Study: If God’s On Our Side, We Kick Ass

Ever felt like going Old Testament on somebody? You know, maybe exact some divinely sanctioned retribution on a neighbor or the guy who cut you off on the expressway this morning, secure in the faith that you’re backed up by your crew — Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Well, according to a recent study, that apparently is perfectly natural for us hyper-aggressive over-zealous human types.

Apparently, if we believe that “God is on our side,” we find it easier to inflict pain and suffering on perceived enemies. And if we think God sanctions violence, we are way more likely to “bring it on.” Those are the findings of social psychologist Brad Bushman of the University of Michigan, who said he is very “disturbed” by the results, though he wasn’t surprised by them.

“I think many people use God as their justification for violent and aggressive actions,” Bushman said. “Take the current conflict in Iraq as an example. Bush claims that God is on his side. Osama bin Laden claims that God, or Allah, is on his side.”

Name a religion, any religion, and it’s a good chance that at some time its adherents attacked, killed, enslaved or burned at the stake other humans who held a different set of beliefs. How Bushman sussed that out in a laboratory setting is fascinating:

Bushman assembled teams of researchers at two very different universities, Vrije University in Amsterdam, Holland, and Brigham Young University in Utah.

Only half of the students who participated in the study at Vrije reported that they believe in God, and only 27 percent believe in the Bible. At Brigham Young, 99 percent said they believe in God and the Bible.

“We hypothesized that exposure to a biblical description of violence would increase aggression more than a secular description of the same violence. We also predicted that aggression would be greater when the violence was sanctioned by God than when it was not sanctioned by God.”

Students were told they were participating in two separate studies, one on Middle Eastern literature, and one on stimulation of reaction time.

Each student competed against another student in the reaction time phase. Those who pushed a button first won the competition and could punish the loser by blasting him or her through a set of earphones with a loud noise.

The volume of the noise was controlled by the winning student. Those who hit the loser with a mild blast were considered less aggressive than those who gave the loser the loudest blast — approximately the volume of a siren.

“The noise is very, very unpleasant,” Bushman said. “It’s a combination of somebody scratching their fingernails on a chalkboard and screaming and sirens.”

The idea behind the test, used widely in laboratories, is that only someone who feels very aggressive would blast someone else with the loudest screech, about 105 decibels.

Before the blasting phase, the students read a description of the beating, rape and murder of a woman in ancient Israel. Half of the students read a version of the story that included an assertion that God commanded the woman’s friends to take revenge. The other half read a version that did not mention God sanctioning violence. Half of the students were told the account came from the Bible, and half were told it came from an ancient scroll.

“What we found is that people who believed the passage was from the Bible were more aggressive, and when God said it is OK to retaliate they were even more aggressive,” Bushman said. “We found that both at Brigham Young, which is a religious school, and at Amsterdam, where only half believe in God.

“Even among nonbelievers, if God says it’s OK to retaliate, they are more aggressive. And that’s the worry here. When God sanctions aggression, when God says it’s OK to retaliate, people use that as justification for their own violent and aggressive behavior.”

When asked why nonbelievers would become more aggressive, Bushman suggested that perhaps some nonbelievers are not all that sure that there is no God. However, nonbelievers did not show as much of an increase in aggression as believers when told violence was sanctioned by God.

“What worries me is when people use God as a justification for their violence,” said Bushman, who said he believes in God and reads the Bible daily. “There are scriptures that say you should not take God’s name in vain. This is the most extreme version of taking God’s name in vain.”

Yet his own research shows that whether people consider themselves believers or not, they are more likely to be aggressive, perhaps even willing to start a war, if they think God is on their side.

As a secular humanist living in a conservative Christian theocracy with a self-annointed monotheistic warrior-monarch in charge, I’m feeling pretty damn aggressive myself, and I don’t even believe in god.

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