Believing and thinking

The idea of separating church and state – now entrenched in many modern liberal democracies – is in some ways strange. After all, governments must keep themselves informed and inform their citizens. That’s why they turn to the science of meteorology to predict weather patterns, to economics to understand patterns of growth and decline, and to the medical sciences to improve public health. So why wouldn’t governments also keep close alliances with religious institutions to know what’s going onwith God? Separating church and state appears strange from other perspectives as well. In the historical sweep of large-scale human societies, it’s a relative newcomer, often associated with the United States’ founding father Thomas Jefferson. In 1802, Jefferson asserted the principle of separation in a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in Connecticut: We’re fans of Jefferson’s principle, one of us (Neil Van Leeuwen) being a philosophy professor who grew up in the Christian Reformed Church, and the other (Jacob Eisler) being a law professor who regularly attends synagogue. But Jefferson’s letter makes putting the principle into practice sound simpler than it is – as though governments could be entirely hands-off when it comes to people’s beliefs, or ‘opinions’. That, however, can’t be right: engaging with and shaping political, social and other kinds of beliefs is actually a core function of government. Public education guides what people believe about everything from mathematics to history to astronomy. Governments also shape beliefs for policy reasons. If fire department officials learn that people believe a building is safe when it isn’t, they will try to change what people believe about the building’s safety. Belief is also a category of legal interest. If a psychotherapist, for example, believes a patient is a danger to himself or others, the therapist is obligated by law to report that belief. All this means that Jefferson’s ‘wall of separation’ can’t sensibly prohibit governments from intervening on beliefs of any type whatsoever. Rather, Jefferson – along with advocates of the principle who came after him – must have presupposed that there is something distinctive aboutreligiousbeliefs that makes it reasonable to give them a different legal status. But what is this distinctive thing? Is it that religious beliefs concern God? No, because Buddhism is a religion with its own beliefs, yet Buddhism has no supreme deity. Is it that religious beliefs concern the supernatural generally? No, because many superstitions that aren’t part of a religion concern the supernatural too. Is it that religious beliefs concern morality, as the biologist Stephen Jay Gould once suggested? No, because many religious beliefs aren’t about morality, and many moral beliefs aren’t religious. In any case, any system of government must presupposesomemoral beliefs – eg, that murder is wrong – to be a government at all. These considerations might make one despair of articulating the psychological distinction of interest – what’s different about religious ‘belief’? – that’s needed to make sense of separating church and state in the first place. Such attempts at characterising religious belief fail, we think, because they focus on beliefcontents, or what the believing isabout. But since any given idea can be believed in a religious way or not, that won’t work. Our suggestion, then, is that religiously believing is a differentattitudefrom ordinary matter-of-fact believing – a different way of relating to ideas – and that this is what’s distinctive about religious belief. In other words, sacralising an idea is different from just taking it to describe how things are. Furthermore, empirical research in cognitive science and anthropology of religion, along with accompanying philosophical analysis, can help reveal characteristic features of the difference in attitude we’re after. To have specific terms, we call that the difference betweenreligious credenceandfactual belief. Understanding this difference, we’ll see, helps make sense of Jefferson’s wall of separation, and supports the rationale for separating church and state in liberal democracies more generally. Whatever they are, ‘beliefs’ come in different varieties. The word ‘belief’ is polysemous –meaningit can refer to a range of different-but-related things – and it subsumes a motley crew: from humdrum factual beliefs (say, about where the ice-cream store is) to superstitions (like those found in astrology), and from moral beliefs about murder to philosophical beliefs about how ‘all is one’. As mentioned earlier, beliefs can also be categorised by theircontents(what is the belief about? Is it about politics? Or maybe about a probable scientific theory?) Or by theattitudethey embody (how does a personrelate togiven ideas or contents?) Here, however, we focus on the differences between matter-of-fact believing and religious credence as distinct ways in which people process ideas. There are, of course, more varieties ofbelief-like attitudes. But we home in on factual belief and religious credence since the differences in those attitudes matter most to the psychology of separating church and state. Ethnographies of religion, like the anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann’sWhen God Talks Back(2012), feature the devout talking of their ‘beliefs’ as a matter of choice. One of the congregants from the Vineyard Church whom Luhrmann interviewed told her: ‘There is always a choice to believe what it is.’ And a common theme in the Vineyard ischoosingJesus, which means choosing tobelievein Jesus. Nor is choosing ‘belief’ unique to Christianity. People around the world switch religions for reasons of romance or for other social incentives, which means voluntarily choosing what religious credence to have. But suppose someone offered you$1 millionto believe, in a matter-of-fact way, that lions are vegetarians. Could you do it? We doubt it, even if you wanted the money. You could voluntarilyimaginethat lions are vegetarians, or you mightpretendto believe it. But if you know that lions eat meat, you can’t just choose to believe the contrary. This is one illustration of how factual belief isnotunder voluntary control. Or, as one of us (Neil) has put it inReligion as Make-Believe(2023):if you factually believe it, you can’t help believing it. Try for a moment to factually believe that New York City is in Quebec, that Iceland is in the Southern Hemisphere, or that Justin Bieber speaks Swahili as his mother tongue. This gives us our first processing difference between religious credence and matter-of-fact belief: Difference number 1: religious credence is voluntary, while factual belief is involuntary. But if matter-of-fact belief isn’t voluntary, or responsive to the will, what does it respond to? Numerous psychological pressures come into play, including distortions like biases and misremembering. But that shouldn’t obscure the main driver of factual belief: evidence. Examples are so simple they’re easy to overlook. If you think, in a matter-of-fact way, that you started the washing machine and then, an hour later, see that the clothes you loaded are dry and still dirty, the evidence of your eyes extinguishes your prior factual belief. If you think the supermarket is open and then arrive to find its lights are all out, that evidence changes your factual belief. Noah was an exemplar of faith for building an enormous boat when there was no evidence of an impending flood Empirical research reveals such evidence-responsiveness already in children and even infants. According toThe Scientist in the Crib(1999) by the developmental psychologistAlison Gopnikand colleagues, young children and even babies learn about the world by forming mini-theories in different domains, and testing them – much like scientists do. According to theresearchof the developmentalists Paul Harris and Melissa Koenig, children are also evidentially discriminating in how they learn from othe