WHEN I SAT down to work on this chapter it was the first time I had written about empathy and religion. To me, religion was more personal than professional. Research on religion in relation to empathy did not seem to fit the academic work I was doing. But over the years I have done a lot of thinking about religion and empathy. After all, to fully engage in social empathy I have needed to take in other groups’ perspectives and contexts, and that includes understanding a very deep part of many communities: their religious beliefs and practices. As I touched on in chapter 1, every major religion has embraced in their liturgy and teachings aspects of empathy; however, there have also been atrocities committed in the name of many religions that demonstrated a complete lack of empathy. How could this be? The mismatch of religion and organized atrocities is what brought me to believe I needed to write a chapter on empathy and religion. I wanted to make sense of the mixed messages about empathy that seemed to come from many religions over the course of human history—love others as you would yourself, but if we deem they are an enemy to our faith, we can wage war and destruction on them. Or the difference in our faiths threatens our way of life, so we need to protect ourselves, which includes fighting those who do not share our beliefs. What do these messages mean? Love them only if they believe like we do? Demand that everyone believe what we believe because we have the one and only truth? For me, the history of religion is confusing in terms of empathy and at times seems to reflect a distortion of empathy. Thus, to better understand the relationship between religion and empathy, I included this topic on my list of ideas for chapters.
Religion Throughout History: The Good, The Bad, and the Worse
It’s likely that most of us have been raised with the idea that religion is a positive force in society. Religion serves as a moral guide helping us to be good people. Religious teachings include admonitions to care about people, such as loving others as we would love ourselves. On the surface, this suggests that empathy can be an important part of religious life. To love another as I would love myself suggests that I need self-other awareness, that perspective-taking would be helpful, and on occasions when others do things that I don’t like, it would help to have strong skills in emotion regulation. Unfortunately, that is only part of the story of empathy and religion. Over the course of history, including into modern times, religion has not always served as a moral compass or as an example of empathy. Rather, there are surprisingly far too many examples of religion serving as the rationale for actions that are far from what we would consider righteous and empathic. So there is both good and bad in how religion is practiced and the extent to which empathy plays a role.
First, the good part. As discussed in chapter 1, every major religion of the world has some version of rules and guidance to take the perspective of others and treat them as we would want to be treated ourselves. The most popular one that we were likely to grow up hearing is the Golden Rule that in variations calls for treating others as you would want them to treat you. There is reference to this concept across all major religions of the world, including Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Confucianism. Recall that the Judeo-Christian biblical foundation for this dates back thousands of years to passages in both the Old and New Testaments. Perhaps the most famous line is “love thy neighbor as thyself” found in the books of Leviticus (19:18), Mark (12:31), and Luke (10:27). This suggests that we use parts of empathy, self-other awareness, and perhaps perspective-taking to understand how we might treat others. However, we do not necessarily have to step into another’s shoes to show compassion and cooperation. I know how I want to feel, and treating you that way might be kind and compassionate because it would be for me, but it does not necessarily take into account your perspective at all. Thus, loving our neighbors as we love ourselves can be very one sided. While that is not empathy, at least it produces behaviors that should be positive—we usually want to be treated well, so if we use that as a measure of how we act toward others, we have a fairly positive, compassionate, and cooperative system. The Silver Rule that admonishes us to not treat others as we would not like to be treated (also discussed in chapter 1) at a minimum also involves projection of ourselves onto others. But it too may not require us to imagine what the perspective of others might be. However, like the Golden Rule, it can also lead to positive human interactions. Thus, although religion teaches us to treat others well, it does not necessarily infuse empathy into that process. From a societal perspective, if we don’t treat others badly, even if we don’t understand them, that can promote morality and cooperation. So the basic teachings of major religions do help us to create societies that are collaborative and compassionate, even if they are not necessarily fully empathic. That is the good side of religion.
