The Faith Instinct (31 page)

The strength of religion-based trust is nowhere more evident than in schemes that exploit that trust. Fraudsters have learned that an effective way to part people from their money is to pretend to belong to the same group, and specifically the same religious group, as do their marks, an approach known as affinity fraud. “Affinity frauds can target any group of people who take pride in their shared characteristics, whether they are religious, ethnic, or professional,” warns the Securities and Exchange Commission. Its Web site describes schemes that targeted Jehovah’
s Witnesses, members of African American churches, Baptists and born again Christians.
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The most spectacular recent case of affinity fraud was the $50 billion Ponzi scheme run by Bernard Madoff. Jewish himself, Madoff targeted many of his coreligionists, as well as Jewish charities and educational institutions. His marks were educated and sophisticated people, yet they ignored salient red flags such as an opaque investment scheme and returns that seemed too good to be true. Religion induces so powerful an urge to trust members of the same faith that rational calculation can be swept aside. “He really undermined the fabric of the Jewish community, because it’s based on trust,” said Rabbi Burton L. Visotsky of the Jewish Theological Seminary. The rabbi went on to explain that “There is a wonderful rabbinic saying—often misapplied—that all Jews are sureties for one another, which means, for instance, that if a Jew takes a loan out, in some ways the whole Jewish community guarantees it.”
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There are many other instances of coreligionists doing business together, particularly in long-distance trade networks before the advent of modern banking. By establishing a separate community, whether defined by dress, diet, or onerous duties, small religious groups can cheaply and effectively monitor the behavior of all their members, notes the anthropologist Richard Sosis. Anyone who cheats another member pays no end of penalties. “Because ruined reputations affect not only business opportunities but also one’s social life, including diminishing the marriage prospects of one’s children and siblings, these threats help to maintain cooperative exchanges,” he notes. The sanctions are so severe, in his view, that it is inexact to speak of trust as the force that holds these business links together. This is not the open-ended trust between people who are powerless if a deal goes wrong, but rather behavior controlled by a heavy threat of ostracism and social ruin, reinforced by supernatural sanction.
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Religious behavior is a way of committing members of a community to a common goal. But these goals, set essentially by the wisdom of society in preceding or current generations, sometimes have adverse effects. Offsetting the positive economic role of raising levels of morality and trust in a society, the three monotheisms probably retarded economic growth for centuries by their prohibitions on charging interest. Judaism barred internal interest rates: Deuteronomy, after banning prostitution and sodomy, stipulates that “Unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury; but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon usury.” Christians interpreted a ban on interest to arise from Luke: “But love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again.” The first Council of Nicaea in A.D. 325 barred clergy from lending money on interest. A thousand years later the charging of interest was no better regarded: Dante put usurers in the seventh circle of hell.

Muslims, similarly, were admonished that “Allah permitteth trad
e and forbiddeth usury.”
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But both religions gradually found ways o
f evading the ban on charging interest. Usury came to be defined as excessive interest. Islamic lawyers developed a series of legal maneuvers to give tacit acceptance to charging interest.

With its communal ideas—“Sell all ye have and give to the poor”—and its strong ascetic strain, early Christianity was not a sound basis for capitalism, and its prediction of an imminent wrap-up of all worldly affairs doubtless did little to encourage long-term investment. Nonetheless, after many centuries and false starts, Christian countries, whether because of their religion or despite it, did stumble upon a set of social attitudes particularly conducive to capitalism.

With the rise of capitalism, many civil institutions came into
being and took over roles long performed by religious bodies, from education to welf
are. States became increasingly secular and, since the Second W
orld War, church attendance in all European countries has decre
ased. Growing numbers of people express no interest in religion, describing themselv
es as agnostics or atheists.

Was Locke correct that atheists cannot be trusted? Atheists and
others insist this is not the case. “Though equating moral
ity with religion is commonplace,” writes the biologist Marc Hauser, “it is wrong in at least
two ways: It falsely assumes that people without religious fai
th lack an understanding of moral rights and wrongs, and that people of religious fa
ith are more virtuous than atheists and agnostics.”
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Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, endorses Hauser’s arguments that religion is unnecessary for generating moral judgments. “We do not need God in order to be good—or evil,” he writes. He ridicules the idea that people are good through fear of divine punishment. A believer who would commit murder if he thought he was no longer under divine surveillance is surely not a very moral person, Dawkins argues. “It seems to me to require quite a low self-regard to think that, should belief in God suddenly vanish from the world, we would all become callous and self ish hedonists, with no kindness, no charity, no generosity, nothing that wou
ld deserve the name of goodness,” he writes.
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Neither argument is fully convincing. The issue is not whether atheists understand moral rights and wrongs but whether or not they will act on this understanding if they harbor no fear of divine punishment. As the Roman poet Ovid confessed:
“Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor—
I see the better course and know it’s right, but I take the worse one.”

Hauser and Dawkins are in principle correct that atheists are just as moral as other people. But the reason is presumably that atheists take at least as good care as everyone else to abide by their community’
s moral standards. And religion surely plays a leading role in shaping and enforcing the community standards that both atheists and believers observe.

