The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture (18 page)

Where do you get your values and morals? You got much of what you believe from your family and those responsible for your upbringing. While you may have been told that these beliefs and morals came from some religious source, in reality, they came from your culture. A cursory look at religious values and morals over the last few centuries shows that religion changes with the culture. For example, what was once a terrible sin is now widely accepted – divorce. St. Paul said a woman should always have her head covered in church.
¹
Who remembers when women had to cover their head in a Protestant or Catholic Church? It was still a requirement in Catholicism as recently as 1969.

No virus could survive if it did not adjust morality through time. For example, the Catholic Church would be far smaller if it kept its 1950s moral view of divorce. Annulments increased from a base of 368 in 1969 to an average exceeding 40,000 per year in the United States through the 1990s to present. Since the 1990s, the United States, with only 4% of all Catholics in the world, accounted for 75% of all annulments. It is clear that the Catholic Church is adjusting the morality of divorce, to compete in the U.S. culture. Without the annulments, those people and their financial resources might be lost to the church.
²

Some Baptist churches would be empty if they maintained their 1900s prohibition on gambling and alcohol.
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Better to have tithing Baptist gamblers than no church at all, I guess. Where would the Episcopal Church be if it maintained its 1900s view of women? How would Southern Baptists
fare if they had maintained their slavery views of 1850? Southern Baptists were founded as a proslavery church in the great schism over Northern anti-slavery activity.
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They had dozens of biblical verses to back them up. A reading of the Bible shows no divine problem with slavery. Nowhere does the Bible say slavery is wrong, so the antislavery ideas could not have come from Christians, despite their claims. Instead, antislavery sentiment came from enlightenment ideas that were adopted by some religious groups and not by others. If morality is unchanging, why is there no proslavery church anymore? How could something so important suddenly lose its moral imperative? It is similar to the revelation of god to the Mormon president in 1890 that officially ended polygamy, allowing Utah to become a state. When the culture changes, the religion changes, or it loses influence and the ability to propagate. Huge moral issues seem to disappear in the face of cultural change.

1
But every woman who has her head uncovered while praying or prophesying, disgraces her head …(1 Corinthians 11:5).

2
Clarence J. Hettinger, “The End of the Annulment Explosion,”
Homiletic,
vol. 3 (2007): 96.

3
This is reminiscent of The Four Great Religious Truths: 1. Muslims do not recognize the Jews as God’s chosen people. 2. Jews do not recognize Jesus as the Messiah. 3. Protestants do not recognize the pope as the leader of the Christian world. 4. Baptists do not recognize each other at Hooters and liquor stores.

As late as the 1960s, it was a scandal for women to wear pants, especially inside a church. Could a Nazarene church keep its doors open if women who wear pants were excluded from the rolls? Sex before marriage was unthinkable in most churches in the 1930s. I wonder how many U.S. Catholics have premarital sex now? Premarital sex does not get the attention and condemnation it once did in many religious groups. Dramatically declining birth rates among Catholics would indicate that birth control is no longer seen as a sin despite church doctrine. The Church does not appear to sanction anyone for using birth control.

Religious leaders who claim morality is unchanging have short memories. Groups like the Society of Christians for the Restoration of Old Testament Morality make broad claims about unchanging morality, yet few would propose a full enforcement of biblical passages that endorse slavery, stoning of adulterers or witches. Few would banish those who believe the Latin Vulgate Bible is of higher authority than the King James Version, etc. Even among so-called fundamentalists, the religion does whatever it needs in order to survive in the biota of surrounding god viruses and culture.

4
One of the primary reasons for the split in 1841 was the right of Baptist ministers to hold slaves. Slavery was not disavowed in the Southern Baptist Convention until June 20, 1995, in a formal “Declaration of Repentance”. Christian Century,
SBC renounces racist past - Southern Baptist Convention
[article on-line] (5 July 1995, accessed 22 November 2008); available from
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1058/is_n21_v112/ai_17332136/pg_1
; Internet.

Study after study over the last 20 years has shown no correlation between morality and religiosity.
^5
,
6
We will explore some of this research, but first let’s set the stage.

Most people claim that they are more moral because of their religion. Yet most religious people I have observed seem no more moral than those who are not religious, despite their claims. Religious people seem to break the Ten Commandments just as much as those who never go to church, but we should put this to some kind of statistical test. For example, who gets divorced more? Who commits crimes or goes to prison more? These might be rough estimates of relative morality.

If someone were to make the claim that religion makes him more moral, I would ask, “How would you prove that?” The answer is usually something along the lines of “religiosity equals morality.” The more religious a person is, the more moral he is in his eyes and maybe in the eyes of other religious people of his faith. The standard is anything but objective. In fact, people are hard pressed to define the standard of morality. That is, the god virus makes a person feel more moral without regard to objective reality.

Baptists, Catholics, Nazarenes and Muslims all make claims that their religion makes them more moral. If this were true, we would expect to see some evidence of this in commonly available statistics on crime.

