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SOC 420 Lesson 6 Module: The Good, Bad, and Ugly (Religion’s Social Aspects)
There were honest people long before there were Christians and there are, God be praised, still honest
people where there are no Christians. It could therefore easily be possible that people are Christians
because true Christianity corresponds to what they would have been even if Christianity did not exist.
—G.C. Lichtenberg, 18th century German scientist
You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all
the same people you do.
—Anne Lamott, contemporary American writer and activist
I'm frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want
to be a moral person, I must believe in A, B, C, and D. Just who do they think they are? And from where
do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as a
legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted
right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every
step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of
conservatism.
—Barry Goldwater, U.S. Senator and 1964 presidential candidate from Arizona
(All three quotes according to http://www.quotegarden.com/religion.html)
Religion has had a long and colorful history in human society. Throughout that history,
contributions to the development of society have been attributed to religion, notably positive
social values as well as advances in knowledge and technology. Likewise, various problems and
crises have also arisen. These have included political involvement in religion, bigotry, wars over
belief and territory that different groups consider sacred, etc. With apologies to Clint Eastwood,
throughout history, we have seen the good, the bad, and the ugly arise in connection with
religion. Some modern critics blame religion itself for this, though an even more problematic
common thread exists in all these religion-connected incidents, good and bad alike: The
involvement of human beings. As we’ve discussed in a previous lesson, it’s a bit nonsensical to
label any religion a “religion of peace” or any other such generalization. This is not because
religions don’t teach peace—virtually all of them do, particularly the world’s major religious
movements. But it’s then up to the human beings involved in the religion to put those teachings
into practice. Some humans are much better at practicing peace than others. To somewhat
grossly paraphrase Karl Marx, the history of religion is the history of human involvement.
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Let’s take a look at how human involvement in religion has produced good, bad, and ugly alike
in these required articles:
Reading 1: Idler, Ellen. 2008. “The Psychological and Physical Benefits of Spiritual/Religious
Practices.” Spirituality in Higher Education (newsletter), vol. 4 no. 2. Pp 1-5.
Reading 2: Dawkins, Richard. 2003 (November 19-20). “The Science of Religion” and “The
Religion of Science.” Transcript of The Tanner Lectures on Human Values. Harvard University.
Online.
Recommended for Further Interest:
Mochon, Daniel, with Michael I. Norton and Daniel Ariely. 2011. “Who Benefits from
Religion?” Social Indicators Research (Springer), vol. 101 no. 1, pp. 1-15.
Public Broadcasting System (no date). “History.” Faith and Reason. pbs.org. Web.
Now that we’ve covered the readings, just a few words about the humanity of it all, starting with
my own. As noted elsewhere, I am a religious believer, though I likewise respect the historic
significance of science and the utility of the scientific process. As such, I have attempted to cover
this subject fairly and with as little bias as possible. But granted, what bias still remains is likely
a believer’s bias—though, as we shall discuss, the believer’s bias is far from limited to only me.
 As also discussed in previous lessons, I profoundly value the free marketplace of ideas. So in
the interest of fairness, I have asked you to read this article by Richard Dawkins, even though I
don’t exactly endorse his arguments, shall we say. Still, there is a great deal to learn from in his
ideas; for example, few experts today understand the scientific process as well as he does.
Also as noted elsewhere, I see little reason to draw a dividing line between science and religion.
Although the history of both has seen a fair share of disagreement and even power struggles,
such as the trial of Galileo, the outright attempt to fundamentally split the two is only recent—
since Darwin, in fact. But in the largely European medieval and Renaissance time periods all the
way through the first half of the 19th century, religious men (yes, primarily men in these times
and places) explored and shaped what we now know as modern science. Let’s duly acknowledge
an argument from more than a few believers: Perhaps science and religion alike would not exist
without inspiration and/or revelation from deity. But as with other belief claims, we will leave
the Ultimate Truth of this question to the theologians and examine the role of humans in religion
and science alike. The origins of religion, science, philosophy, art, and many other bodies of
knowledge may have stemmed from deity. Yet it seems beyond question that humans have been
primarily responsible for their operation and development. So we will approach this topic from
that standpoint and examine science and religion alike as largely human-operated phenomena.
