I recently listened to a podcast discussion on Data Over Dogma with cognitive scientist and philosopher Neil Van Leeuwen about his book Religion as Make-Believe: A Theory of Belief, Imagination, and Group Identity [1]. The podcast episode is titled “Is Religion Make-Believe?” which is a bit more aggressive, but whatever puts butts in seats I guess. What’s interesting is that the theory is not actually being rejected by all Christians, and it is conversely pissing off some atheists, according to author Van Leeuwen.
First, let me explain the concept of how the brain works when dealing with beliefs (aka worldviews). There are two categories of beliefs being described:
- Factual Beliefs. These are things that we believe as concrete facts (even if those beliefs are wrong or end up needing to be corrected). These are things like science, physical things we observe, but they also include historical information (things we read), etc. Our mind views these things in a category that is calls “facts” and they are not really negotiable. The brain believes them, but doesn’t place a strong emotional value to them or sentiment.
- Religious Credence. These are things we believe that explain the world, that are linked to our values and feelings. They may explain facts and they feel factual on some level, but they function in the same way imaginary beliefs function. We can choose to believe these things, and some people will even try to demonstrate the strength of their belief by putting these beliefs over their factual beliefs, although it also an agreed-upon “pretense” to behave in this way, a performance to demonstrate the emotional commitment to the belief.
If you saw the Emma Stone movie Easy A, you may remember this exchange between her character and Fred Armisen’s pastor character. Olive (played by Stone) is upset about social events at school and her reputation which she has sacrificed to help some other people who then took advantage of her, and since she & her family are not religious, she thinks maybe religion will have some answers, so she enters a church to ask her questions.
Olive Penderghast : I was just wondering what your church’s stance on lying and adultery was?
Pastor : It’s not a good thing.
Olive Penderghast : Oh, I agree wholeheartedly. But then, tell me this: assuming there is a Hell…
Pastor : Oh, the Christian church recognizes the existence of Hell.
Olive Penderghast : OK, so we’ll just say there’s a “Hell”…
Pastor : There is. Just so we’re clear.
Olive Penderghast : OK, but for argument’s sake…
Pastor : No, there’s no argument, it’s there. Right below our feet. Right above the Orient.
Easy A
In this exchange, Armisen’s pastor character is using his Religious Credence views as if they are Factual Beliefs. The humor exists in the fact that he’s taking it to the extreme of making Hell a physical space with an exact location, right beneath their feet, but most religious people, when confronted with the theoretical nature of their religious beliefs will more or less concede the theoretical, loose nature of these beliefs.
Another major departure from most research on religious “beliefs” is a shift in focus from the contents of those beliefs to the attitude that is taken toward them: understanding this overlooked dimension clearly will illuminate how, why, and to what extent much religious practice is pretend play.
Neil Van Leeuwen
Van Leeuwen shares two excellent examples that illustrate the “pretend” nature of these beliefs. The first is the example of a grandmother babysitting when her granddaughter’s head gets caught in the spindles of the banister. The grandmother is frantic to rescue her, but the grandson doesn’t understand why it matters. “If she dies, she’ll just go to Heaven anyway.” With the crisis now past, the grandmother sees her grandson’s statement as naive. She knows something he hasn’t yet learned: that death is “factual,” and religious belief is “theoretical.”
Contrast that example with another one cited in which a father scolds his daughter for grieving too much for her deceased mother, explaining that it’s a lack of faith for her to be so upset. In this second example, the father’s attitude is about his daughter’s willingness to demonstrate her belief in the agreed-upon pretense that they know what has happened to the mother after her death. The daughter’s grief and the father’s lack of grief will not change the fact of the mother’s death, so instead, the father focuses on the comfort of and loyalty to his theoretical religious belief and insists his daughter do the same.
