RELIGION: THE BIG RED WELLINGTON BOOT

By Hugh Thomas

I'd like to pose a question: why do people become religious? Anthropologists are said to have found that all societies yet discovered have a concept of God, seeming to imply that it must therefore be somehow natural and therefore true. Yet I'd be prepared to bet that if you looked into it, all tribes on record would also have a concept of piles, athlete's foot and lumbago. Just because it's ubiquitous doesn't mean it's desirable, natural or right. So just how do the believers get their religion? My own experiences in growing up yielded a number of interesting but inconclusive case studies. One twelve year old classmate was converted to born-again-dom by a blinding flash of inspiration he experienced during a performance of the rock opera Godspell. When relating the tale, he even attached the revelation of God's existence to hearing a particular line in Act 2. Another contemporary turned up at school a couple of years later announcing that he was now a Scientologist. He proceeded to try to recruit peers to L. Ron Hubbard's ranks by promising that if they started spending all their pocket money on Dianetics books he'd show them how they could fly like birds. Few of his mates seemed impressed, and a previously popular boy became widely shunned. Such instances apart, religion figured little in my formative years. Never mentioned by my tacitly yet robustly atheist parents, it cropped up in a certain amount of the usual Jesus Loves Me junk at school, but I took this for the story book stuff it always obviously was. Clearly, I saw, religion was silly, old fashioned stuff, dying out in all but a few backward places. Then in a sixth form RE lesson I was surprised to find that a show of hands yielded a sizable majority of professed believers. The teacher, a former minister, expressed (to seemingly general nods of approval) the opinion that those of us in the atheist minority should have "grown out of that" by now. Sixth form girls referred to "their faith" in the ensuing discussion.

The teacher even accused us of having closed minds in comparison to his own, open, one. When I asked him when he had last changed his opinion on anything however, he changed the subject. "Have you ever wondered how your arm works?", a glassy eyed American student asked me in my first week at university, flexing his forearm with a look of wonderment and relishing the obvious expectation of chalking my soul up on his belt. "Have you ever heard of biology, physics, chemistry or the theory of evolution?", I would answer now, but at the time the diffidence of youth led me to make my excuses and leave at the earliest opportunity. The question began to nag at me: how the hell do these people - some of whom seem quite sensible, normal types - get that way? Why do they seem so completely sold on something which is so clearly nonsensical after even a moment's application of logical thought? Faith, as someone once put it, is the capacity to believe in something you know is not true. Then in my second year at university I happened to take a subsidiary course which started to lift the scales from my eyes. The course was Experimental Psychology, and it was the lectures on Animal Behaviour which I found of particular interest. What I learned there all fitted perfectly as an explanation for the propagation of religion. The lecturer told us about the work of people like Konrad Lorenz on the process of imprinting. Imprinting, briefly, refers to the habit of young animals like newly hatched ducklings or chickens to latch onto and follow around the first thing they see after birth. Normally this is their mother so the behaviour is highly adaptive as the young stick where it is safe and they are looked after. But Lorenz showed that the power of instinct could be misdirected, for instance if the mother was removed and another object substituted. Lorenz was able to demonstrate his ability to lead a line of happily cheeping chicks around a farmyard, imprinted on his red wellington boot. Once imprinted with an object, no amount of effort could get the young bird to shift its affections to a more appropriate object. In the same way, I suggest, the young human mind may undergo a similar sensitive period where particular objects - people, ideas, habits, vices, political or religious ideologies - become the subject of fixations which may be life long in influence. "Once a Catholic, always a Catholic," it is said, and this may reflect the tenacity with which the more successful religions go in for imprinting their young on the red welly of religion. Catching 'em young with the maximum impact is the approach: making sure the first thing the chick sees as it leaves the shell is that big red welly. Churches know how few they'd have in their congregations if they left it till people were at the age of consent before becoming eligible for joining.

Someone once did a correlational study comparing people's religion with those of their parents. Surprise, surprise, there was of course a near 100 per cent correlation. Sudden coversions in the front stalls apart, the biggest determinant of your religious beliefs is the beliefs of your family before you: otherwise we'd be finding Christians, Moslems, Buddhists and the rest scattered randomly around the world, instead of within the obviously sectarian boundaries where we actually find them. It is far fetched in the extreme to suppose that people choose particular religions because they have wrestled with their consciences and worked out which is the right one. In fact, and the realisation may be shocking to some, what happens in the vast majority of cases is they believe what they are trained to believe in their critical early years when their minds are most impressionable. Seeing religion in this light can be most informative. It explains the tenacity with which believers cling to their creeds in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Just as Lorenz' chicks would prefer red wellies to their own species as partners when they grew to sexual maturity, the imapct of maladaptive religious imprinting can have knock on effects well into adulthood. Over-population, wars, sectarian hatreds and prevention of scientific progress are some of the symptoms we see around us. This view also has significant implications for our education systems and child rearing practices, for what we are dealing with here are the deeply entrenched beliefs determining how people live their lives and see the world. Should individuals and institutions be allowed the right systematically to program - brainwash even - the impressionable young with their demonstrably false ideas? Yet to suggest otherwise seems to deny the right of people to bring up their children in the way they wish. The solution, if one exists, requires that a substitute be provided to society to replace that big red welly of religion. Our job, as Rationalists and Humanists, is to try to change people's beliefs and inbred attitudes, and make sure that the big red welly is given the order of the boot.

The above article is reprinted from The Freethinker magazine by kind permission of the National Secular Society

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