What about the bad side? The basic premise of most religions is that we accept certain beliefs that unite us as a religious group and make us different from others. This is a form of tribalism. We know that being a part of a tribe can be helpful to our survival, and there can be cooperation between tribes to create collaborative larger societies. That is good. However, as we know from chapter 3, when tribalism goes bad, it pits us versus them, promoting otherness. This is bad tribalism. Bad tribalism is not necessarily a required part of religion, but throughout history it has taken on major significance. For the religions descended from the Old Testament, perhaps the strong language of Deuteronomy 13:7–11 reinforces the belief that keeping the tribe together is imperative:
If your blood brother, your son, your daughter, your wife, or your closest friend secretly tries to act as a missionary among you and says “Let us go worship a new god, have a spiritual experience previously unknown by you or your fathers”…do not agree with him, and do not listen to him…you must be the one to put him to death. Your hand must be the first against him to kill him, followed by the hands of the other people. Pelt him to death with stones, since he has tried to make you abandon your Lord who brought you out of slavery in Egypt.
That is strong language and can certainly contribute to bad tribalism if taken literally.
Sometimes being tribal is less overt and takes the form of exclusion, such as membership in social organizations that are restricted by religion. (I remember when I was young that there were certain country clubs that would not allow anyone who was not a member of their religion to join.) Consider the quotas placed on students who were to be admitted to universities, limiting the enrollment of students who might not be from the majority religion. These practices were typically difficult to document, but were actually legal in the United States from the earliest years of our history up to the civil rights movements and court cases during the 1950s and 1960s. Private clubs are still free to do as they please in terms of membership as long as they do not receive public benefits (such as nonprofit tax exemption).
Even the earliest history of the United States, although taught to us as based on groups coming here to practice religious freedom, demonstrated bad tribalism. Digging more deeply into early American history, we find examples of religion used as the justification for taking land, keeping slaves, and even putting nonbelievers to death. The Puritans, the early settlers of New England who came in the 1600s for the right to freely practice their religion, used biblical passages to justify the use of force to take land from the Native Americans who were already settled here. Specifically, they cited Romans 13:2, “Whosoever therefore resistith the power, resitith the ordinance of God; and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.”1 There are documented cases of fighting among religious leaders in Colonial America that resulted in violence such as hanging and the burning of nonbelievers. Some whose behaviors were inexplicable (some of which were likely due to medical conditions that caused seizures) were often referred to as witches. The phrase “thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” (Exodus 22:18) was used as justification for the famous witch hunts of early New England, particularly in Salem, Massachusetts.2
Religious values were cited as the rationale for both slavery and abolition. Proponents of slavery claimed that all the patriarchs in the Bible had slaves and that there was no mention of God’s disapproval, as well as there being numerous mentions of slavery, even in the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:10 and 20:14). All these cases of slavery were interpreted as God’s acceptance of it.3 On the other hand, for abolitionists slavery was anti-Christian because in the Bible all people are made in God’s image, which means they are all of the same family and should be treated equally. Abolitionists also cited the exodus of the Jews from slavery in Egypt as proof that God was opposed to slavery. They even cited the Golden Rule as an important guide for how to treat each other and, as such, how slavery would not be an acceptable way of loving one’s neighbor.4
Proselytizing, the effort to convince someone to convert to your religion, is a form of holding one religion as the ultimate way of life and believing it so strongly that you want others to be a part of that religion. That can be an affirmation of the proselytizer’s beliefs, but it becomes oppressive when that belief assumes that no other form of religion or way of life is correct. The history of missionaries converting Native Americans to Christianity across the United States was done to “civilize the Indians” and was codified into law in 1865 when the U.S. government deputized Protestant groups to administer government boarding schools that forced Indian children to leave their homes and unlearn their native ways.5
The use of religion to justify the actions of the early settlers of the United States can be traced back to their countries of origin. Religion being used to oppress others has a long and ugly history throughout the world. Pinker’s review of violence throughout history identifies numerous historical atrocities that were committed in the name of religion.6 In just three pages of his extensive text, he identifies millions killed in the name of religion: the Christian Crusade to take Jerusalem from the Muslim Turks, which was initiated by the Latin Church in Europe with the promise that the Crusaders would erase their sins and have a ticket to heaven for carrying out this holy fight, killed one million “nonbelievers” between 1095 and 1208; the Inquisition designed to clear Europe of Muslims and Jews that was centered in Spain under the Catholic rule of the king and queen of Spain from the late 1400s through the 1600s was responsible for a death toll of around 350,000; and the European Wars of Religion between 1520 and 1648 that included several long periods of fighting between different religious groups is estimated to have claimed the lives of almost six million people throughout Europe. These are just the death tolls of Western European efforts at proselytizing during the Middle Ages.