For a much simpler example in which the stakes are a bit lower, Van Leeuwen says that you can believe that a concrete slab is a soft bed. You can state this belief. You can agree to it with other people. But when you lay down on it, even if you claim it feels as soft as a real bed, you would not flop down on it or dive onto it headfirst because you know these beliefs are “pretend” or “imaginary,” and in this case, they contradict the factual beliefs you know about concrete.
When there is a conflict between “factual” beliefs and “religious credence” beliefs, choosing to follow the latter over the former requires a certain level of intentional pretense. The reason is that “factual” beliefs (even if they turn out to be wrong) are not voluntary. We don’t choose to believe them; we just do. But “religious credence” beliefs are voluntary. We can choose to believe them, and sometimes we do, even in the face of contradictory evidence. When we do this, our beliefs are similar to imaginary play in which we pretend an imaginary friend is talking to us or a cable buried in the creek is the mast of a pirate ship or some washers we found in our dad’s workshop are ancient coins.
Doubt and hope illustrate attitudes toward either type of belief. We can hope or doubt the present under the tree is the Malibu Barbie we’ve been asking for. We can hope or doubt that God exists. Hoping or doubting refer to how we process our beliefs, not the content of the belief. Additionally, the book distinguishes between cognitive and conative attitudes. In a cognitive statement, the person is processing belief about how things are. In a conative statement, they are processing how they want things to be, how they should be, a worldview they aspire to making true.
While Van Leeuwen uses the term “religious credence,” this type of thinking is not exclusive to religion (or to imaginative play). It can be nationalist beliefs or political views as well. It could be about family roles or work ethics. It’s more about how the mind works in relation to these beliefs.
As always, it’s easier to identify “imaginary” beliefs in other people than it is in ourselves. It is also easier to identify incorrect “factual” beliefs in others than in ourselves. The difference is that we can all probably see, if we’re honest, that “religious credence” beliefs are more like imaginative beliefs than factual beliefs, whether they are correct or not, and that they relate to our emotional experience, values, and group belonging in ways that factual beliefs just don’t (although the misinformation and conspiracy theory trends are pushing some of these factual beliefs into some very weird places).
- Does this explanation make sense to you in relation to your religious beliefs?
- Have you personally ever chosen your “religious credence” belief over your “factual” belief? Can you think of an example? Have you seen others do this?
- Do you see how testimony bearing (using terms like “know” for religious credence beliefs) are more about attitude than facts?
- Do you see danger in conflating “factual beliefs” and “religious credence”? Do you see benefit in separating them?
Discuss.
[1] Which retails for $42.65 on KINDLE for crying out loud. Is this book written on gold plates?? Even if it were, you wouldn’t get them on Kindle. It was a great discussion, but I’m not shelling out $43 for a fake book or even a real one. But the ideas they were discussing in the podcast were really interesting.
Wheat & Tares 
My mother-in-law believes in ghosts. She doesn’t think of it as a belief, though. For her they are factual. Ditto for various medical superstitions.
This may be an urban legend–I heard it while traveling–but apparently there was this church in Germany, whose leader announced that Jesus would return on a certain date, to a location in Germany. So the whole church took the train there and waited. Of course Jesus was a no-show, so they all went back.
They had all bought round-trip tickets.
I think from my experience, a lot of active members treat “Sad Heaven” as a factual belief rather then a religious truth – and that impacts a lot of their relationships with others. I think at best it creates some cognitive dissonance as they have to reconcile “I won’t be with my non-believing family members as I was taught by the prophet” and “Why put families together (including found families) and having meaningful (and significant) experiences if we won’t be in relation with each other latter?”
I think that “factual belief” and “religious truth” get blended together when we assign divine traits to God (Divine Male and Divine Female) that are scientifically being tied to hormones in the body. Our theology assigns to “Heavenly Mother” the “nurturing of children and others” that women in their 20’s and 30’s have (with levels of oxytocin and estrogen noticeably higher) that aren’t expressed the same way as women get older and go through peri-menopause and menopause. Because we associate Godhood with “constancy” there is a religious truth/assumption that “Heavenly Mother” is in an eternal “nurturing/child-bearing/estrogen and related hormone infused loop” which isn’t a good “social construct” look.