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Taking a look at known history, we see a great deal of religious involvement with the processes
of societal development and knowledge. The Greeks and Romans both had very well-developed
religious mythologies. (Please note that I use the term “mythology” in the sense of a story
considered sacred by a group of people, past or present, not in the sense of a known fiction or
deliberate falsehood.) Greco-Roman mythology has since been passed down to us today, most
recognizably in the form of narratives and memorable characters. This may be particularly true
for those of us who have picked up any books in the Percy Jackson series, though that’s just a
few crystals on the tip of the iceberg.  Also influential were Egyptian and Norse mythologies,
as well as the Semitic traditions that produced the Judeo-Christian religious accounts, all of
which likewise influenced world history and literature alike. Hinduism and later Buddhism also
profoundly influenced Asia, though the influence of these religions remained largely in that area
for centuries.
As we know, all of these but monotheistic Judeo-Christianity and non-theistic Buddhism were
polytheistic societies, assigning various valued attributes to a pantheon of deities. The Egyptians
had a multitude of traditions that continually changed, so that different attributes were ascribed
to different deities at different times—hence, the somewhat confusing and contradictory nature
of the mythology we’ve inherited from the Egyptians. Interestingly, the Egyptian experience
even featured a brief monotheistic experiment under Akhenaten. The Nordic cultures attributed
various qualities, events, and circumstances to the gods of Valhalla, who rarely intervened in
mortal affairs. The ancient Hebrews, often in defiance of their polytheistic neighbors, located all
positive attributes in a single all-powerful God, who was very much involved in earthly and
human matters, though at times more subtly than others. The Greeks and Romans in particular
developed similar religious systems that originated from a common source, though the Romans
also adapted a fair amount of Greek mythology. Parenthetically, post-Biblical Christianity also
borrowed a great deal from Greco-Roman cultural heritage (in part because many early Christian
converts were Greek and Roman!), though these contributions aren’t usually as well-noted.
In any case, the Greeks and Romans each saw in their deities that which they valued most:
wisdom, love, and power for the Greeks in Athena, Aphrodite, and Zeus; protective power,
social stability, intelligence, and warlike power in Jupiter, Juno, Minerva, and Mars. All these
mythologies have had an inestimably profound influence on our modern world, particularly in
terms of
folklore. Nordic
legends gave us
giants, dragons,
trolls, and
dwarves (and even
magic rings,
Tolkien fans!), 
while Egypt
contributed an
early form of the
divine right of
kings, Pharaoh,
Biblical influence,
and mummies.
The JudeoChristian
context also
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The Greek goddess Athena governed wisdom,
counterbalance to the angry passion of Ares, god of war. The city of Athens not
only bore her name but produced many of the Greek philosophers that are still
widely admired today. Image from ishareimage.com.
became important in the post-Biblical period, but the ideas of the Greeks and the Romans may
have been the most deeply embedded in European-influenced culture for the longest period of
time. Philosophy, art, politics and governance, humanism, science, biology, war strategy,
plumbing, and architecture all have components directly traceable back to Athens and Rome. It
can be fairly said that America as we know it today wouldn’t exist without either influence.
After the power of the Greeks and Romans subsided (but not the influence of their heritage),
Judeo-Christianity rose in prominence as a world religion, particularly after the life of Jesus
Christ and Constantine’s religious wars that were fought nearly three centuries later to expand
the Christian beliefs of the time. The founding of Islam in the 7th century A.D. furthered the rise
of monotheism. Semi-sequestered Asian polytheistic and non-theistic traditions continued, but
monotheism had spread to much of the rest of the known world by the 8th and 9th centuries. Areas
little known to the Middle-Ages European and Asian power centers such as the interior of the
African continent as well as modern-day Russia—not to mention virtually unknown areas at that
time, such as the Americas and Australia—practiced various tribal religions that were often
polytheistic. But as far as the powers that then ruled the European world were concerned, JudeoChristianity now ruled the globe (that is, the known world).
This set the stage for the development of the world as we know it today. This historical episode
is not often recognized, but when the Umayyad Islamic caliphate conquered a substantial chunk
of land in southern Spain, ostensibly from its Visigoth occupiers, around 720 A.D., a key
interchange of knowledge between the Christian and Muslim worlds had been established. In
Andalucia for nearly the next 800 years, the Islamic population brought its knowledge and
intelligence with them, not only building cities but commercial centers, libraries, and
universities. This was not Utopia; it was definitely Muslim territory under Muslim rule. Yet
Christians and Jews were welcome as long as they respected Islamic control and accepted a sort
of second-class citizenship. Though unthinkable by today’s political standards, this social
arrangement was almost certainly the most peaceful and tolerant of any mixed-social-group
context during the Middle Ages; there were few if any forced conversions, and scholars of all
three religions collaborated at the universities that kept the knowledge of the Greeks alive and
helped produce philosophy, literature, mathematics (especially algebra, a.k.a. al-Gebra),
astronomy, medicine, and
perhaps most notably,
navigation techniques and
travel methods, including
shipbuilding!
