The Faith Instinct (32 page)

Religious bans on contraception, like that of the Catholic church, presumably increase fertility. Mormons, among whom contraception was banned until the mid-twentieth century, have always had a much higher than usual birthrate.

So too have many Muslim communities. Muhammad is said to have ruled polygyny legal after the battle of Badr in 624, when many of his men were killed. Polygyny probably does increase the birthrate in societies with a surplus of women. In balanced societies it seems to reduce fertility, because the richer men who can afford multiple wives are older and less fertile. The surplus of unmarried young men, however, can be helpful for military purposes.

Bans on abortion, instituted by Islam and the Catholic church, may increase fertility. So too may arrangements that allow an infertile wife or husband to be divorced, and place no bar on the remarriage of widows. Homosexuality has traditionally been condemned in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. These prohibitions presumably reflect the belief that homosexuality will reduce a society’s overall fertility.

While some religious rules increase fertility, others have the effect of reducing it. Some Christian churches forbade intercou
rse on ritual occasions, such as on Sundays or during Lent. In the Middle Ages, mari
tal intercourse was forbidden for three 40-day periods each yea
r, on major feast days and for three days before taking communi
on. Given all these restrictions, intercourse among the devout could occur on only 1
60 days out of 365, which must surely have reduced
birthrates.
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The venerable Shaker community of the United States carried sexual abstinence to an extreme. Shakers separated the sexes and forbade procreation. Those who wanted children had to adopt them. The sect could therefore grow only by conversion, but turnover was high. Despite their many distinctive cultural contributions, Shakers could not flourish and their last community is now nearly extinct.

Religious practices can also reduce fertility by raising the age of marriage, permitting abortion, increasing the spacing between children, forcing widows to immolate themselves on the husband’s pyre (the Hindu practice known as suttee), and forbidding divorce between couples who cannot have children.

Some religions countenance the killing of unwanted infants. In India and other countries where sons are more prized than daughters, female babies are allowed to die in various ways. Archaeologists have recovered evidence of child sacrifice from the Inca and Moche civilizations of Peru, from the Aztecs of Mexico, and from Minoan Crete. The most egregious example of the practice is reported from ancient Carthage, where members of the nobility and others were expected to sacrifice their firstborn children to the god Ba’al Hammon. The children seem to have been placed in the arms of a bronze statue which, when the statue was heated, opened and dropped the victims into flames. According to the historian Philo, the children were sacrificed to secure favors from the god, such as safe arrival of a shipment to a foreign port.

So compelling are religious beliefs that people throughout history have accepted the dictates of the gods as governing the most intimate aspects of their private lives. Even when the gods require actions deeply repellent to human nature, such as the sacrifice of a child, their decrees are obeyed. It was presumably in order to control population numbers that societies chose to extend the iron discipline of religion into reproductive behavior.

Religious rules like those above may thus affect almost every point in people’s reproductive lives. To any historian of religion it may seem strange that the gods, in their distant supernatural realm, are so intensely interested in the minutiae of human reproductive activities. But from an evolutionary perspective, the gods’ preoccupation with s
ex makes perfect sense. The rules they decree serve as a powerful method of adjusting a community’s population size to prevailing circumstances.

Whether or not societies throughout history have in fact used religious rules to control population size cannot at present be proved. The adjustments do not seem to have been made explicitly. But the fact that these powerful methods were available strongly suggests they were put to use, even if for the most part implicitly.

Most if not all religions regulate marriage, usually decreeing monogamy or polygyny. Marriage confers several obvious survival advantages. One, probably the origin of the institution, is that a woman has a much better chance of raising infants to adulthood if she has a man to protect her and her family. A man too has a better chance of getting his genes into the next generation if he is committed to the welfare of his children and their mother. Another highly significant benefit of marriage from a society’s perspective is that wedlock, at least in principle, settles a principal cause of strife among men, that of access to women. Marriage finalizes and sanctifies the distribution of women and is thus a central pillar of social stability in monogamous societies. In polygynous societies, a state of generally lesser stability is achieved because many young men cannot find wives and a common solution is to let them risk their lives in military exploits.

Marriage is the most necessary institution for a society keen on reproducing itself. This and other religious rules that increase fertility confer the obvious benefit that greater numbers lead to greater military strength. But larger populations are sometimes at a disadvantage; they may leave everyone living at the edge of starvation, and indeed have done so for much of the agrarian past.

Religious rules are formulated in tacit negotiation with the gods and include many arbitrary elements. Nor is the negotiation process necessarily conscious; religious officials are guided by tradition and what has worked in the past. So it is hard to establish cause and effect between a religious rule and its demographic impact.

Still, religious policies affecting fertility seem too often al
igned with a community’s requirements for the association to be mere chance. A
fter a survey of religions around the world, the social scienti
sts Vernon Reynolds and Ralph Tanner concluded there was a clear pattern between rel
igious rules and a society’s environment. In conditions of poverty, frequent n
atural disasters, disease, infant mortality and low expectation
of life, religions fostered the view that people should have many children. “
We found this kind of religious attitude to be prevalent in man
y Moslem countries, in Hindu India, and in rural African societies,” they repo
rt. But where affluence prevailed, and disease and natural disasters were rare, “
then religious attitudes to childbearing were anti-natalist ...
This attitude we found to be characteristic of modern Westernized countries, whose
primary religion is Christianity.”
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Maintaining a high birthrate is a powerful demographic strategy, especially for small beleaguered sects threatened by larger populations. The Mormon church, for instance, achieved a growth rate of about 40 percent per decade for the first century of its existence, with a temporary spurt of 70 percent per decade in the 1980s, though its growth seems now to be leveling off. The remarkable increase, attained through both a high birthrate and a vigorous missionary program, has secured the church’s continued existence. This was in doubt during its early years when its prophet, Joseph Smith, was killed and its followers driven into exile in the frontier wildernesses of Utah. They doubtless understood that there was safety in numbers and worked to gain them.