I did have to laugh about your footnote and $43 for a fake book. 
I agree with his concept that religious beliefs fall into a different kind of thinking than facts. 
But, then I choked on the idea that we cannot ever have religious beliefs based on factual experience. I have been “told” things that were true, but no human could have known. And where the hell did that information come from? It was some source outside of myself and that is fact. But, honestly, I don’t “know” it was from God, or guardian angel, or what. But fact, I was told. And so, in his explanation, I am stuck with unexplainable experience. And out of body experience, best explained by the “spiritual” idea that our consciousness somehow separates from our physical body, because while “out of my body” I viewed things from a physical position that my physical eyes were not in. I mean, scientists can virtually creat an “out of body experience with headphones and eyepieces and cameras, and taking away all touch sensation. But that’s fake. So, explain a REAL out of body experience where you see what you cannot possibly see. So, paranormal experiences.
Psychologists (other than me) try to explain out of body as trauma induced disassociation. All right, fine, that is a name for the experience but it is NOT an explanation for how you see what your physical eyes cannot see. Those psychologists think the person just imagines “going through the wall and getting into bed with baby sister in the next room.”  But having experienced being out of my body, no, that was not me “imagining”. So, my factual knowledge is there are things we cannot explain. Then who can blame me for latching onto a “religious” or parapsychological explanation. I factually know some nonfactual crap is real.
Let me reword that. There is still stuff that scientists cannot explain, and that we humans (who have actual experience with stuff) can only conclude that there are ways that intelligent, nonhuman something can communicate to us, brain to brain. And that there is more to out of body than “imagining” and there is something besides “brain shutting down hallucinations” to NDE. There is stuff that we still only have “spiritual” explanations for.
But, other than that one quibble, his theory is very good and explains 99% of religious belief as pretend. So, I agree with him, 99% of what he says.
And thanks for the word for what Kearon was doing in his talk describing God wanting us to return and not putting up road blacks. Now, if he would just teach that to President Nelson. He was describing God as he wishes him to be, not how the church talks about God most of the time. And what are signs and tokens to get past angels and return to God if not “road blocks.” They were the roadblocks that horrified me when I first went through the temple. So, kearon was expressing his conative belief that God doesn’t set up roadblocks, which is the opposite kind of God that I experienced from the church.
Fascinating topic and very timely. I’ve been thinking about this a lot. I haven’t listened to the podcast you referenced but I will soon.
As I’ve tried to wrap my head around these beliefs that don’t seem to be accurately reflected in our behavior, I’ve sometimes called these “tells” in the same way 95% of a poker player’s behavior will suggest confidence, but little subconscious ticks will give away the actual strength of his/her hand.
For example, we believe the Book of Mormon is literally true, but I’ve never heard someone insist it’s taught in history classes alongside factual histories about the Americans. We know this is the only way back to God, but if that’s true it feels amoral to happily wander through life without telling people what we know if we’re literally the only thing that stands between them and an eternal state that’s nowhere near what it could be.
Death is another one I’ve considered because the knowledge professed (life after death, this is just a blip, families together, etc.) doesn’t match the behavior (everyone is still terrified of death). The way you described it – “She knows something he hasn’t yet learned: that death is ‘factual,’ and religious belief is “theoretical.” – is such an interesting way to describe it.
Many members like to refer to the temple as the “Lord’s University” and that they “learn something new” every time they go to the temple. However, no one generally asks people what exactly they learned after they’ve returned from the temple because they know from their own personal temple experiences that that person probably hasn’t actually learned anything new at all. Also, if people factually learned something new and significant every time they went to the temple, the Church would need to build a whole lot more temples than they are already building since the temples would be full all the time. People would be clamoring to visit the temple every single day, even multiple times per day, and there would be no need for GC talks pleading for members to visit the temple more frequently. There is this religious credence in the Church that the temple is the Lord’s University, yet the actual behavior of members belies the reality that most people don’t gain a whole lot of knowledge (or anything) from a typical temple session. In fact, members making statements about obtaining knowledge in the temple that they know really aren’t true are a way of establishing themselves as a “Church insider”. It’s something many members just kind feel like they have to say to be considered a part of the Church community, a true insider.