As time went on, a religiouspolitical rivalry developed
between Christianity—
particularly the Catholic
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12th
The Third Crusade in the late
century featured something of an effort to recapture
Andalucia, but most of the focus of these battles between Christian and Muslim armies was
over control of Jerusalem. Map from pantherfile.uwm.edu.
Church—and Islam, as seen in the Crusades. These battles for control over Jerusalem and
modern-day Israel started in the late 11th century and continued well into the 13th. During the
Crusades, Christian rulers in Europe became nervous about the Muslim presence in Andalucia.
They vowed to retake the territory, though the complexity of doing so without provoking all-out
warfare with the Ottoman Empire proved daunting. Rather than a full-bore military offensive to
conquer Spain, Muslims (and Jews!) were gradually forced out of Andalucia. By the 15th
century, the first Spanish Inquisition helped expel the remaining Muslims and Jews alike,
accomplishing the Reconquista even as Columbus sailed from Palos (in Andalucia), with its
knowledge of shipbuilding and navigation. This knowledge soon proved critical to further
voyages and exploration, first from Spanish explorers searching for gold and then spreading to
other nations.
Some early heretics had already been suppressed by the 1450s, but the printing press had been
invented and the Bible was beginning to publicly circulate. European Protestantism arose in
earnest with the rise of Martin Luther in the early 1500s and King Henry VIII’s split with the
Catholic Church in 1534. The Renaissance began to take root in Europe. This rebirth of the ideas
and knowledge of the Greeks and Romans in a Christian-influenced (yet somewhat humanistic)
context led to a number of different developments. Art, culture, education, and technology arose
in Europe, but so did a number of other much less savory social issues, including corruption,
religious persecution, and starting in the mid-15th century, the Atlantic slave trade of forcibly
seized Africans. As the Renaissance led to the American and French revolutions in the late 18th
century, vehement debate and warfare over the “rights of man” primarily considered the rights of
already privileged men. While the same rights were later extended, at least on paper, to men and
women beyond the privileged classes, it took further
warfare to reach that point.
What was the role of religion in all this? It depended.
Sometimes it offered a handy rationale, such as the
abominably self-serving Christian notion that the
Africans were the “seed of Cain” and thereby deserving
of sub-human treatment. Sometimes it provided a social
setting or power structure for the larger changes in
society to take place, such as decades of papal
corruption leading to the Catholic Church’s permission
to drive natives off their homelands in the interest of
building wealth. Sometimes it provided the backdrop,
such as the highly influential Medici family’s generous
support of education and the arts in the interest of
achieving power in the church and building a more or
less positive name for themselves, unlike the infamous
Borgia family and Pope Alexander VI. And sometimes
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The Medicis
In Florence, Italy, the Medicis were a
powerful Catholic family. They rose
from humble beginnings as traders in
the 12th century to become arguably
European history’s most influential
clan. By the Renaissance, the family
was backing Florentine art, literature,
and science. They supported Galileo
as well as artists, philosophers, and
educators. They influenced politics
and Catholicism alike; Giovanni de
Medici was elected Pope Leo X in
1513. See this link from The Galileo
Project for more on the Medicis.
it provided the inspiration, as in countless religious-themed Renaissance paintings and sculptures
as well as the American and French patriotic convictions that they had been granted God-given
inalienable rights. But the enactment of those rights differed starkly, as the Americans drove the
British army out of the colonies while the French commoners exacted their revenge against the
nobility.
But we can leave history aside here. With all due respect to Richard Dawkins (2003), he has
missed an all-important point in his withering critique of religion: Not only Western civilization,
but world history as a whole, would be starkly different had religion not played a key role in
shaping it. The Crusades, Spanish Inquisition, and the like were rather sore spots in religious
history. But it is all part of our human experience, nonetheless. We wouldn’t recognize the world
today without religion. Would we even be here having this discussion without its influence?
Humans were involved in all these movements, all throughout recorded history. For better or
worse, humans did what humans do and have always done. Sometimes they used religion—or
greed—or desire for power—or some combination of all of these, and other factors—to justify
their actions. Sometimes their beliefs led them to question existing religious practices, as with
Martin Luther and the Catholic sale of indulgences, and form new sects. And sometimes their
creeds inspired them to perform better actions. The evidence suggests a “rational actor” approach
is the best fit for this scenario. Humans used religion for all these purposes and more;
contrary to what Dawkins (Ibid.) strongly suggests, religion did not use humans.