Wars fought in the name of religion have occurred in modern history as well. Civil wars have frequently involved fighting over religious beliefs, including the fighting in Northern Ireland during the 1970s between Protestants and Catholics and in Lebanon during the 1980s between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. The Dalai Lama is in exile as the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism due to strife with a Chinese government that controls all religion, thereby essentially outlawing practice of their religion. The brutal civil war that broke out after the breakup of the Yugoslavian state in 1992 among Serbians, Croatians, and Bosnians followed a long history of religious differences. While there were political aspects, the civil war included Orthodox Christians and Muslim groups fighting over land that they deemed to be rightly theirs in order to protect their religious heritage. Over a three-year period, one hundred thousand people were killed, mostly Muslims. Despite the war ending, the religious differences are still deep, even today.7
We can even find evidence of religions that we do not expect to use violence doing just that to oppress nonbelievers. We usually think of Buddhism as an ideal example of a peaceful and meditative religion. Yet in the Buddhist majority country of Myanmar (formerly Burma) located in Southeast Asia, there is growing evidence of extremist Buddhist monks organized to isolate and expel Muslims. These monks are backed by public policies and the state military. Their organization’s goal is to rid Myanmar of Muslims. Unrest has led to riots, ethnic violence, and the displacement of 140,000 Muslims into government camps from which they cannot leave.8 This is not an isolated case. Extremist Buddhist nationals are also targeting Muslim residents in Sri Lanka.9 The situations in Myanmar and Sri Lanka further demonstrate that extremism in any religion, even one that seems to be very accepting such as Buddhism, can lead to violence and oppression.
The current most striking example of how religion has been organized to use brutal means to spread its message is the attempt by ISIS (which is an acronym for the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, also sometimes referred to as ISIL or the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) to create an international Islamic State, uniting all Muslims under one religious calling and leadership. The means that ISIS uses include videotaped beheadings of Western prisoners, mass killings of nonbelievers when towns are taken over by their armies, and suicide bombings designed to kill citizens across the globe. In recent years, the news has been full of these stories. But we know from history that the use of violence and terror to spread the beliefs of fervent religious groups is not new.
Why Religion Goes Bad
Yet if religions across the globe share the Golden or Silver Rules, how can religion be used for killing, torture, and brute oppression? Charles Kimball, noted professor of religion and expert on Christian-Muslim relations, has identified warning signs of when a religion goes to extremes and becomes evil.10 Citing numerous examples, both ancient and current abuses by religions to justify and perpetrate heinous behaviors, Kimball found that the common aspects of religions gone bad include five characteristics: making the claim for having the one, absolute truth; asking for and getting blind obedience; establishing the “ideal time” for their work; that the ends justify any means used to bring about their religious truth; and that the imperative to do so is a holy war. All five of these elements were found hundreds of years ago in the Crusades and the Inquisition, and are now found today in ISIS and the ethnic wars between the Serbians, Croatians, and Bosnians. To some extent we can see variations of these elements, some of them in justifications for slavery, apartheid, and rights to land settlements throughout history and all over the globe. Kimball suggests that the problem is the nature of a religion and whether it is exclusive or inclusive in terms of the ways to believe. Exclusive religions hold that they and only they have the truth, while inclusive religions acknowledge that while their beliefs may be primary to their followers, other religions may have valid belief systems too. This analysis suggests that the problem is rigidity, in believing that there is only one right religion and that yours is that right religion. This rigidity lacks perspective-taking, which would help people to acknowledge that there is a legitimate worldview of other religions.