Hence the fact that atheists are as moral as anyone else does not means that religion is unnecessary, as some atheists contend. In most European countries less than half the population attends church regularly. But people seem to treat one another with much the same level of concern as when churchgoing was de rigueur. It may be that it requires only a small number of people to establish what moral standards should prevail. The opinion leaders certainly include religious believers, though need not be confined to them. In this way communities achieve consensus on how members should behave toward one another; morality is not an area where diversity within a society is particularly welcome. just as a vaccine may achieve what immunologists call herd immunity, by immunizing merely enough people to break a pathogen’s chain of transmission, religion can help create a moral community if enough people either are believers or behave as if they were.

An interesting question is whether a society composed entirely of atheists could generate ties of morality and trust strong enough for the community to operate effectively. The test of such a society would be whether it could maintain order and civility not just during times of peace and prosperity but also under stressful conditions, such as war and depression. But a large society composed only of atheists may not be available for observation any time soon. Given that religious behavior is part of human nature, such a society is no more likely to emerge than one in which no one plays or appreciates music.

Some neoatheists have tried to turn the argument on religion, saying religion is a source of immorality. By citing bloodcurdling passages from the Old Testament, they accuse Judaism and Christianity of promoting immoral doctrines. If your brother or son or daughter should entice you to worship other gods, advises an author of Deuteronomy, “Thou shalt not consent unto him, nor hearken unto him; neither shall thine eye pity him, neither shalt thou spare, neither shalt thou conceal him: But thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people. And thou shalt stone him with stones, that he die....”
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In his book
The End of Faith
Sam Harris cites this passage in the cour
se of an argument that “we have been slow to recognize th
e degree to which religious faith perpetuates man’s inhumanity to man.”
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Christopher Hitchens cites a similar exhortation in Numbers as “certainly not
the worst of the genocidal incitements that occur in the Old Testament.”
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But the morality of religions cannot be reduced to texts, especially ancient anecdotes that play no role in daily practice. Religions are based on rituals that generate emotional commitment to behave in certain ways. These behaviors for the most part reflect and enforce the current social consensus on what moral standards should be. Religions sometimes get out of step with the consensus—as Mormonism did with po
lygamy and Catholicism does with birth control—but by and large there is an interactive process between each religion and its society in establishing standards of morality and of trust.

 

 

RELIGION HAS LONG BEEN the essential guarantor of a cohesive society. Its role is less evident in modern societies that have divided the world into sacred and secular. Still, whether religious or not, people everywhere tend to abide by their society’s moral standards, and religion plays a strong role in shaping expectations of what those standards should be. These standards are the basis of trust, on which economic activity and much else depend.

Adam Smith described the marketplace as an invisible hand that induced each individual, by following his self-interest, to serve the common interest. But hands come in pairs. An efficient marketplace can operate only on the basis of trust. The counterpart of the invisible hand that works on self-interest is the one that induces moral self-restraint. In most, if not all, societies moral standards have been secured by religion and the fear of divine retribution.

But the influence of religion is not confined to shaping just a society’s public life. The most intimate aspects of private life, starting with reproduction, are subject to religious regulation, for reasons discussed in the next chapter.

GENESIS 1:28

QUR’AN 2:223

 

 

 

R
eligion is based on an implicit negotiation with supernatural powers as a result of which they decree the rules that a society’s leaders consider to be in its best interests. If so, then religions should include many prescriptions that bear on activities critical for a society’s survival, such as its rate of reproduction and the management of natural resources. This is indeed the case. Religions, both ancient and modern, have a lot to say about marriage and sexual activity. Older religions also show evidence of elaborate concern with agriculture and ecological management, matters that in modern states have been taken over by secular institutions.

Because people will follow rules that they believe include divine penalties for disobedience, compliance is high and the society works intensely to accomplish whatever common goals the gods have set. Such an arrangement greatly improves the chances of survival compared with a society that lacks cohesion or common purpose. But survival is by no means assured. The wisdom of the gods, as Durkheim might have noted, can be no better than the collective wisdom of the society and of its past and present leaders. From time to time societies fall under the control of irrational leaders, and when such people impute destructive commands to the gods, the result can be disastrous.

The rate of reproduction is a critical parameter of existence, especially among primitive societies, and religions are a potent means of regulating fertility. Religious practice is usually set so as to increase fertility. Having too few people makes a group vulnerable to attack from more populous neighbors, whereas maintaining a high birth rate is the surest path to survival and dominance, and presents an acute demographic threat to neighbors with a lower fertility rate. But religions can also be used to ratchet down fertility if population numbers exceed the natural resources required for their support.

There are few aspects of human reproduction to which the gods’ interest does not extend. According to the Babylonian Talmud, “The times for conjugal duty prescribed in the Torah are: for men of independence, every day; for labourers, twice a week; for ass-drivers, once a week; for camel-drivers, once in thirty days; for sailors, once in six months. These are the rulings of Rabbi Eliezer.”
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Many societies have religious rules on the timing of intercourse, some of which capture the time of peak fertility quite well, even though the underlying physiology was unknown to the rule-makers. In Jewish law and custom, intercourse is regarded as ritually impure from the start of menstruation until 7 days after its end. The woman then goes to a ritual cleansing bath and it is her husband’s religious duty to make love to her when she returns home. The requirement ensures that the first intercourse occurs within the 3 day period of greatest fertility.