Zla’od, maybe Jesus didn’t show up because they all bought round-trip tickets!
This post really resonated with me in light of recent general conference address. Elder Eyring told of a very personal story about the Teton Dam breaking in Idaho and being separated from his children. This was of course before cell communication and he related that they were unable to find out the status of their children or even if they were alive. Elder Eyring recounts staying in a motel and incredibly being able to fall asleep but being woken up by his wife in consternation and being baffled that he was able to sleep given the fact that they knew nothing of their children whereabouts. In the talk, Elder Eyring replies to his wife something to the effect of, “Don’t worry my dear, all is well. We have been sealed in the temple.” The subtext of this message is that even if the worst case scenario had happened (his children were hurt or dead), the knowledge of the sealing power is enough consolation for one to drift off asleep, as he apparently did.
My wife was just incredulous when she was discussing this talk to me. She couldn’t fathom that the belief in sealing power and forever families would allow someone to peacefully sleep given the uncertainty of whether one’s children were alive. Now, probably staying up and worrying wouldn’t do much good given the fact that the disaster was so extensive and they were literally unable to find out the status of their children in the morning. But I think the take-away message was that his wife should have been more like him and not worried so much and had faith in the sealing power. But I mean, it’s quite alright to worry and be excruciatingly pre-occupied for your loved ones. The message I think being implicitly conveyed is not a great one because it seems to faith-shame those who are pre-occupied with the well-being of the living and the hear and now. When you talked about the bannister story, this general conference story of Elder Eyring is immediately what came to mind.
The other comment I wanted to make is regarding Donald Trump’s 2020 election denial. I read in the Washington Post by Josh Dawsey over the weekend that in the purge of the Republican National Committee (RNC) under Lara Trump (formerly Ronna McDaniel), one of the questions that is being asked of prospective hires is, “Do you believe the 2020 election was stolen?” This appears to be a litmus test for being hired today by the Republican National Committee. It is unbelievable that the litmus test for participating in the GOP today is the willingness to blatantly lie by calling white black and black white. To me, this is an example of a factual belief being subverted into a religious belief. This new belief is an article of faith, almost like one would bear testimony (e.g., “I bear testimony that the 2020 election was stolen.”).
This is an interesting paradigm, thanks for writing about it. It does seem like there are at least 2 categories of ways we construct our worldview, with one more factual and another more tentative. But I struggle with the idea that the second category of religious credence is in fact voluntary. In my experience, it doesn’t really feel voluntary. It feels like I have a dataset in my mind and if a religious credence-type belief is proposed, my brain just can’t choose to accept it unless it carries some degree of plausibility in my mind’s dataset. And what’s in that dataset is derived from my experiences, not things I chose. Maybe I can hope for the proposition. I can hold it in some suspension of provisional status, like a working hypothesis. But I don’t think I can choose whether or not to believe something. Maybe this is in part why we are encouraged to read the scriptures so much: because it changes the data our minds are swimming in so that religious belief can be made more plausible. Same thing with gathering to hear others’ testimonies.
Zla’od: “They had all bought round trip tickets” is the perfect example of how religious beliefs are really more tentative / curious / theoretical, but at our heart, we know they might not be real. Bravo! These people took a leap of faith (going by train to meet Jesus), but they also knew they might need to get home if he didn’t show.
your food allergy: “Maybe this is in part why we are encouraged to read the scriptures so much: because it changes the data our minds are swimming in so that religious belief can be made more plausible. Same thing with gathering to hear others’ testimonies.” Bingo! At least, that’s what I have long believed, that when Church leaders encourage doubters to immerse themselves in scripture, prayer and the bearing of testimony and say that “a testimony is found in the bearing thereof” it’s because psychologically, the more religious data we surround ourselves with, the more compelling it is to us psychologically. To paraphrase something my dad used to say “Absence makes the heart go wander,” or if you step away from something (or someone), you might just find other things that are more interesting to take their place.
