The Psychology of Belief, Part 8: Quest

I've got to admit that this series has been kinda random, but here is what I was hoping to argue…

There is a certain configuration of religion that is highly explosive. Last week I tried to paint what that configuration looks like:

1.) Certainty: A feeling that what is right vs. wrong or moral vs. immoral is a FACT that is obvious to everyone and universally binding.
2.) Ingroup: The creation of an ingroup and an outgroup.
3.) Infrahumanization: Viewing the outgroup as less intelligent, honest, or righteous because they disagree with the ingroup.
4.) Victimization: A victim mentality justifying aggression (overt or psychological) toward the outgroup.

This configuration of forces is like dry brush out here in West Texas. Just a small spark and you get a conflagration.

Sam Harris (see first post in this series) notes these problems and should get some credit for bringing that discussion to the fore. But Harris goes on to suggest that religious moderates, people with a different religious configuration, have little to say to religious fundamentalists. I disagree. In the last three posts I've outlined a different way of approaching faith. Thus, I think a religious moderate can say a lot to a religious fundamentalist in order to attenuate the fundamentalist's strong certainty and ingroup/outgroup mentality.

Specifically, in the last few posts I've highlighted the following as a contrast to the "explosive" configuration listed above:

1.) Pragmatic belief: We don't act from certainty, but from the best information we have on hand.
2.) Religious Experience: We only get "hints" and "guesses" about God's activity and will in the world. Thus, we act humbly.
3.) Discernment: We cannot interpret our own religious experience. To do so would lead to deviance. We must intermingle our story with both Scripture and the larger community.
4.) Agreement: We seek to find expanding circles of agreement, thus reducing ingroup/outgroup tensions.

This list brings me back to psychology (where I feel a lot more comfortable).

In my area of research, the psychology of religion, the holy grail is to find a way to capture the "optimal" religious life. That is, a life that manifests the best of faith: Love of humanity, high ethical standards, deep spirituality. The difficulty for researchers like me is how to measure these things. Why would we want to measure these things? Well, because people differ on these dimensions. Not all religious people are humane, not all are ethical, and not all are spiritual. But many are. Psychologists would like to identify (i.e., measure) these differences because we would like to know how each "type" of person is produced. Does family matter? Does church matter? Does theology matter? The point being that, if we could find the correlates of optimal or dysfunctional faith, our efforts at spiritual formation might be more empirically informed.

But, to date, we don't yet know how to assess "optimal" religious functioning. All we have are partial measurements assessing a piece of the religious life. Relevant to this series is a religious variable known as "Quest."

Introduced in the 1970s by the psychologist Daniel Batson (see Batson, Schoenrade, & Ventis, 1993, for a review), I've worked some with the Quest construct (Beck, R., Baker, L., Robbins, M., & Dow, S. 2001. A second look at Quest Motivation: Is Quest multidimensional or unidimensional? Journal of Psychology and Theology, 29, 148-157; Beck, R. & Jessup, R. 2004. The multidimensional nature of Quest motivation. Journal of Psychology and Theology, 32, 283-294.). Specifically, Batson has suggested that a religious person high on Quest motives should, in Batson’s words, be “involve[d] [in] honestly facing existential questions in all their complexity, while at the same time resisting clear-cut, pat answers.” More specifically, Quest involves three related features: 1.) Readiness to face existential questions, 2.) openness to change, and 3.) a positive view of doubt.

In short, a religious person high on Quest motives sees faith as, well, a "quest." A journey. That is, they have not already "arrived." Faith is a process, a work in progress. The feature of Quest I've been most intrigued with in my own research is this "positive view of doubt." In my papers I typically call it "tentativeness."

What is interesting to me is that religious people high on "tentativeness" generally report better relationship with God and are more altruistic. Fascinating isn't it? Why would doubt produce such great stuff?

I think, after all these posts, we see why. Doubt and tentativeness open us up to both God and others. It means that the answers await us and the adventure of faith is in full swing. We don't own the truth right now, so we don't have to protect it. We don't have to build a fortress separating Us from Them. Rather, we leave the fortress behind, journeying forth on our glorious communal adventure to seek the face of God.

This is our quest.