But we will come back to Dawkins. Let’s first consider in what ways religion has helped society,
as well as how it can benefit us individually. In doing so, I’m aware that some people have not
had this experience. Religion can also certainly be used and abused in ways that harm people,
and we will also discuss that. Meanwhile, what positives can come from religion? As we’ve
seen, religion in several different forms preserved the proverbial “wisdom of the ages.” As also
suggested in its history, religion also helped preserve society and social order. Religion also
encourages positive social values—honesty, respect for others, obedience to law, ideas about
right and wrong, love for other people, and so forth. As we know from previous readings in the
course, religion also gives meaning to life and answers questions about the meaning of existence,
humanity’s ultimate purpose, why hard-to-understand
Social Consequences of Religion
life events occur, and so forth. We can argue about how
well religion does all of this or whether we really need
The Good: Preserving Knowledge,
religion to do all of this, but the fact of the matter is that
Social order, Values, Health, Social
religion has done all of this for millennia—and we have
Support
never tried living in a world where it hasn’t. So on that
The Bad: Violence, Slavery,
“good” aspect, religion carries a number of crucial
Corruption, Delusionary Beliefs
large-scale and long-term social benefits.
The Ugly: Death Cults, Abuse,
Terrorism
Idler (2008) further identifies several relatively shortterm tangible positives for individuals. These include
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providing an opportunity to make friends, promoting a relatively healthy diet, avoiding risky
behavior and health risk factors (and parallel expectation of high life expectancy), and
contributing to a sense of spiritual development as well as rest and solitude. Religion also offers
an alternative perspective on life and way of understanding other people. The most far-reaching
of Idler’s conclusions are 1) the long-term health benefits that can be expected from healthy
dietary and lifestyle practices and 2) the provision of support networks, which are critical in
helping cope with and/or overcome life challenges as well as accomplish life goals. Both factors
help explain a higher rate of life satisfaction seen among religious people.
So these are the upsides of how rational actors can use religion for the better in their lives. But on
the downside, as Dawkins (2003) points out, religion has a way of seemingly bringing out the
worst in people. For instance, as we saw in the case of the Crusades and Reconquista, religious
conflict is recurrent throughout history. We live in another era of conflict. Despite the relative
tolerance of our modern American society, as underscored in American Grace (2010), there is
plenty of distrust of Muslims, Mormons, and several other religious groups. Some of the conflict
in our past over religious differences has not only continued in the present but has escalated.
Moreover, in the European-American context, humans used religion to justify slavery, which has
come at a tremendous human cost. As humans used the rationale to seize and sell other humans,
even while the discourse of human rights and liberty were advancing, it set the stage to identity
some humans who deserved rights and others that didn’t. Religion both helped and hindered the
development of society in this way. On an equally serious and more recent note of collective
self-justification, see the Catholic sexual abuse scandal, in which pedophiles among Catholic
priests took advantage of their privileged positions and the church’s trust to carry out crimes
against the innocent. Though only a tiny fraction of all priests were implicated, this violation of
religious trust came at a heavy price in the public eye.
Furthermore, corruption within established religions has contributed to the mixing of religious
and political concerns, notably in power plays such as the Spanish Inquisition but at other times
have had even more far-reaching consequences. Take, for instance, Rodrigo Borgia, who as Pope
Alexander VI may have been (arguably) history’s most corrupt leader of the Catholic Church.
Borgia was from Spain—a Castilian, as were King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. He was
elected August 1492, the same year that many historians consider the Spanish Reconquista of
Andalucia complete, but later in the month after Columbus sailed from Palos. Borgia established
the parameters for the Spanish and Portuguese exploration of the Americas. His papal Bull
following the Treaty of Tordesillas established the territory that Spain and Portugal would be
able to hold. It was also under his watch and guidance that Columbus and the Spanish settled and
conquered Hispaniola. Without Borgia’s (corrupt) influence, our modern world would be
unrecognizable. Still, all this speaks less to the nature of religion per se and more to the nature of
humans who used it for their own evil purposes.
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As Dawkins (Ibid.) also points out, humans have experienced delusions and self-defeating
behavior in connection with religion. Dawkins, writing as a “true believer” in Darwinism and
atheism, rather curiously deals with religion as a pathology and uses these as his Exhibit A of
sorts. This strikes me as something of an overgeneralization. In any case, as said elsewhere, we
generally set aside truth claims when dealing with individual experiences with religion. Yet there
are some claims that just cannot be true, such as the end-of-the-world claims from pastor Harold
Camping. He first predicted May 21, 2011 as the
world’s end; when that date passed, the next end
of the world was set for October 21, 2011.
