Why We Believe: Part 1 (Socialization)

Recently I finished reading a fascinating book titled “The Tenacity of Unreasonable Beliefs: Fundamentalism and the Fear of Truth” by Solomon Schimmel. Schimmell is quite a paradox: he is a practicing Orthodox Jew who loves his religious community, a professor of psychology and Hebrew studies at Hebrew College, and a self-described agnostic/atheist.

I found so many similarities between Schimmel’s experience as a skeptic within Orthodox Judaism and my own experience within orthodox Mormonism.  In his book, which I highly recommend, he explores some fascinating aspects of religious belief. An aspect I want to highlight here is how people acquire their religious beliefs.

Understanding how people acquire religious beliefs helps me be a little more understanding towards others who have a different opinion.  The reason why is that our beliefs have little to do with free-will  (in fact, it is doubtful we even have free-will).  Like many things that we feel free about, religious beliefs bubble up from environmental, genetic, and subconscious psychological factors that are beyond our ability to consciously control. And because a large measure of our religious belief is beyond our ability to control, we shouldn't judge too harshly.

So why do people believe that certain religious myths are literally true? Where do our religious beliefs come from? Why do we hold certain religious beliefs when there is no objective evidence for believing them? And why do we hold onto them so tenaciously in the face of disconfirming evidence? In Part 1, I want to focus on one of the reasons we hold religious beliefs. I will examine other reasons for belief in subsequent posts.

First, we are socialized to believe certain religious beliefs when we are young.

Socialization is why children raised in Pakistan or Afghanistan are usually Muslim who believe that Mohammad was Allah's true prophet who revealed His word in the Koran. Socialization is why kids from Utah usually believe Joseph Smith was God’s true prophet who translated gold plates into the Book of Mormon. Socialization is why many Catholics believe that the sacramental wine and wafer literally become the blood and flesh of Jesus Christ inside their bodies (transubstantiation). Socialization is why a child of an Orthodox Jewish home will believe the Pentateuch was inerrently revealed by God to Moses on Mt. Sinai.  These people wouldn't hold such different and unsubstantiated beliefs without the socialization and culture they grew up in.

Could you imagine hearing about certain religious myths for the first time when you were an adult? Would angels and demons, Gods and Satan, Heaven or Hell, or prophets and revelation really be plausible if you never heard about them until you were thirty? What about gold plates, white Native Americans who were Israelites, and a transcontinental visit by a resurrected Jesus?  These ideas are as implausible and irrational as believing that crackers and wine magically turn into Jesus's body and blood inside your stomach. None of these ideas would be plausible unless you had them repeatedly reinforced by your parents, your church authority figures, and your society at large.

And it's not just religious myths that we are socialized into believing. The same phenomenon works for holiday myths as well.  For example, Western children believe in Santa Claus, while Aboriginal and Mongolian children do not for the simple reason that one group was socialized to believe in Santa, and others were not.  In fact, holiday myths (like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny) die out sooner because our socialization of them stops sooner - not because they are any less rational.

And like holiday myths, religious myths work better when we are taught to believe them when we are children. While we are young, we are unable to think critically about such abstract ideas.  The reason we are unable to think critically is because the parts of our brain responsible for critical thinking don't mature until we are in our mid-twenties.  If we want our children to accept something irrational, then the time to get them to believe it is when they are incapable of rational thinking.

Socializing children to believe certain religious ideas sheds a different light on the scripture in Proverbs: "Train up a child in the way he will go, and when he is old he will not depart from it." Well of course they usually won't!  But is it right to do so?  Is it right to socialize children to believe in religion? Why not expose your kids to lots of different religious beliefs when they are young so that when they grow up, they can choose their own religious beliefs?  Why do many Mormon parents think that religious belief is a choice that parents should make for them?

I think it's telling that many Mormon parents think that if you don't teach your children to believe Mormon doctrines, then the parents are guilty of the child's sins. What a great idea to scare parents into indoctrinating their children! It seems to reveal the fact that most people know that if they didn't socialize their kids into believing certain religious beliefs, that they wouldn't ever believe in them. I get a sense of this when concerned family and friends sometimes asked my wife and I what we were doing to teach our kids about the church.  I think they realized that our children won't believe it unless we socialize them while they are young. What a damning indictment of the irrationality of religious belief; that it is largely unbelievable unless you indoctrinate your children before they have the ability to think for themselves.

However, before I get too judgy here, I need to remember that our parents and leaders, who socialized us, were also socialized themselves by their parents and church authorities.  And the people who socialized them were socialized themselves, etcetera, etcetera.  So can we really get very upset at our parents or leaders when they were as free to choose their religious beliefs as we were?  It's nuanced, but we really shouldn't. We just don't have as much freedom (nor did our parents) to choose our religious beliefs since we have them, in large measure, because we are socialized into them before we can think rationally for ourselves.

There's more to the question "Why we believe?" that I will address in subsequent posts. So until my next installment, my beloved brethren and sisters, I bid thee "adieu."