Scriptural Violence Can Foster Aggression, Especially in Believers

From NSS Newsline
Mar. 14, 2007

Psychologists studying religion have tended, until recently, to focus on its role in psychological healing. But no longer: now they are beginning to investigate some of its less benign aspects.

A study published in this month's Psychological Science looks at the relation between aggression and recent exposure to accounts of Biblical violence. Students were asked to read a story about the torture and murder of a man's concubine and his tribe's measured response: they assembled an army and razed several cities, killing every man, woman, child and animal they could find.

Half the students were told that this was based on an ancient scroll recently discovered by archaeologists. The other half were told that it was from the Book of Judges in the Old Testament (which it is). In addition to the scriptural distinction, half of the students from both the Bible and the ancient scroll groups read an adjusted version that included a sentence in which God commanded his followers to take up arms against the others "and chasten them before the LORD."

After reading this edifying tale, the students were then given a standard test for measuring aggression. Pairs of them were set a simple reaction task and the winner was allowed to blast the loser with whatever level of noise he chose, up to the volume of a fire alarm.

The result? Higher levels of aggression were measured in two groups of students: in those who were told that the passage was from the Bible and in those who had read that the violence was sanctioned by God. Unsurprisingly, this effect was greater in believers than in atheists. A particularly unsettling result, however, was that even non-believers were found to be not completely immune to the "official sanction" imparted by someone else's sacred book and someone else's deity.

Terry Sanderson is the vice president of the National Secular Society (U.K.). He is also the editor of the weekly NSS Newsline, in which this article first appeared on Mar. 9, 2007. This article is republished by permission of the NSS.