Pro-natalist doctrines or practices are evident in other small sects, such as the Amish, Doukhobors and certain Jewish populations, that strive to survive within larger host populations. Demographic growth and fertility can be influenced by many factors, from the spacing of children to the timing of intercourse to the issue of whether widows are allowed to remarry.

Islam was shaped as the state religion of an expansionary Arab
state. Whether or not high fertility is a continuing legacy fr
om that period, Muslim populations in many places have a higher fertility rate than
their non-Muslim neighbors. This demography has potent politica
l consequences, as for instance in Palestine and Israel where t
he Muslim birthrate far exceeds that of Jews. Even in the United States Muslim popul
ation growth exceeds that of all other religious groups except
Mormons, as measured by family size. In the population at large 9 percent of familie
s report 3 or more children living at home, but 21 percent of Mormon families do, an
d 15 percent of Muslims.
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The various conflicts between Muslim countries and their neighbors have been accompanied by a high birthrate in many Islamic countries and this, in the view of some observers, has had unsettling consequences. “The demographic explosion in Muslim societies and the availability of large numbers of often unemployed males between the ages of fifteen and thirty is a natural source of instability and violence both within Islam and against non-Muslims,” writes Samuel Huntington. “Whatever other causes may be at work, this factor alone would go a long way to explaining Muslim violence in the 1980s and 1990s.”
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Demographers generally see economic factors such as affluence and education, not religion, as being the prime influences on birthrate. But religious rules may be one of the mechanisms through which these factors operate. As already noted, the early Christian church adopted strongly pro-natalist rules by elevating the status of women, promoting marriage, prohibiting promiscuity, and classifying abortion and infanticide as murder. The outlawing of abortion gave Christian women in the Roman empire a better survival rate than pagan women, many of whom died while undergoing the frequent abortions demanded by their husbands. The
extra Christian women available to marry pagan men often converted their spouses. All these factors improved fertility, writes the sociologist Rodney Stark, who concludes that “superior fertility contributed to the rise of Christianity.”
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Once Constantine legalized Christianity in the Roman empire, however, the imperative to be fruitful and multiply became less pressing. Christian hermits had begun to live in the Egyptian deserts in the third century A.D. to escape unrest and the persecution of the emperor Diocletian. Their numbers continued to grow after Constantine’s Edict of Milan in 313, in which he ended the persecution of Christians throughout the western half of the Roman empire. Monasteries were soon established throughout the eastern half of the Roman empire, and later in the West.

By the eighth to ninth centuries, 100,000 monks were said to be living under the rule that had been established by Basil, bishop of Caesarea, around 360. Eastern monasticism was “essentially parasitic,” writes Paul Johnson. The monks “had no economic purpose. Indeed, they were one of the spiritual luxuries a rich society could, or at any rate did, afford.”
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Monasticism grew more slowly in the West but eventually a large fraction of the arable land of Europe had fallen into the possession of monastic estates. The European monks, however, became efficient administrators of their extensive holdings and made a more positive contribution to society.

Nonetheless, monasteries and nunneries of any kind curtail fertility. From a biological perspective, do they represent a pathological use of religion, in a similar category to that of cultic mass suicides, or something more conducive to survival? (

An obvious possibility is that monasticism, along with abortion and the other methods of reducing fertility, could in fact have served a practical purpose, whether or not it was consciously exercised. That purpose has to do with the nature of agrarian societies, which perhaps from near the beginning of agriculture 10,000 years ago operated under much the same conditions as those described by the Reverend Thomas Malthus in his gloomy treatise on population growth. Any increase in agricultural productivity raised living standards for a few years but induced people to have more children. Within a generation the surplus was eaten up by the extra mouths and the standard of living reverted to normal, which for most of the population was essentially a notch or two above starvation. Modern economies escape Malthus’s trap through their high rates of productivity, but agrarian economies were caught at the edge of misery, for the reasons Malthus defined, except while recovering from harsh population declines.

The only prolonged improvement in living conditions in European economies seems to have occurred after terrible plagues. “The explanation for the very high living standards of Europeans in the years 1350-1600 was undoubtedly the arrival of the Black Death in 1347,” writes the economic historian Gregory Clark. “Its first onslaught in the year
s 1347 49 carried away 30-50 percent of the population of Europe.... After its initial onset the plague offered Europeans a greatly enhanced material lifestyle at small cost in terms of the average length of life. In the Malthusian world gifts from God took surprising forms! ”
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Clearly agrarian societies could have attained better living standards by constraining their fertility, and religious practices such as monasticism and abortion, whether or not consciously shaped to this end, would have been a means to do so.

Throughout history religious beliefs have proved strong enough to govern people’s sexual behavior, overriding even the strongest biological imperatives. A modern-day example is provided by a renegade Mormon sect, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, whose polygynous prophet, Warren Jeffs, shared out women with his associates, giving each man a right to three wives. But this required some social engineering to adjust the sect’s sex ratio accordingly. Jeffs’s solution was to force parents to expel teenage boys from the community, using any minor infraction of the sect’s strict rules as an excuse. Fathers who failed to oust a young boy designated as a rule breaker would have their wives taken away.
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Few human bonds are stronger than those of family, but the prophet’s dictates induced parents to abandon and exile their teenage children. Once the innate susceptibility to fear supernatural justice is triggered, people will go to almost any lengths to obey what priests or rulers tell them is the gods’ will.