The Varieties & Illusions of Religious Experience: Chapter 12, Defense Mechanisms, Faith and Intolerance

i.
You will recall that the account of William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience overlaps in significant ways with Freud's account in The Future of an Illusion. Specifically, James is willing to admit along with Freud that religious faith can function as an existential defense mechanism, an "anxiety buffer" to use the language of Terror Management Theory (TMT). In the last chapter we reviewed the evidence from TMT studies concerning worldview defense. That is, if our worldviews are existentially vital we protect them from threat. One type of threat is encountering an out-group member, someone who doesn't share our cultural values and belief systems. The mere existence of these people prompt worries about the arbitrary nature of worldviews. But rather than face this anxiety we engage in worldview defense by denigrating out-group members. As quoted from Greenberg et al. (1990) the last post:

[T]he practical significance of our findings is clear. Mortality salience appears to increase in-group favoritism, rejection of those who are different, and authoritarian tendencies. This suggests that whenever events heighten mortality salience (e.g., newspaper accounts of catastrophes or violence in intergroup and interindividual conflicts), in-group solidarity, out-group derogation, nationalism, religious extremism, prejudice, discrimination, and intolerance of deviance are likely to escalate. More generally, the findings are consistent with the oft-stated contention that prejudice and hostility toward those who are different may be one particularly costly means of coping with fears and insecurities.

Interestingly, William James in The Varieties reaches a conclusion similar to Greenberg et al. in his discussion of the healthy-minded type. Recall, the healthy-minded type is the type that converges upon Freud's analysis of religious illusion. In comparing the healthy-minded type with the sick soul James makes the following contrast:

If religious intolerance and hanging and burning could again become the order of the day, there is little doubt that, however it may have been in the past, the healthy-minded would at present show themselves the less indulgent party of the two [i.e., compared to the sick soul].

Given what we observed in the last chapter regarding worldview defense, James's quote is remarkably prescient. James notes, about 90 years before the advent of Terror Management Theory and the worldview defense hypothesis, that existential defensiveness is implicated in religious intolerance. The logic is the same as we've seen in the TMT literature: The defensive posture is brittle and we act hostilely to protect our worldviews. To date, I have yet to see a citation in the TMT literature noting how James anticipated the the worldview defense effect, but it seems clear that he did.

ii.
I began this chapter with William James because he was the first to hypothesize a link between existential defensiveness and religious intolerance. But the first empirical test of this hypothesis occurred in 1990 when Pyszczynski, Solomon, Rosenblatt, Veeder, Kirkland and Lyon conducted the first analysis of religious belief using the TMT paradigm.

The experimental protocol was similar to the Greenberg et al. (1992) study discussed in the last chapter. In that study, after a mortality salience manipulation, American participants were asked to evaluate pro-America and anti-America essays. Obviously, the pro-America essay bolsters the American cultural worldview (its values and beliefs) while the anti-America essay attacks the American worldview. It was observed in Greenberg et al. that in the face of the mortality salience prime the American participants engaged in worldview defense. Relative to the control condition the mortality salience participants became more patriotic, embracing the pro-America author and denigrating the anti-America author.

The importance of this study is that it establishes a link between patriotism, intolerance and death anxiety. More specifically, following the work of Ernest Becker, patriotism is a form of death repression. Or, positively stated, patriotism is a form of death transcendence. The values and beliefs of "the American way" provide Americans means to achieve meaning, self-esteem and significance. Of course, the American way is just one path among many paths for achieving a good life. Other nations embody different paths toward significance. And yet, in the face of death, Americans are driven by existential fear to consider their way as more true and worthy than others. And that xenophobic stance is being driven by an unconscious existential worry, an influence Americans are almost wholly unaware of.

So much for worldviews based upon nationalism. What about religious worldviews? The Pyszczynski et al. study focused upon Christian participants. After going through either a control or mortality salience manipulation (see the last chapter for details) the Christian participants were asked to read through two questionnaires ostensibly filled out by two anonymous people. These questionnaires included background information and attitude ratings on a variety of social and political issues. To make the surveys look real and distinct one of the questionnaires was filled out in a way that looked socially conservative and the other as socially liberal. These two profiles were switched back and forth during the study so that any effects due to the content of the surveys (conservative or liberal) would be spread evenly across a religious affiliation manipulation.

The religious affiliation manipulation involved the following. In the demographics attached to one questionnaire the person's religious affiliation was noted as Jewish. The person ostensibly filling out the second questionnaire was identified as Christian.

After looking over the two questionnaires regarding social issues the Christian participants were asked to rate the two people along a variety of descriptors such as honest, trustworthy, intelligent, warm, and kind. The researchers also included traits associated with negative Jewish stereotypes in the anti-Semitic literature: stingy, manipulative, arrogant, snobbish, and obnoxious.

