It is frequently argued that religious violence is simply an expression of human violence, thus even if religion disappeared we'd still end up with the same problems and same violence but with different justifications. There is surely some truth to this, but perhaps not as much as so many have assumed. A study of the biology associated with violence has revealed differences between faith-based violence and politically motivated violence.
The study in question comes from Jeff Victoroff and colleagues at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine. They, along with Samir Quota of the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, asked some questions of young Palestinian boys in the al Shati ("Beach") refugee camp outside Gaza City then tested hormone levels in their blood. The results are interesting.
The researchers asked these boys if they agreed with two statements concerning "religiously conditioned political aggression":
- "Religious ends justify any means" (43% agreed)
- "Harming civilians is a justifiable tool in a Muslim arsenal." (22% agreed)
Those boys who agreed with the first statement also had higher testosterone levels (although there was no relationship with the second statement). Perhaps surprisingly, however, there was no correlation between conventional aggression and testosterone levels.Conversely, there was no link between religious aggression and cortisol levels. Conventionally aggressive boys did, however, have low levels of cortisone.
Even stranger, there was no correlation at all between religious aggression and conventional aggression.
Source: Eiphenom
As Tom Rees points out, testosterone is not the "aggression hormone" that it is so often perceived to be. It is, instead more of a dominance hormone -- it's something that is produced when people are or at least feel like they are winning. Cortisol, in contrast, is a stress hormone -- it's produced when a person is under stress, worried, fearful, etc.
Having too much cortisol is bad, but having way too little can be even worse and when cortisol levels get really low we see a lot of aggression. It may be that when the body can't produce the sorts of cortisol necessary to deal with anxiety and stress, a person reaches for aggressive behavior as a compensation and coping mechanism.
So what does this tell us about the findings of the study? For one thing, it's clear that on a biological level religious aggression differs from secular aggression. Conventional, secular, and political aggression seem to be linked to a lack of cortisone and thus anti-social behavior generally. Faith-based aggression, however, is linked to testosterone and thus feelings of dominance over others.
Put another way, conventional violence seems to be more closely linked to someone thinking "I'm losing and I need to lash out in order to acquire some measure of control over my life." Faith-based violence seems to be linked to someone thinking "I'm a winner and I will lash out to assert my dominance over those who are inferior."
So it's not obvious that if religion suddenly ceased to exist, then all the violence we currently see being committed in the name of religion would just shift to being justified in the name of something secular.
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