5
Bart Duriez and Bart Soenens, “Religiosity, moral attitudes and moral competence: A critical investigation of the religiosity-morality relation, Department of Psychology, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium,”
International Journal of Behavioral Development
Vol. 30, No. 1, (2006): 76-83.

6
B. Duriez, “Are religious people nicer people? Taking a closer look at the religion-empathy relationship,”
Mental Health, Religion & Culture
7, no.3 (2004): 249-254.

Many a Sunday morning sermon has derided the immorality of atheism or secular humanists. Yet self-identified Atheists are almost non-existent in the prison system. Self-identified Baptists, Evangelicals, Catholics and Muslims show prison rates roughly equal to the general population. There is no statistical evidence that religious affiliation has any positive effect on criminal behavior. Baptists seem to commit crimes roughly equal to their numbers in the general population. The same is true for Catholics, Methodists and most others.

The one group that seems to be underrepresented in the prison population is self-identified Atheists and Agnostics.
⁷
One study found Atheists are .5% of the federal prison population out of a possible 6-10% in the general population; that is, they are underrepresented by 70%. Some prison surveys find no Atheists at all.
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Europe, with its much higher number of Atheists, doesn’t have nearly the crime rate of the United States. Pagans and Wiccans, who are vilified by Christians as immoral because they don’t worship the Christian god, don’t make up a higher percentage of the prison population. If criminal behavior is a rough measure of morality, then many groups seem to have morality at least equal to that of Christians. To date there is no evidence that religion or religiosity has a positive impact on crime.

7
Harris Interactive,
While Most Americans Believe in God, Only 36% Attend a Religious Service Once a Month or More Often
[article on-line] (15 October 2003, accessed 22 November 2008); available from
http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/index.asp?PID=408
; Internet. This survey found that “79% of Americans believe there is a God and that 66% are absolutely certain this is true. Only 9% do not believe in God, while a further 12% are not sure.”

8
Denise Golumbaski, Research Analyst, Federal Bureau of Prisons,
The results of the Christians vs atheists in prison investigation.
[article on-line] (5 March 1997, accessed 20 November 2008); available from
http://www.holysmoke.org/icr-pri.htm
; Internet.

A study published in the
Annals of Family Medicine
looked for differences between more religious and non-religious physicians serving the poor or underserved.
⁹
The conclusion was that
Physicians who are more religious do not appear to disproportionately care for the underserved.
In this sample, 31% of those scoring high on religiosity worked among the poor or underserved compared to 35% of those who described themselves as Atheist, agnostic or none. In his conclusion, study author Farr Curlin, M.D., wrote,

This came as both a surprise and a disappointment. The Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist scriptures all urge physicians to care for the poor, and the great majority of religious physicians describe their practice of medicine as a calling. Yet we found that religious physicians were not more likely to report practice among the underserved than their secular colleagues.

Many evangelical groups see divorce as a sign of immorality and rail against it from the pulpit. We might expect to see religion having a positive effect in this area but we would be wrong. The highly Christian and religious state of Oklahoma has a higher divorce rate than the less religious citizens of Massachusetts. Throughout the United States, divorce rates are highest where evangelical religious practices are strongest, in the Bible Belt.
¹⁰

A 1999 study of divorce by the Barna Research Group found that evangelicals and fundamentalists had divorce rates higher than more liberal religious groups, and much higher than Atheists.
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The Southern Baptist Convention became quite incensed by these findings, causing a major debate in the denomination and some challenge to Dr. Barna. This reaction prompted George Barna, the lead researcher, to write a letter to defend his research. Standing by his data, even though it is upsetting, Dr. Barna
wrote, “We rarely find substantial differences between the moral behaviors of Christians and non-Christians. We would love to be able to report that Christians are living very distinct lives and impacting the community, but ... in the area of divorce rates they continue to be the same.”
¹²

9
Farr A. Curlin, MD, Lydia S. Dugdale, MD, John D. Lantos, MD and Marshall H. Chin, MD, MPH, "Do Religious Physicians Disproportionately Care for the Underserved?,"
Annals of Family Medicine, Inc.
5 (2007): 353-360.

10
David Crary, “Bible Belt Leads U.S. in Divorces,”
Associated Press
12 November 1999.

11
See
Chapter 10
of this book for the statistics from this study.

A few years later, the Southern Baptist Convention admitted that the statistics were probably right and began developing a DivorceCare package for Baptist churches. As of 2002, almost half of all Southern Baptists churches had adopted the program.
¹³
No evidence has since been produced to show whether the program has had any effect on Baptists' divorce rates.

While these are not definitive studies of comparative morality, they do not bode well for religious claims of superior morality.

I received a thorough fundamentalist education. I was forced to sit through countless sermons and Sunday School lessons about the unchanging morality of the Bible. So, what did my religion teach me?

As in most of life’s lessons, the real learning comes not from the spoken word but from observed behavior. All religions of the Book
¹⁴
place a great deal of weight on the word but tend to overlook the simple notion, “What impact does the word have on behavior?” Do people who get more of the word behave better?

My religion was full of contradictory and strange messages. Do any of the following sound familiar to you?

• Women should be honored and respected but they are inferior to men. (Colossians 3:18).