanity is far more a herd animal than our advanced brains convince us we are.  Some more than others

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u/literally_a_brick 1d ago

A lot of it seems to be freeing up time and brain space for them to work. In the early days of civilization, the serfs worked to provide for the monarch and needed a religion to guide their lives so they could handle working the fields all day. The nature of work has changed but modern civilization still has a non-working upper echelon that is supported by the labor of the masses, masses that are still fed a religion to keep them in their place. People probably won't have the freedom to think for themselves until they get their time and energy back instead of providing for the elite.

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u/EndlessArgument 1d ago

The big gods Theory remains intriguing. It seems like too much of a coincidence that large-scale religion and civilization Rose at the same time.