Coming at this discussion from the angle of exclusiveness, Sam Harris writes in his book The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason that fundamentalism is the problem.11 Harris is skeptical of all religion-based faith because it is not based on evidence but instead on dogma, which is blind faith—we are told by religious leaders that this is so. While I think he may throw the baby out with the bathwater (religion has also contributed to positive social movements such as civil rights, antiwar, and support for the poor), he echoes Kimball’s five warning signs of when religion becomes evil. Harris worries that strong faith does not leave room for other faiths, hence a lack of tolerance for religious diversity.
I think his theory helps to explain the horrors perpetrated under religious fundamentalism and in fact can extend to any totalitarian ideology. The purity of the Aryan race espoused by the Nazis was not a religion per se, but it was a fundamentalist faith, that is, a shared ideology with no room for personal deviation, compromise, or questioning. In fact, Kimball’s five warning signs fit the Nazi regime well. Instead of a religion, it was an ideology that had the absolute truth, demanded blind obedience, and established that it was at the ideal time in history to come to power and that the ends justified the means. What runs beneath fundamentalism and totalitarianism is that there is “us,” our group, against “them,” who are the outside others. This difference provokes the need to have a holy crusade on our side to do away with the nonbelievers who are the others. This is possible because the others are seen as less than human, allowing us, and in some extremist religions commanding us, to destroy the others. While this may seem oversimplified, the number of historical examples that fit this logic is extensive and has been repeated over time across multiple groups. We also have ample neurological support (as was discussed in chapter 3) that shows us how feelings of otherness provoke human beings to dehumanize others.
How might we stem the horrors that have come from blind faith and devotion to fundamentalist religions? Kimball calls for critical analysis of our religions. He suggests that questioning and analyzing religious principles can allow for personal interpretation rather than blind loyalty. He believes this is one way to achieve inclusiveness for many different religions. We can be believers and practitioners of our own faith but also recognize the possibility that there are other faiths that are important to others and thus have tolerance for religious diversity. Harris asks us to invoke our better sides, the parts of us that are reasonable, honest, and loving. He calls for recognition that we are all interdependent and that our happiness depends on the happiness of others. Both these suggestions include key aspects of empathy, particularly social empathy. When we take the perspective of others while considering the historical context of their groups and imagine stepping into the life experiences of members of that group, we can gain a deeper understanding of others, which hopefully results in tolerance. Social empathy can help us to view the larger world as an extension of our kin and not pit one group against another.
Context Matters, and So Does History
Perhaps the most important piece in understanding the role religion has played in oppression and terror is analyzing the context of these applications. When groups claim they are killing for the sake of their religion, we need to be very thorough in understanding what is happening before we can take their actions to be true representation of an entire religion. When someone murders a doctor who performs abortions because that doctor is regarded as anti-Christian for doing so, do we call all Christians murderers? When the Ku Klux Klan calls itself a Christian organization that believes in White Supremacy, do we think all Christians are White Supremacists?12 And if a suicide bomber is Muslim, are all Muslims dangerous?
As Kimball explains, extremist positions are the issue, not religion generally. The historical pattern that chaos and social breakdown of a civilization can create an opening for the emergence of charismatic leaders who promise the glory of a perfect world if we just follow their ideology and rules was discussed in chapter 2. They claim their ideology is the only way to achieve this perfect world, and therefore those who do not believe as they do stand in the way of creating it. Contextual events come together to allow for the emergence of such ideologies. This is extremism. It then follows that part of creating this perfect world includes stopping or eliminating those who do not believe. For some religious leaders, this is taken literally through killing nonbelievers.
