Why I Criticise Religion So Much: It Is the Best Single Predictor of a Person

People ask me, often with real puzzlement, why I spend so much of my writing on religion. The world is full of problems; religion, they say, is in retreat; surely there are better targets. The question deserves a straight answer, and the straight answer is that religion is not one topic among many. It is the topic that predicts the others.

One Fact About a Stranger

Here is a thought experiment I keep coming back to. Suppose you are allowed to know exactly one thing about a person you have never met, and your task is to predict, as well as you can, their views across the widest possible range of subjects. What is the single most informative fact you could ask for?

Not their income. Income predicts a few things about consumption and almost nothing about belief. Not their education, which predicts vocabulary better than it predicts opinion. Not their nationality, which is too coarse. Not their age or their sex, both of which predict less than people assume.

The best single fact is their relationship to religion. Not merely which religion, but how they hold it: literally or loosely, as identity or as doctrine, as something they chose or something they inherited and never examined.

Know that, and you can predict with better-than-chance accuracy their views on the origin of the universe, the origin of humans, the reliability of science, the status of women, what may be done with a body, what may be done in a bedroom, how children should be raised, what happens after death, whether history has a direction, whether the state should enforce a morality and whose, who they vote for, what they read, and whom they trust. No other single variable comes close. It is the master key to a person's worldview, and that alone would justify studying it closely.

Why It Predicts So Much

The reason is not that religion is one belief. It is that religion is a method for holding beliefs, and the method generalises.

A person who has accepted that some claims are to be believed on authority, without evidence, and defended against evidence, has learned a habit. The habit does not stay in church. It shapes how the person handles every question where authority and evidence pull in different directions, which is most of the interesting questions. I have called this faith as an anti-epistemology; the point here is that an anti-epistemology, once installed, is the single most consequential thing about a mind, because it decides how everything else gets in.

Conversely, a person who has consciously rejected inherited religion has usually done so by applying a standard, and having applied it once to the most protected belief they were handed, they tend to apply it again. That is why the correlation runs through so many unrelated domains. It is not that atheists agree about tax policy. It is that having refused one unfounded authority makes you harder to move with the next.

What It Means for Where Effort Goes

If one variable does most of the predicting, then it is the variable to work on. This is simple arithmetic about leverage.

Argue with someone about a downstream position, say a specific policy on schooling or medicine or the rights of some group, and you are arguing about one leaf of a tree. Win, and you have moved one leaf. Lose, and you have changed nothing, because the root that produced the position is untouched and will produce it again tomorrow.

Argue about religion, and you are arguing about the root. Win rarely, because these arguments are rarely won on the spot, but when the root moves, the whole tree moves with it, in a hundred places you never discussed. I have watched this happen in individuals. The person who stops believing does not merely stop attending. Over the following years, their positions shift on question after question they never connected to their faith, because the faith was connected to them whether they knew it or not.

That is the return on investment, and it is why I do not consider the time misspent.

The Retreat Objection

But religion is declining, people say, so why keep kicking it? Two answers.

First, it is declining where I live, among the people I meet. It is not declining for most of the human race, and what happens where it remains strong will shape the century more than what happens where it is weak. I have written about ranking humanity's problems by tractability, and religion ranks as the most tractable precisely because the retreat is already underway and can be seen to work. A problem that is being solved is the one to keep pushing on, not the one to abandon.

Second, the decline changes the composition of what is left, and what is left is louder and more frightened than what departed. The political damage a religion can do is not proportional to its size but to its desperation, and the current phase is the desperate one. Easing off now, because the numbers look good, would be like stopping a course of antibiotics because the fever has dropped.

The Personal Answer

There is also a personal reason, and I will give it because the question is usually asked personally.

I spent years learning things I now know to be false, and I regard the time as not entirely wasted, because understanding why a field is empty is itself knowledge. Religion was the largest of those fields, and understanding its emptiness taught me more about how people come to believe things, and how they can be talked out of them, than anything else I have studied.

So when I write about religion, I am not writing about God. God is not the interesting part; there is no God, and the arguments for one are exhausted. I am writing about the single mechanism that most determines what people believe about everything else, using the case where it is most visible. If there were a better predictor of a human mind, I would write about that instead. I have not found one.