A Moral Guide to Depravity: Religiously Motivated Violence and Sexual Selection

Abstract

This chapter explores the link between religion and violence, with the goal of better understanding this link through an evolutionary psychological perspective. Human violence research has benefited tremendously from an evolutionary psychological perspective. The most general contribution of this research is the understanding that violence is the behavioral output of evolved psychological mechanisms designed to solve particular adaptive problems and therefore occurs in predictable contexts. This perspective has informed explanations of violence throughout the animal kingdom and it is reasonable to argue that many cases of violence in humans have an underlying evolutionary function. We now understand some of the contexts in which violent behavior is most likely to occur, as well as the function it may have served over our evolutionary history (Liddle, Shackelford, & Weekes-Shackelford, 2012). Might there be circumstances that exacerbate violence within these contexts? In this chapter, we argue that the short answer is "yes" and that the longer answer implicates religious beliefs in motivating and exacerbating violence, arguably by being shaped by preexisting, violence-promoting mechanisms in evolved psychology. In other words, we expect religiously motivated violence to occur in contexts that would elicit violent responses as revealed by past research, especially research from an evolutionary perspective (e.g., in the context of sexual selection). At best, the rates and degrees of violence should be equal in religious and nonreligious circumstances. However, we argue that it is more likely that religion makes it worse. That is, religious beliefs, practices, and norms may lower the threshold for violence, as well as explicitly promote and conveniently justify violent actions in evolutionarily relevant contexts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)