In the midst of Jesus’ suffering, when others would have cried out in anger, He offered His persecutors a prayer of forgiveness: “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.”
The first part of Jesus’ statement makes the most sense to us. Forgiveness was a central part of Christ’s teachings and His “Prayer.” But the second part is another story. Surely the persecutors fully knew what they were doing. They were eliminating a threat to the religious and political order. They were following both the will of the people and Rome. But yet, the One who looks at the heart and knows our innermost thoughts said otherwise.
Perhaps Jesus perceived that his persecutors misjudged the spiritual and moral consequences of their actions. Perhaps they misunderstood that He was truly the Son of God. This was Aquinas’s viewpoint who believed that the persecutors acted out of ignorance rather than intentional malice. Others see Christ’s words as a call for self-reflection, encouraging believers to recognize how they might unknowingly participate in wrongdoing.
The Hive Switch
In the early 1970s, British social psychologist Henri Tajfel conducted a study in which he divided a group of schoolboys into two arbitrary groups. The participants were asked to distribute points or rewards between members of their own group and those in the other group. Even though group assignments were random, without imparting any personal benefit, participants consistently favored members of their group over those in the other group. Jonathan Haidt calls this the hive switch, and we all have it.
Tajfel’s findings revealed that by simply assigning people into groups randomly, out-group discrimination and in-group loyalty could be achieved – even when there were negligible differences between the groups. Building on this, psychologist John Turner showed that people will automatically categorize themselves into groups. They will then adopt behaviors that align with perceived group norms, enhancing self-esteem by adopting their new in-group identity. This process of self-categorization leads to biased judgments – and it’s unknown to us.
Around the same time, psychologist Philip Zimbardo conducted the Stanford Prison Experiment which examined the impact of group identity in a power-based environment. After randomly assigning participants as “guards” or “prisoners,” he observed that guards quickly adopted authoritarian behaviors while prisoners displayed signs of emotional distress. The excessive role conformity arising from two randomly picked groups quickly led to harmful behaviors, requiring Zimbardo to end the experiment prematurely.
It’s Hardwired Within Us
We were made for community.
Scripture, science, and life experience all attest to this essential feature of our human nature. Our neurological system is wired to focus on caring and fostering empathetic social connections through our ability to understand and anticipate others’ thoughts. We continuously develop social skills, even while resting. Those skills allow us to gauge the beliefs and values of those around us. We then incorporate these beliefs subconsciously, creating an alignment between them and our own. Above all, we seek harmony—driven to be liked, loved, and included.
We were made for community.
Our community-oriented nature can strengthen society by fostering cooperation. It can help us work together to achieve common goals. This desire for harmony enhances trust. It enables us to rely upon others, share resources, and build social networks that promote resilience. Alignment with group values and norms encourages adherence to social rules, creating stability and order within communities and reinforcing a sense of belonging that enhances well-being and mental health.
We were made for community.
Our community-oriented nature can also fracture society through in-group favoritism and out-group discrimination. It can generate divisions and foster prejudice against those perceived as “outsiders.” Our desire to harmonize can stifle critical thinking or in-group correction, as individuals suppress their judgments to conform to group norms. It drives us to seek out like-minded people, leading to echo chambers, the biasing of certain ideas, reinforced polarization, and hindering open-minded discourse. It can harm others.
We were made to be tribal.
Belongers or Believers?
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Our community-driven nature does much more. In Religion for Realists, Samuel Perry argues that our community orientation drives values and behaviors too. In fact, our desire for harmony within a group often influences our values more than the beliefs we claim to hold. In essence, we are driven by the need to belong more than by the doctrines we profess—even in matters of faith.
For most of us, those are fighting words and attack some of our most deeply held understandings. Aren’t we, first of all, thinking people? Isn’t our faith, beliefs, and opinions a product of choices that we ourselves make? Don’t we, as individual thinking actors, have agency over our affairs, faith included?
Perry, a data-driven Christian sociologist, goes one step further. He asserts that “religion isn’t fundamentally about faith or the content of one’s faith. At the level of cognitive and emotional processes, it’s about our relationship to in-group and out-group members. Religion is sacralized “us-ness.” It orients us within our in-group, and it clothes “our people” and “how we do things” with transcendence and eternal cosmic significance.
Those are fighting words too, and now I’m rolling up my sleeves. This might be true for those who treat Christianity as a social club – like a faith-based Rotary Club. We’ve all known those who seem to be in “it” for social and personal benefits. But that’s “them” and not “us,” no?
But let’s just take, for the sake of argument, that it’s true. Then if belonging trumps believing, we would expect inter-alia (1) faith-based values to change according to the political winds; (2) in-group norms, sensibilities, and practices to overrule essential Christian beliefs; (3) to see the prioritization of in-group clout and political power over a countercultural Christianity marked by authentic gospel living. Let’s take them one at a time.
If belonging trumps believing, we expect faith-based values to change according to the political winds. Consider:
- 56.3% to 33.6% – the percentage drop of Republican evangelicals who believed God appointed the president of the United States following the election of Biden in 2020.
