Religion
The WEIRD worldview is, to most of the world, pretty weird, and the religious frameworks that we’ve largely abandoned in the West instead feel very real. This factor focuses on some of the features of those religious worldviews: while each branch of each religion is distinct, there are some features that are alien to WEIRD minds, but remarkably common elsewhere.
In the freedom-loving West, we tend to intuitively believe in free will – the idea that I have choice in how I act, that my actions have consequences in the outside world, and that I hold moral responsibility for those choices. This version of free will emerged in Christian theology through philosophers like St Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, and was then developed into a more humanistic framework that underpinned Western values of liberty and autonomy during the Enlightenment.
This core belief has a huge impact not only on our other beliefs, but on how we structure our society too. We are more individualistic and less interdependent – we don’t shape our actions based on family or community consensus, and we believe that it’s the state’s responsibility to look after struggling relatives, or our parents in old age.
By contrast, free will is balanced with the concept of divine predestination in Islamic theology. God has foreknowledge of everything that happens, but humans can still make choices within those limits. There’s variation between different Islamic schools on this, with some placing more emphasis on free will, and some more on divine determinism. Many followers of ultra-conservative Salafism believe that all events are determined by God’s will, or qadar, and emphasize complete submission to this. Their health, successes in work or society and even external events are viewed through the lens of God’s will. They therefore need to seek God’s favour by sticking closely to correct religious practices and prayer.
This has a massive impact on what people view as permissible and possible in terms of personal actions and cultural change. Try and convince someone in an ultra-conservative religious community where events are pre-ordained by God that all they need to do to have a better life is adopt the tenets of Western liberal humanism like gender equality and LGBTQ rights and they’re more likely to view it as a divine test of their religious faith than an opportunity to engage in a debate over the merits of social progress. It may, therefore, even strengthen their religious faith: the messengers might be viewed as demonic.
A core error of Western liberal messaging resides in the assumption that non-WEIRD populations can be won over with an upbeat information campaign selling the upsides of our way of life. The marketplace of ideas that we take for granted is more of a chamber accessed by multiple antechambers, and a concept that we want to introduce to the marketplace has to be acceptable in each antechamber – the antechamber of God, or family, or community, and so on.
In many parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, whether Christian or Islamic, communities often hold strong beliefs that family size is determined by God’s will. Western family planning campaigns promoting individual choice in contraceptive use, or condom use to prevent HIV, run into conflict with these views. Campaigns that respect the belief that children are blessings bestowed by God and that frame family planning as a way to bring those blessings responsibly tend to work better. In order to get concepts of family planning and condom use to successfully enter a culture, these concepts have to pass through the antechambers of religion and tradition.
In many Muslim-majority countries, it is common to debate how best to align Islamic principles with values like women’s education and economic development. Scholars and laypeople may well be open to discussing how to balance tradition with modern life while staying faithful to Islamic principles. Outside of that window is querying the Quran, the Prophet Muhammad or arguing for a secular society. Therefore, a women’s rights movement arguing that women working could help grow a successful Islamic economy would be more likely to succeed as it would be within the confines of what can reasonably be discussed.
The religious framing of identity can prove an overwhelming motivational force. Western audiences have long forgotten what it was like to have brothers going off to die for God’s glory, because the last time that happened in significant numbers was during the Crusades in the 13th century. WEIRD norms don’t value that behaviour. This means that we can be bad at understanding the motivations of Muslims or Hindus who will die, or at least risk their lives, for their religion. We see the world as bounded by earthly existence: the good life, in the liberal humanist mind, is having a good time in the here and now. This is, perhaps, bolstered by generations of peace and prosperity in our homelands that have made the here and now appealing. But if we want to understand what propels schoolchildren to leave the country and join ISIS, or well-educated young men to kill themselves and many others in terrorist attacks, we need to take a longer view of the afterlife as well as this one, and of the religious community as well as the individual.
In WEIRD mode, our cost/benefit analysis reveals being a suicide bomber as a very bad choice, both pragmatically and morally. You end your life, and lose all the things you might have done with the rest of it. You harm many other innocent people too. Your family will be devastated.
The cost/benefit balance shifts once you factor in the afterlife and the big-picture interests of the religious community, along with how your more immediate community might interpret them. In WEIRD mode, we don’t consider these. As a suicide bomber, your family’s grief at losing you may be offset, in some communities, by their honour in the face of your martyrdom. You have empowered your community, and added to the credibility of your faith and the glory of God. And your dating opportunities may have been massively upgraded in the afterlife, too. The family’s response to martyrdom may, of course, be very different depending on their relationship with the dominant culture. But to assume that they automatically will take a Western view is naïve.
Religion can forge a far more expansive view of where the benefits of a given action may lie, and where we derive meaning during our period of life on Earth. Religious fervour is often particularly strong among the poor and dispossessed because the metaphysical can tell a hopeful story that material conditions simply can’t. Harnessing this story has led Islamic groups, in particular, to do very well against otherwise far more powerful and well-resourced Western powers in asymmetric warfare. We don’t have belief in something bigger on our side. They do.