Let's try to narrow in on what this study was doing. The Christian participants were looking over the shoulder of two strangers, creating impressions of these people by looking over their answers to social and political issues. After reading through these surveys the Christian participants were asked to share their impressions via a rating scale. After the counterbalancing, where the liberal essay was associated with each author 50% of the time and the conservative essay the other 50% (thus removing any systematic bias due to essay content), the only difference between the two essays was found in the demographic section of the surveys. One person was a Christian, the other a Jew. That is, the Christian participants were rating an in-group member and an out-group member relative to their own religious worldview. The research question was straightforward: Would the Christian participants display worldview defense in response to the mortality salience manipulation?

The results were clear. There were no rating differences observed in the control condition. Control participants did not favor the Christian over the Jew. But a significant effect was observed in the mortality salience condition. That is, after being reminded of their death the Christian participants favored the Christian over the Jew. Further, when the Christian target was rated first the Jewish person was rated significantly higher on the subset of anti-Semitic characteristics. That is, when the opportunity was given to compare the Jewish person to the Christian anti-Semitic judgements emerged. But again, only after the death prime.

In short, as we saw with nationalism in the last chapter, death anxiety was linked with anti-Semitism. In the face of death Christians defended their worldview by denigrating religious "outsiders," in this case a Jew.

iii.
What we observe in the Pyszczynski et al. study is the effect anticipated by William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience. That is, religious intolerance is linked to existential fears. More specifically, intolerance emerges when religion is used as an existential "anxiety buffer." When faith is functioning as an "existential drug" as Freud suggested religious persons are unable to encounter the out-group member honestly and openly. The out-group member is too existentially threatening. The narcotic functions of faith are interfering with both rationality and morality. For the existentially defensive religious person the effect of consolation is what is most valuable and, thus, the faith system is defended from anything that might question its validity. If the faith system is called into question its ability to console is compromised.

The Pyszczynski et al. study strongly supports Freud's thesis in The Future of an Illusion. It does appear that religious faith is a form of existential consolation. In the face of death faith is deployed defensively, as a means of protecting consolation. In the wake of this TMT research we should admit that Freud's thesis has strong evidence behind it. Freud's claim isn't just abstract theoretical speculation. Laboratory data back up the broad outlines of his thesis. Faith can and does function as an illusion.

So, Round One goes to Freud. But is that all there is to say on the subject? We noted at the beginning of this essay that William James was willing to admit that existential defensiveness is associated with religious intolerance. But James was speaking about the healthy-minded believer. What about the sick soul? According to James, the sick soul, being more existentially honest, should be more tolerant of out-group members. Further, sick souls should be relatively resistant to mortality salience manipulations in TMT studies. Recall how James described the sick soul:

To ascribe religious value to mere happy-go-lucky contentment with one's brief chance at natural good is but the very consecration of forgetfulness and superficiality. Our troubles lie indeed too deep for that cure. The fact that we can die, that we can be ill at all, is what perplexes us; the fact that we now for a moment live and are well is irrelevant to that perplexity.

Back of everything is the great spectre of universal death, the all-encompassing blackness...In short, life and its negation are beaten up inextricably together. But if the life be good, the negation of it must be bad. Yet the two are equally essential facts of existence; and all natural happiness thus seems infected with a contradiction. The breath of the sepulchre surrounds it.

If James is correct in these characterizations, if sick souls consciously engage the issue of death, can they really be affected by mortality salience manipulations? Would reminding sick souls of their death affect them in any significant way? If James is to be believed, the answer is no, sick souls should be unaffected by TMT manipulations. Reminding people who already think a lot about death about their death would be a fairly innocuous manipulation. According to James, only the healthy-minded should be reactive to the mortality salience manipulation. Given that the healthy-minded are using faith to prevent death-related material access into conscious awareness a mortality salience manipulation would be anxiety inducing for these types of participants.

In short, a weakness of Pyszczynski et al. study, although they can't be blamed for this, is that they failed to consider the varieties of religious experience. By moving an undifferentiated group of "Christians" though a mortality salience manipulation they failed to test how subgroups within the Christian faith react or fail to react in the face of TMT manipulations. According to James, the healthy-minded would engage in worldview defense (e.g., display intolerance) while the sick souls would not display worldview defense. In sum, although the first wave of TMT research examining religious belief appears to side with Freud, by failing to distinguish the healthy-minded from the sick souls we've yet to fully adjudicate between Freud and James. The only way to fully test James's notion of religious varieties is to isolate the sick souls and make them, in contrast to their healthy-minded counterparts, face a mortality salience manipulation. If the sick souls were unaffected by TMT manipulations and didn't engage in worldview defense then the findings of studies like Pyszczynski et al. require nuance and qualification. Research into the existential dynamics of faith cannot approach a faith group as homogeneous. There are varieties of religious experience.

To conclude, we need to revisit the Pyszczynski et al. study. Only this time we need to isolate the sick souls in the population prior to the mortality salience manipulation. In the next two chapters I'll tell the story of how, in my own research, I tried to do just this to create a more accurate test of the Freud/James debate.