Killing nonbelievers is extreme, but there are less violent ways of expressing that the way nonbelievers live is wrong and inadequate to bring about their salvation. For example, missionaries believe they are improving the lives of nonbelievers. They travel the world to convert others to their beliefs. In the process, they assume that any other religions of the nonbelievers are not sufficient to bring about the perfect world, so they do not recognize the nonbelievers’ practices as legitimate, instead continuing to advocate for their own religion. This view of one and only one way to live ignores the historical experiences of cultures that may have existed for generations with a set of beliefs that are very important to them.
One group believing it has the ultimate truth to bring about a perfect world and trying to eliminate those who disagree is difficult unless there is an absence or a hiatus of empathy. How do we stop violence in the name of religious beliefs? One tool is social empathy. When we are not rigid in our thinking of us versus them and instead see ourselves as similar human beings, it becomes difficult to kill and maim because we would be doing so to our own. When we believe that there are many good ideas and that our religion is not the only way to make the world better, we can accept other groups and work with them to develop shared communities.
More Subtle Uses of Religion Can Validate Ethnocentrist Ways of Governing
Compared to earlier history, today in our country we do not see application of religion to large-scale violence or as legal justification in courtrooms. However, we do see religion infused into discussions of social issues such as abortion, homosexuality, and the death penalty. While many would argue that holding principles that protect human life is moral and represents the good side of religion, when the expression of these beliefs has one group claiming they have the truth and those who do not share their view are demonized as evil and should be imprisoned or even killed, then religion steps over the line from compassion to lack of empathy. Luckily, most situations in this country in which religion is the lens through which people view their world do not lead to violence. But in many cases, there is still an us versus them perspective, and as a result there is a lack of empathy.
In the 1990s I attended gay rights marches and saw firsthand the counter-protesters with signs that damned gay people to hell, saying that “God hates fags” and that homosexuality is a sin. These antigay groups identified themselves through their shirts and signs as members of religious groups. I remember them yelling at us marchers that we should die. These protesters’ fury against homosexuality was based in biblical quotations that they printed on their signs and in the literature they handed out. One of the key principles of extremist religious views is using texts literally, although often only selectively. There are excellent biblical scholars who have analyzed text and are worth reading if you are interested in more detail than I can provide.13 In the case of opposition to homosexuality, two passages in the book of Leviticus in the Old Testament are most often cited:
Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind; it is an abomination. (Leviticus 18:22)
If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them. (Leviticus 20:13)
Those are very severe warnings. But so are a lot of admonitions in the Old and New Testaments, which are not taken literally:
If a man marries a woman and she is found not to be a virgin, she is to be stoned to death. (Deuteronomy 22:13)
A stubborn or rebellious son shall be brought to the authorities and stoned to death. (Deuteronomy 20:11)
It is an abomination to trim the hair on one’s temples or to trim one’s beard. (Leviticus 19:28)
People who divorce, then remarry, commit adultery. (Matthew 5:3, 19:9 and Mark 10:11)
If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and cast it from you. (Matthew 5:30)
Women must keep silent in the churches, they are not permitted to speak. (I Corinthians 14:34)
I am not saying that these passages are not worth studying, and they can be a guide to choices we make in life. But to claim that they are the law of the land and the only right or moral way would mean following every commandment, however far it may be from current lifestyles and laws of the land. Selectively picking and choosing passages for justification of one’s beliefs often accompanies extremist views that can set a religious group on the path to the dangerous characteristics of religion gone bad that Kimball describes.
Gay rights is not the only issue that religious groups have opposed vehemently. Abortion has also been on their list of atrocities by nonbelievers. The extremist group the Army of God advocated the killing of doctors who performed abortions, and followers were successful in killing several doctors as well as bombing clinics.14
Even recent policy issues have seen elected officials base their political positions on their personal religion. At a recent congressional hearing on food assistance, Representative Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) quoted scripture as rationale for cutting the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. He cited 2 Thessalonians 3:10 that states, “If a man will not work, he shall not eat.”15 While policy makers are free to have their ideas about how social programs should be operated, when the justification for policies rests in the religious texts of one particular religion, that brings up other questions: Should public laws be based on religion? Which religion? Which parts? Who gets to decide?
