Religion and Morality

The relationship between religion and morality is a subject of intense public and academic debate. Common questions include whether religion is necessary for morality or if it makes individuals more moral. McKay and Whitehouse argue that these debates are frequently stalled by conceptual confusion. Researchers often treat religion and morality as monolithic, monolithic entities, failing to account for the diverse psychological and cultural mechanisms that underpin them. By adopting a "fractionating" strategy, the authors aim to decompose these broad categories into biologically and psychologically grounded traits to better understand how they interact.

The authors identify several key problems in current research. First, many studies suffer from descriptive ethnocentrism, focusing on Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) societies, which may not represent the full spectrum of human moral and religious experience. Second, the field often relies on "sanitized" definitions of prosociality—equating morality with "niceness" or kindness. This ignores the fact that behaviors which benefit an ingroup—such as enforcing norms through punishment or aggression—can be highly prosocial in an evolutionary sense while being perceived as antisocial or harmful by outsiders. Finally, researchers often fail to distinguish between cognitive-level explanations (evolved mental systems) and cultural-level explanations (learned traditions and dogmas).

To move forward, the authors propose an evolutionary framework that treats religious and moral representations as cultural artifacts triggered and constrained by innate cognitive systems. They draw on Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) to categorize morality into foundations like care/harm, fairness/cheating, and loyalty/betrayal. Similarly, they propose "religious foundations" based on cognitive systems such as hyperactive agency detection, theory of mind, and teleofunctional reasoning. The authors suggest that cultural systems, such as the Pomio Kivung movement in Papua New Guinea, demonstrate how these foundations are woven together into complex, culturally specific doctrines.