There was a post years ago that I think was maybe done by KC Kern comparing religions to different software we might run, and that some people (systems) run better with specific types of software. Likewise, different individuals find different religious beliefs more or less compelling. For example, I don’t find horoscopes super compelling, but I know plenty of people who do. I am intrigued by (but not really convinced by) reincarnation, but millions of people truly expect to be reincarnated as part of their personal evolutionary journey. There are a lot of people who find the idea of atonement personally meaningful (that someone died for them personally), and others consider this to be a strange system of justice that doesn’t make sense.
To food allergy’s point, we inherit the religious system we have mostly from our parents and partly from our society and peer groups. When it doesn’t fit, it’s pretty hard to change it as an adult unless the new one just happens to coincide with our own religious ideas and theories about the meaning of life and what happens when we die. It doesn’t feel like a choice to have been raised in a specific religious framework, but ultimately, we can choose to adopt it or discard it.
I know that I love my wife. That’s a factual belief–albeit a very subjective one. I also know that my wife loves me. But how do I objectively verify such a fact? Of course there are different ways of reasoning things out and whatnot–but in a theoretical sense I don’t think there’s any way to actually prove her love for me through the instrumentality of science. And yet I can say that I *know* that my wife loves me. In fact, I would bet my life on it.
That said, our religious credence can also be based on that same kind of knowing–a knowledge that comes with building a relationship over time. And in time it will also yield the fruit of factual belief–as per Alma 32–thus strengthening our religious credence. And so it goes–receiving grace for grace and moving from grace to grace.
I agree with Food allergy, that *some* of us cannot choose to believe or not. I never could quite buy the whole Joseph Smith as a prophet because God has GOT to have better sense than to pick him. I was in primary, probably around seven, when it first struck me that Joseph was an egotistical jack***. It was not an emotional reaction, but something in Joseph’s behavior, some fact of his behavior was jerk behavior.  I can’t even remember the subject of the lesson, I think him playing rough and tumble games with kids, but it was all about how wonderful Joseph was. But something in the description of Joseph’s behavior was something I recognized as selfish. Joseph Smith reminded me of my father, who was a charismatic sociopath. Very charming and totally self centered. And that was all before my father started the sexual abuse. I spent the next 30 some years trying to make myself believe that Joseph Smith might not be a jerk, and not ever being successful. I just could not get one ounce of respect for the man and I could not make myself believe a God with an ounce of common sense would pick a 14 year old (come on, I had 14 year old brothers who were jerks, and I knew a jerk when faced with one. And 14 year old boys are mean brats who haven’t outgrown fart jokes.) and the adult Joseph was really a jerk. And I had not yet learned about his polygamy and “marrying” girls too young to say “no”.
As soon as I found solid data to confirm my initial fact that I saw in his behavior, that Joseph was an egotist, I could no more make myself believe than I could fly to the moon. It really was not a choice, because data always trumps wishful thinking. My thinking has always been very fact based, and I cannot believe anything if there are any facts that contradict. I am way more logical than emotional, and have been accused of being on the autism spectrum because I don’t decide things on an emotional basis, but logic and data. If it comes down to “which do you like better?” I honestly have to flip a coin and see if I like the way it landed. I just don’t do emotional thinking.
So, some people cannot make the choice to believe when data contradicts the socially taught beliefs. Data and facts always trump what other people tell us. Maybe we distrust other people to some huge degree. I guess we are that small percentage that do not give in to social pressure in those psychological experiments where the co-conspirators all say the lines are the same length when any idiot can see they are not. We go with what our eyes tell us and wonder what is wrong with us that we see things differently. Because fact, we are odd man out most of our lives. I had a psychologist friend tell me that I am one of those weird people who cannot lie to themselves—-it wasn’t a compliment.