Of course, the majority of people in the United States who identify as a member of a religion do not hold extremists views that drive them to wish death upon nonbelievers. But the possibility of the abuse of religion through government worried the founders of this country. They were very concerned about the power of religion to dictate extremist views and also were worried that if one religion was intertwined with government, as had been the case in England and Europe, there would be no room for religious freedom. The solution they put forth was to address the place of religion in the highest law of the land, the U.S. Constitution.
Separation of Religion and State
One of the things that makes U.S. democracy so special is recognition of the potential misplaced power of religion in government. Understanding the possibility that religion in government can lead to abuses of power dates back hundreds of years to the writing of the Bill of Rights, amendments made to the U.S. Constitution two years after its adoption. In the first sentence of the First Amendment, separation between religion and government was laid out: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” This short initial part of the First Amendment does two very important things: it prevents the government from setting up one religion as the most important religion, and it guarantees freedom to worship and believe what we want without government interference. Because the First Amendment guarantees that no religion will be given priority or preference, it paves the way for religious tolerance and religious diversity. James Madison, one of the Founding Fathers and the fourth president of the United States, believed that our freedom arises from having numerous equal religions: “Multiplicity of sects, which pervades America…is the best and only security for religious liberty in any society. For where there is such a variety of sects, there cannot be a majority of any sect to oppress and persecute the rest.”16
This is the legal strength in our country that prevents bad tribal behaviors of religious groups. However, even with constitutional backing of the separation between major religious beliefs and public rules, policies and practices can be blurry. We do have an overlap between the dominant religion of Christianity and the larger culture of the nation.
When I was in high school, classmates of mine would gather early in the morning for a Christian Bible study and prayer session. Although it was a public school, they were free to meet before classes started. I was asked to join. My reply was that I was not of their religion and would not be able to say the prayers that they said because those prayers were not part of my tradition and did not reflect my beliefs. It was incomprehensible to my friends that I did not believe in what they thought were prayers anybody could say. They also had no understanding that the New Testament was not part of my religion. They would insist that I participate, not to try and convert me, but simply because they felt that their Bible study would help me and make me feel better, as it did for them. Even as a young teenager, I understood that their Protestant beliefs felt so universal to them that my being Jewish could not possibly matter. There are some very fundamental beliefs that differ between Christianity and Judaism, and the prayers that both religions say have some similarities, but they also diverge greatly. My friends were completely unaware of those differences. I, on the other hand, was acutely aware of those differences.
Why were my friends unaware of what I (and my siblings) were deeply aware of? We came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, and it was often difficult to separate American beliefs from Protestant beliefs, especially in my small town community (when I was growing up it was officially a village; now it has grown and does not at all reflect how it was fifty years ago, so context and history are important). In fact, I can still sing in Latin the Christmas song we sang in the chorale that talked about “our Lord,” which I was well aware was not my deity. But it was the norm, it was accepted. We celebrated Christmas in my schools as a national holiday, not a religious day. When I got kicked off the girls’ basketball team because I could not come to the practice held on the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah, I did not even tell my parents. What was the point? It was the way things were. I honestly was not angry or bitter. I was disappointed, but it was just the way things were. I have heard similar stories from friends about their being members of a minority religion. It was just the way things were. Actually, I knew from the stories of my parents growing up that it was much better for me than it had been for them. My father had to lie about his religion to get a job as a bus boy cleaning away dirty dishes from lunch tables. I certainly could work at all sorts of menial jobs in our village without worrying that my religion would prevent that, at least if I did not ask too often for special days off or for special treatment. The separation of religion and state has strengthened in practice over the past fifty years.