- 60% in 2011 to 16.5% in 2018 – the percentage drop of white evangelicals who believed that a public official who “commits an immoral act in their personal life” would be unable to “behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life.”
- The leading predictor of where Christians place Jesus on a left-right political spectrum is their own ideological identity and in the last election, party identification of religious Americans was the strongest predictor of who they considered to be the most religious candidate.
If belonging trumps believing, we expect in-group norms and sensibilities to trump essential Christian beliefs. Perry shows how people can hold many seemingly contradictory ideas in tension for the sake of status and harmony within their group. Hence, the disconnect between religious beliefs and behaviors is common, perhaps even normative, when our group-based relationships are on the line. Consider:
- How else could you have those who proclaimed a gospel of universal love while attending racially segregated churches?
- Or colonial missionaries who curried favor by the state for forcing conversions, cultural erasure, or the subjugation of indigenous peoples under the justification of spreading the Gospel.
- Or those who, under the banner of “biblical authority,” solely address the “sins” of their opposing party while turning a blind eye towards rampant immorality from those in their religious community or political party.
If belonging trumps believing, then we would expect to see the prioritization of in-group clout and political power over a countercultural Christianity marked by authentic gospel living. Consider:
- “We kind of gave him…a mulligan. You get a do-over here,? said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council. [We] “were tired of being kicked around by Barack Obama and his leftists. And I think they are finally glad that there’s somebody on the playground that is willing to punch the bully.”
- “I’m looking for a leader who’s going to fight,” said Baptist pastor Jeffress. His view on Trump’s “shit-hole countries” comment was, “Apart from the vocabulary attributed to him, President Trump is right on target in his sentiment.” Regarding Trump’s payoff of Stormy Daniels, Jeffress said that everyone “knew they weren’t voting for an altar boy.”
- Evangelicals are 37.5% less likely to see personal character and 58.3% more likely to see immigration as the most important factor in choosing a candidate – data reflective of the political party most of them belong to.
This abandonment of character, thirst for political power, revision of morality, and selective vision all point to Perry’s conclusion that “We are social beings driven by group status, and the currency for status is showing you are ride-or-die committed.”
A Few Caveats
But belonging versus believing is not a binary: we’re all a mixture of the two. Secondly, not every evangelical exhibits group-driven values and priorities: some keep their identity and values pure. Thirdly, the close association between political parties and evangelical sensibilities doesn’t imply directional causality. You can’t assume that one’s Republican membership makes someone less interested in personal morality.
Yet throughout history and even today, leaders have leveraged religion’s focus on belonging to advance their agendas. They recognize what many fail to see: religion’s social essence often subconsciously elevates group identity, priorities, and norms in place of personal beliefs and values. By exploiting the dynamics of in-group loyalty and fear, they amplify outrage, encouraging people to substitute cultural war priorities for essential gospel principles.
Those leaders capitalize on the reality that human behavior, including religious and political actions, is primarily driven by instinctive, emotional reactions rather than deliberate reasoning. Cognitive biases further reinforce these gut-level instincts, rationalizing actions that align with emotional and social impulses rather than thoughtfully grounded theological beliefs. Knowing this, they craft messages that ignite group cohesion, often leading believers to act in ways that contradict the transformative intent of the gospel. Their strategy is to be transformational, turning good people into those who “know not what they are doing.”
Four Take-Home Points and a Conclusion
- The Power of Group Identity: Studies by Tajfel, Turner, and Zimbardo demonstrate that humans naturally and subconsciously align with group norms, often at the expense of critical thinking or personal beliefs. This reinforces the idea that group identity significantly influences moral and social behavior.
- Belonging Over Believing: We see ourselves as masters of our religious futures – independent actors formed by ideas that lead to a personal faith that drives behavior and beliefs. Yet, the data show otherwise – how social identity, group dynamics, and authority subconsciously drive individuals to often act contrary to those personal beliefs.
- The Politicization of Religion: Religious values are increasingly and subconsciously intertwined with political and cultural identities. This trend raises concerns about the ways religion is used to amplify group loyalty, sometimes undermining its foundational principles of love, justice, and integrity.
- The Role of Bias in Decision-Making: Human cognition tends to justify instinctive, group-oriented behaviors. This subconscious process can lead to motivational biases that skew moral and ethical judgments, reinforcing in-group loyalty at the expense of faith-based virtues and values.
A new paradigm shift is needed—one that consciously “puts off” the influence of tribal loyalty through “putting on” of Christlikeness, showing the world what our God is like through the words, deeds, and attitudes of people who take seriously their calling of being “Christ’s Ambassadors.” We need a church with a singular identity centered on following Jesus, in whom “we live and move, and have our being.”
In essence, we need a new set of 95 Thesis nailed to the doors of many American churches, which begin with “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, “Follow Me,” he willed the entire life of believers to be an imitator of his life and teachings.”