I think the strength of our beliefs is also directly proportional to the sacrifice we’ve made (cost incurred) to demonstrate that belief due to the need to avoid cognitive dissonance. The more we have invested, the more we are willing to hang on to a belief in spite of ever increasing evidence that it’s not real.
This might be one reason why smart, competent, rational people (I’m thinking particularly of leadership) – who would otherwise be skeptical of various truth claims in their religion – can express such fervent belief (even knowledge) in those truth claims. Because someone wouldn’t spend all that time and money, even their lives if necessary, if it weren’t “true.”
Great Post, and great comments. I really resonated with what you are saying and I want to read this book (or at least listen to the podcast).
I’ve come to the conclusion that what I believe isn’t capital T True, but I hope that I am oriented in the direction of Truth. Like, I hope that my newest incorrect ideas and beliefs are a little bit closer to the Truth than my previous incorrect ideas and beliefs.
While I do believe that there can be harm that comes from conflating “factual beliefs” and “religious credence”, and there’s benefit in separating them, I want to share an example where I found benefit in conflating them.
I felt like God told me to attend (a certain) graduate school and that I would be successful and everything would work out great. I took this as a fact, (even though with my current understanding, I don’t know if God really told me that). There were some really tough times during my graduate program where I probably would have quit, but since I treated this revelation/religious credence as a fact, I stubbornly pushed through the difficulty. I honestly don’t think I would have made all of the necessary sacrifices to graduate if I didn’t take this as fact, and believe that God told me I should do it. So it was helpful to me in that situation.
I can think of many instances where this “pretending” that we do can be harmful, and I can think of many instances where this “pretending” we do can be beneficial. 
(I apologize if all my comments on this blog sound the same, I’m currently in a phase of really leaning into seeing both sides of everything).
The problem is that religious credence tries to pose as factual truth, sometimes in direct contradiction of factual truth. I see this as immoral, particularly when religious leaders instruct their adherents to make life-altering decisions based on religious credence, regardless of facts on the ground.
I’m Exhibit A of the disastrous consequences of such actions. I made decisions regarding marriage, career and child-bearing as if the teachings of the LDS church were factually true. From a factual standpoint, I practiced extremely poor judgment, however. I’ll be suffering the harmful effects of “following the prophet” for the rest of my life.
aporetic1: I agree with your assessment that the “pretense” of religion is capable of being both harmful (Lonicera’s comment is a great example of how) or can be beneficial. For example, religion has throughout time provided the same type of support that psychological therapy does. Prayer is a grounding experience. Seeing ourselves in the care of a benevolent force larger than ourselves can provide solace and reduce stress. There was an example shared in the free sample portion of the book about a young boy whose parents were fighting. The boy would escape to the attic where he imagined one of his childhood toys spoke to him and provided comfort. He would then visit that space that became holy to him, providing a needed respite from the stress of being in a home filled with anger and violence. While it was a true case study, it’s also a valuable analogy for how religion functions.
I listened to the podcast episode in question before reading think post ( does everyone here listen to the same podcasts?) and like Jacob L, I immediately thought of Pres. Eyring’s talk. Nelson’s plane crash story also came to mind. I learned a lot about the Teton Dam disaster as a student at BYU-I, including reading many of the oral histories that were collected later by students, and it occurs to me that likely the only individual in Madison county who slept soundly through that night was the then president of Ricks College.* Mormon religious credences about eternal families etc have the potential to be weilded as a double-edged sword of emotional harm. First, by minimizing the grief of others (even believers), and second, by hijacking and exclusivising the hope of post-death reunions with loved ones. It would be less cruel to stick with the factual belief that “dead is dead,” then to tell a non-Mormon or a Mormon who left the church that they probably won’t be with their departed family members after this life.
** To be clear, I’ve never read anything remotely critical about Eyring’s response to the actual Teton flood.**