Thus, while religious teachings such as treating others as we want to be treated ourselves can support empathy, religious organizations and groups have not always been the best guides for empathic behavior. There are teachings that fit well, but the organized execution of religion can miss the mark. For that reason, the separation of religion and state is important. The constitutional mandate that there be a separation between religion and government holds the promise of building social empathy into the governing structures of our modern government. We can be devoutly committed to our own religion and also be tolerant of other religions. We build that tolerance through empathic insight, through walking in the shoes of others, including contextual understanding of how we each got to where we are today. This view allows for a diversity of religions to coexist, and it is backed up by the law of the land.
Not a Lot of Research on Empathy and Religion
Although religion and empathy can be connected, there is minimal research on this relationship. Here is what the research we have suggests. One role of religion is that it may act as a way of extending kinship.17 Remember the power of kin selection in promoting altruistic behaviors for those we identify as part of our kinship circle? One idea of how empathy gets extended beyond our religious group is that language and images that extend our kinship, such as the concept of “brotherly love” or more recently “the family of humankind,” are used by religions to express caring among all people. Maybe one positive function of religion is to extend the boundaries of our image of kin beyond actual physical relationships to ideological relationships. But this is not a given. As the eminent empathy psychologist C. Daniel Batson warns, although religious imagery can extend our thinking in terms of who is part of our family, it can also be narrowed to see those who do not believe in our religion as “heathens” or “infidels” who consequently need to be converted or eliminated. As we know, history has provided ample proof of that.
In specific research on empathy and religion, it seems that the link with empathy is not in religious practice but in how we process religious content.18 That is, being a religious person by way of membership and practice is not related to empathy, but those who interpret religious content symbolically as opposed to literally do report higher levels of empathy. I would suggest that this research reflects Kimball’s suggestion that critical analysis of religion supports tolerance of diverse religions, which can reflect empathic insight. Another study found that the process of spirituality, unrelated to belonging to a religious sect, is closely associated with empathy.19 That relationship also makes sense. Spirituality involves engaging in self-transcendence or self-development, which involves stepping outside of one’s own world to consider the concerns of others. That practice requires the flexibility to take different perspectives and try to understand them.20 Being spiritual is different from being involved in religious practice and seems more likely to be related to empathy.
In fact, some religious practices can be barriers to empathy. Rituals are set practices that are required of members of religious groups. Religions use these rituals to build group cohesiveness. However, research on rituals finds that they can also serve to separate group members from others who do not belong and do not participate in those rituals. This sense of separation due to performance of rituals can lead to discrimination.21 In fact, the stricter the rituals are and the more effort it takes to follow them, the greater the sense of otherness and separation.
It would be instructive to consider how the components of social empathy, contextual understanding, and macro perspective-taking relate to religion. There is no research specifically on social empathy and religion, but there is research available on religious identity and taking the perspective of others in the area of race. When it comes to understanding race, those who identify as more orthodox in their religious beliefs view racial inequality as an individual problem rather than due to structural conditions, while those with less orthodox religious beliefs hold the opposite view.22 This difference makes sense based on the brain science of otherness and race that we reviewed in chapter 3, as well as the characteristics of strong religious identification that we have reviewed in this chapter. Religious orthodoxy instills strong identification with one’s own religion and separateness from others, stirring the sense of tribal identification strongly. Inequality due to race would be a problem outside the group and would trigger an us versus them differentiation. That view is compatible with an individualized focus of race. Considering structural reasons for racial inequality would suggest viewing the problem as across groups and built into all of society, making it a shared problem. That does not mean orthodox religious people are not concerned about racial inequality, but that they would be likely to approach it differently than those who see it as a structural problem.
How might these differing views of racial inequality, as either individualistic or structural in origin, affect the ways we might use empathy to approach the problem? If we use empathic insights to understand others who are different by race, those who hold more orthodox religious views would be more likely to engage in interpersonal empathy and less likely to engage in social empathy. So we might ask: What difference is there in approaching the problem of racial inequality with interpersonal empathy but not social empathy? For those with an individualistic view of race in America, the “solution” would be to improve race relations, which would emphasize improving how people of different races interact with each other. For those who are less orthodox in their approach to religion, the “solution” would be to address racism, which would mean confronting the structural systemic factors in our society that contribute to racial inequality.