Though a few voices among Camping’s
followers then claimed the predicted year was
wrong and the world’s end would happen on
October 21, 2012 instead, even fewer people
were still listening. We all still seem to be here,
Jim Jones, leader of the People’s Temple, preaching. Image
regardless. 
from jonestown.sdsu.edu.
However, some of these delusions go far beyond
the sadly mistaken. Religion has also had its fair share of outright ugly episodes, particularly in
more recent years. These have included fatal delusions, abuse, and terrorism. Though long ago,
many of us are still reasonably familiar with the People’s Temple atrocity perpetrated by Jim
Jones in Guyana in 1978. Jones, preaching a curious mix of separatism and egalitarianism,
managed to manipulate more than 900 believers into killing themselves. In the mid-‘80s, another
charismatic leader, David Koresh, took control of a Branch Davidian sect near Waco, Texas,
turning it into his own personality cult over several years. In 1993, after investigating allegations
of sexual abuse by Koresh—including of underage girls—and other offenses, the FBI and
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms raided the sect’s compound, during which 76
members died. As a footnote, outraged anti-government crusader Timothy McVeigh observed
the raid and planned a bombing of a government building in Oklahoma City two years later. In
another tragic incident, charismatic leader Marshall Applewhite
convinced 38 Heaven's Gate followers to kill themselves in
1997.
Other episodes have not involved mass suicide but have been
ugly in their own right—not because they have resulted in the
deaths of followers, but because the followers have used the
religion to justify atrocities against others. We have seen such
abuses not only in the Spanish conquest of the Americas, under
the leadership of the highly corrupt Alexander VI and several
others who followed, but also in World War II. Then, a
renewed emphasis on Shinto in Japan led many soldiers to be
willing to give their lives for the head of their religion, the
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Image from abc.net.au
Japanese emperor, and their country. This produced not only the notorious kamikaze pilots but
also millions of dedicated soldiers and motivated citizenry.
Terrorism, in which religion becomes a weapon against non-believers, also surfaced late in the
20th century in the Japanese cult of Aum Shinrikyo, which planned a mustard gas attack in the
Tokyo subway system. But we know terrorism even more directly today in the case of Islamic
extremists. They have not only launched murderous attacks against critics, persecuted Christians
and other religious minorities (particularly Jews), and destabilized their home countries, but they
have launched all-out war against America and much of the rest of the world. Islamic terrorists
have brought us everything today from the 1972 Munich Olympics bombings to 9/11. We know
the terrorists best today as al-Qaeda and the fundamentalist soldiers of the Islamic State, but
there are many other lesser-known cells and groups.
Religion can be justified to incite many forms of violence and overall strange behavior. Consider
the case of the Cliven Bundy family, who were engaged in a well-publicized standoff beginning
in March 2014 in Nevada over cattle grazing rights. The Bureau of Land Management declared a
vast swath of land off-limits to grazing; Bundy insisted the federal government had no authority
to make this decision. (Here is the Washington Post’s timeline and background.) Furthermore,
Bundy cited Mormon beliefs in defending his decision to take his stand. This led to a tense
armed standoff in April for about two weeks between the BLM, which had obtained a court order
to seize Bundy’s cows, and the Bundy family and a sizeable group of armed paramilitary
supporters. The standoff ended when the BLM decided not to enforce the court order. Nearly two
years later, in January 2016, Bundy’s son Ammon helped lead an armed occupation of the
Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. The younger Bundy not only cited anti-federal
sentiment but declared he was doing so because God had commanded him. This statement drew
an immediate rebuke from the LDS Church. All of this brings to mind Monica Duffy Toft’s
conclusion (2006) in our Lesson 4 readings: “When religious belief is used to justify violence, in
other words, wars may (a) last longer, (b) be harder to stop, and (c) be more destructive than
wars in which the central issue does not involve religious practice or identity.”
OK, let’s wrap up. Overall, the positives of religion—especially seen through a historical lens—
outweigh the negatives. I wouldn’t be teaching this class in good conscience if that were not the
case, and certainly not in this way. But there are downsides, and significant ones, as seen—
especially when religion is used to harm others. However, given the mixed results over long
periods of time—particularly the many largely positive outcomes that contribute to social order
and stability as opposed to the few that undermine them—there seems to be no good reason to
fear that religion itself is some mysterious mind-poisoning force that brainwashes people into
doing horrible things. Instead, history is full of human beings using religious beliefs for the
better and worse alike. Whether good, bad, or ugly, or all of these at once, we have used religion
to make us exactly what we are.
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