The example of race helps us to see that people of different religious orientations can be empathic, but the focus in their empathy can differ, and the result is approaching issues from very different perspectives. Working on race relations involves changing individual people’s behaviors. Working on structures of inequality between races involves changing access to opportunities such as education and employment, in addition to addressing widely held stereotypes about racial groups. Of course, there is overlap between an interpersonal approach and a structural approach, but emphasis on which approach might be taken seems to be linked to one’s own religious orientation. The difference in these approaches is not that we should choose one or the other, they are both important, but that they take very different forms in action. In addition, those very different ways of responding to racial inequality are representative of how our personal belief systems can influence what empathic steps we might choose in response to social issues.
Teachings from Religion that Guide Me to Be Empathic
The Golden Rule, love my neighbor as myself, does not work for me. Over the years I have had many good neighbors, some great neighbors, and some not so good neighbors. I have had neighbors that I have had to call the police on because of violent fights and rowdy drug parties. I have also had neighbors who were incredibly kind and helped me through difficult times. So are we to take “love thy neighbor as thyself” literally? There was no way I was going to love neighbors who were violent and frightening! So what about the meaning of that very famous biblical phrase? Based on some of my experiences, I do not want to love all my neighbors. That is a lot to ask of us with people who are randomly in our proximity. Does that make me unempathic? I don’t think so, but it shows me that using the Golden Rule is not the best guide for being empathic. Yet religion can support empathy.
Writing this chapter has helped me to identify how religion has played a part in my own development of empathy. As I look back on what I was taught as part of my religious education, I realize that there were key lessons that probably contributed to my thinking on empathy and development of social empathy. If you are reading this section, then I decided to keep it in the book. I had decided to write it out because it would be helpful for me to see how my thinking grew from a couple of lessons learned in my teenage years. My hesitancy in sharing it is that I am only a case of one. How relevant to others is my experience? But seeds planted early seem to have grown over the years, so I share with you my relationship with religion and discovering some of the building blocks I now use for empathy.
When I was in high school, I attended a youth group retreat that included several study sessions with our rabbi. In our community, this rabbi was considered to be a brilliant intellectual, which was rather intimidating at the age of fourteen. But to his credit, he treated us as adults who could handle sophisticated thinking. He had us read from Martin Buber’s book I and Thou.23 What I remember most from those lessons was the concept of two different types of relationships. One is the “I-it” in which we experience others in a way that is an object to be known, utilized, or put to some purpose. It is the kind of relationship that is useful but not engaging in a meaningful way. The other is the “I-thou,” which is an encounter with another in which we form a relationship; we participate with the other and share the experience. There is more to Buber’s work, but the fact that I remember these two types of relationships and that we were taught how important it is to try and create I-thou relationships and not I-it interactions is for me an important piece of my development to becoming an empathic person.
The other teaching that was significant for me was the Silver Rule as taught through a parable about a rabbi of over two thousand years ago, Hillel.24 The story goes that a man came to Hillel and asked him if he could be taught the Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament) while standing on one foot. Hillel, although sensing that he was being mocked, replies, “That which is hateful to you, do not do unto others. That is the entire Torah. The rest is commentary—go study.” From this parable I was taught that first and foremost, thinking about my actions in relations to others is key. But I was also expected to learn about how to do that; it would not just happen without thinking and learning. Knowing what I now know, the two parts of empathy, the physiological unconscious interaction and the cognitive thinking part that involves perspective-taking, self-other awareness, and contextual understanding, were there in the Silver Rule story.
Of course, there are countless other experiences and encounters within my family and community that contributed to my learning to engage empathically. But my experience is that religion can also play a part and provide opportunities to teach empathy. Given the historical misuse of religion, it is encouraging for me to remember the positive contributions that religion can make to help us engage empathically.